North America, Richard Hakluyt’s ‘fourth part of the globe’.
Hakluyt signed the letter of dedication to the third volume from London on Monday, 1 September 1600. His dedicatee, Sir Robert Cecil, was the latest of a number of powerful men that Hakluyt had courted since the 1580s. Pushing and pressing a colonizing agenda for twenty years, Hakluyt had dedicated his first book on America, Divers voyages (1582), to Philip Sidney and the single volume of Principal navigations (1589) to Sir Francis Walsingham. He and Michael Lok had helped Sir Humphrey Gilbert to put together his prospectus for settling the North American continent, and Hakluyt had done the same a few years later for Sir Walter Ralegh. His influential ‘Discourse on Western planting’ (1584), a briefing paper for Ralegh and his supporters, was completed during the course of the first successful English voyage out to the coast of present-day North Carolina. The two leaders of that expedition, Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, had gone ashore in July 1584 ‘to take possession’ of the American continent in the queen’s name.12 A month after their return home, Hakluyt presented Elizabeth herself with a special copy of his ‘Discourse’.
There were all kinds of reasons to plant America with English settlers. One was missionary, converting ‘infidels’ to the true religion. Another was proprietary, adding to the size of the queen’s dominions. Trade was also a powerful motive, as was the old idea (familiar in the books and papers about voyaging to no doubt chilly Cathay) of selling English woollen cloths in cold climates, where there was bound to be a healthy market. And there was the hope of further discovery and contact, trading beyond America with Japan and China. The elder Richard Hakluyt of the Middle Temple set out these interconnected objectives in 1585. Of course it was not going to be easy, and there would, he noted, be some difficult choices to make: ‘To plant Christian religion without conquest, will be hard. Traffic easily followeth conquest: conquest is not easy. Traffic without conquest seemeth possible, and not uneasy.’ Hamlet-like, he ended: ‘What is to be done, is the question.’13 There is no good reason to think that his younger cousin Richard thought any differently.
The first colonial efforts failed. High on rhetoric and ambition, Ralegh had secured in 1584 Queen Elizabeth’s permission to settle a colony named in her honour, with the right to make a seal of his coat of arms with the legend (in Latin) of ‘Walter Ralegh, Knight, Lord and Governor of Virginia’.14 However, the realities of planting the new continent were stark. By 1587 there was a fledgling settlement of men, women and children on Roanoke Island. Two babies were born there; they were very probably the first European Americans. One was a girl, christened Virginia. But this tiny colony was lost: all of the settlers simply vanished, including little Virginia and her parents Ananias and Eleanor Dare. The English settlers of Roanoke were never seen again.15
And yet in spite of the horror of Roanoke and the failure of Ralegh’s efforts, hope persisted: hope for a new continent rich in natural resources, hope for a flourishing Western trading satellite of England. There were fresh attempts after 1600 to explore and settle that portion of America which was so quickly fixed with the name Virginia. Ralegh’s patent had expired in 1590, and so it was more than anything else a nod to Sir Walter’s efforts that a voyage of 1602 sought his blessing. He gave it, writing of Virginia to Sir Robert Cecil like some colonial prophet: ‘I shall yet live to see it an English nation’.16
Roanoke was not forgotten, for in 1602 the new explorers tried and failed to find the old colonists. But there was no room for sentiment or regret. Settling Virginia was too important an opportunity to let slip: a land of beauty and promise, it began to fire the Jacobean imagination much as Elizabethans had been possessed by the fantasy of the empire of Cathay. And, of course, Viriginia actually existed. Eating boiled fish and smoking strong tobacco with the local Virginians, the English explorers enjoyed an agreeable climate and saw all around them fantastic natural resources. They recognized very clearly what could be achieved with money, effort and God’s will.
What strikes us today is the boldness of the pitch. The Elizabethan and Jacobean mind was brilliantly elastic. The writer and adventurer John Brereton, who published an influential prospectus on Virginia in late 1602, was undaunted by the huge challenges of distance and geography. Thinking a project achievable somehow made it so. There were no limits to ambition, which took on a reality all of its own.
And Brereton’s ambition was considerable. By planting ‘Christian people and religion’ along the eastern American seaboard, he wanted to open up America to European trade. The North Atlantic would buzz with traffic. He saw in his mind’s eye wines, fruits, spices, sugars, silks, gold and silver arriving in Virginia from Portugal and Spain, and English cloth and cattle crossing the ocean from the home country. Virginia would become America’s entrepôt. Even more ambitiously, in the light of what even Elizabethans knew about the size of the continent, Brereton believed that Virginia would become a vital staging post for transcontinental trade between Europe, America and Asia. With that eternal hope of finding a navigable north-western sea route from America into the North Pacific and Indian oceans, Brereton predicted ships returning to England every four months, laden with ‘the great riches of Cathay, China, and Japan, and the rest, which will be spices, drugs, musk, pearl, stones, gold, silver, silks, cloths of gold, and all manner of precious things’.17
Brereton’s prospectus, in fact, was not far short of a plan for a system of English trade that circumnavigated the globe. It had all the optimism of the colonial patents of Gilbert and Ralegh and the charter of the East India Company, a year old when Brereton’s pamphlet was put on sale in London by the leading printer of Principal navigations, George Bishop. Trade was the golden chain that tied kingdoms together in mutual friendship: the metaphor came from the pamphlet Sir Thomas Smithes voiage and entertainment in Rushia (1605).18 Smythe and other East India Company grandees threw themselves at the Virginia project. East and West might be joined seamlessly together. That for London’s merchants and investors was the hope of Virginia.
The Virginia Company of London came into existence on 10 April 1606 by virtue of King James’s letters patent. It was a corporate hybrid, a kind of public–private partnership in which capital was raised by investment in a joint-stock enterprise (here it was very similar to the Muscovy or East India Companies), but where governance belonged to the king through a council responsible to him. The new company delicately balanced a number of interested parties. London grandees dominated, but merchants from Bristol and Plymouth wanted an equal say. To add to this complexity, the company and its royal council would supervise two separate plantations in Virginia. One part of the colony, to the north, was the West Country enterprise. The southern plantation was London’s. Sir Thomas Smythe, Sir William Romney and John Eldred sat on the king’s council. All three were East India Company men.
The poet Michael Drayton celebrated in 1606 the forthcoming enterprise. Having read accounts of Virginia in Principal navigations (‘Industrious Hakluyt / Whose reading shall inflame / Men to seek fame’), he praised America as a place unique, a kind of Eden:
And cheerefully at sea
successe you still entise
to get the pearle and gould,
and ours to hould,
Virginia,
earths onely paradise.
where nature hath in store
fowle, venison and fishe,
and the fruitfull’st soyle,
without your toyle,
three harvests more,
all greater then your wish.19
Where poets made excellent propagandists, they could also be scathing satirists. Thanks to Hakluyt and probably John Brereton, Drayton’s poetic imagination helped him to imagine Virginia’s rich vines and tall cedars reaching up to kiss the sky. In their play Eastward Hoe (1605), George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston instead poked fun mercilessly at the fantasy of Virginia. In the setting of the Blue Anchor near Billingsgate, Scapethrift asks the expert Captain Seagul
l all about America. ‘But is there such treasure there, Captain, as I have heard?’ ‘I tell thee,’ Seagull answers, taking his script straight from Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, ‘gold is more plentiful there than copper is with us.’ Dripping pans, chamber-pots and prisoners’ chains were all made of gold, while children collected rubies and diamonds from the seashore. The Virginian climate was excellent, and wild boar was as common as the tamest bacon in England, venison as plentiful as mutton.
But the humour also has to it a sharper edge. Captain Seagull makes an indirect but clear reference to Roanoke, even if he muddles his dates: ‘A whole country of English is there, man, bred of those that were left there in ’79.’ And there is a swipe, too, at utopian dreams of the new freedoms of colonial society, with all the hopes of a life of rank and importance without the realities of low parish office and drudgery: ‘And then you shall live freely there, without sergeants, or courtiers, or lawyers, or intelligencers [spies]. . . . You may be an alderman there, and never be scavenger; you may be a nobleman, and never be a slave.’ Seagull hints at a community without law, order or moral self-restraint: ‘Besides, there we shall have no more law than conscience, and not too much of either: serve God enough, eat and drink enough, and “enough is as good as a feast”.’20
There is every reason to think that in 1605 Chapman, Jonson and Marston knew exactly what ordinary Londoners were saying about a new life in Virginia. Plenty of gentlemen sailed across the North Atlantic on the first voyage in 1606, but of the 295 settlers many were carpenters, blacksmiths, apothecaries, tailors, artisans, fishermen and labourers. These were the kinds of men who in the 1590s had had to work hard to scratch a living. Perhaps it was the desire for adventure that took them out to Virginia, or the hope of making their mark on a new continent. There is a high statistical probability that many had lost members of their close or extended family to plague in 1601 or 1603. And who, reading or hearing about pristine Virginia, would not have been glad to leave behind the filth, stink and disease of overcrowded London?
Of course it was less straightforward than that. The first Virginia colony was the furthest outpost of King James’s new British kingdoms. To guard against Captain Seagull’s vision of a society with no more law than conscience, it had the government of a president and council. Gentlemen and preachers were in authority.21 The ministers with their bibles and prayer books gave the plantation a sense of godly mission. Almost certainly there were copies of Hakluyt’s Principal navigations to edify and occupy the settlers.22 Yet there were good reasons in 1606 and 1607 to imagine that Roanoke might happen all over again. The planters of 1606 relied for their survival on two supply voyages that arrived months apart in 1608. The quickest recorded sea journey from England to America was five weeks, the longest eighteen.23 And the Virginian climate was far from easy and temperate. The winters of 1607 and 1608 were as brutal in America as they were in Europe. The Virginia adventurers in London shivered through cold so severe that it froze the Thames and turned the river into a playground, but also kept Londoners short of food, with depleted stores of fuel, and made it difficult for the city’s trades and businesses to stay open. Thousands of miles away it was much worse: the company’s planters had to cling on to survival.24
The Virginia Company of London pushed hard for money and support, and by the spring of 1609 it was orchestrating a major new effort to raise capital. This physical act of planting a continent was an ‘adventure’: here, once again, was the language of the Frobisher voyages and the joint-stock corporations. Certificates were printed, with blanks for names and for the amounts of money subscribed. These were processed by Sir Thomas Smythe himself as the company’s treasurer. This subscription represented a permanent share in the colony that could be passed to heirs and successors. From ‘time to time’, so the certificate explained, there would be returns on Virginia’s ‘mines and minerals of gold, silver, and other metals or treasure, pearls, precious stones, or any kinds of wares or merchandizes, commodities or profits whatsoever’.25 In London the whole venture looked promising; Sir Humphrey Weld, the lord mayor, was foursquare behind it. Thanks to Weld, at least five livery companies – including companies as distinguished and influential as the mercers, merchant taylors and clothworkers – took out institutional holdings in Virginia.26
In these early years of the colony, two motives for plantation jostled for pre-eminence and publicity. There was every belief that Virginia possessed wonderful raw materials that would in due course be brought home to England. Richard Hakluyt identified in particular mulberry trees, which could be used to feed silkworms, and sources for various dyes. The clue was in the title of his pamphlet of 1609, Virginia richly valued. Hakluyt found in the Virginia enterprise future commercial wealth – not a surprise for a man named in the company’s 1606 charter and a Virginia shareholder.
But more than this, America was a virgin continent ripe for God’s word. Richard Hakluyt had his adventurer’s certificate in one hand and the Bible in his other. Virginia, he suggested, was a test of Christian constancy and mission:
. . . the painful [i.e. assiduous] preachers shall be reverenced and cherished, the valiant and forward soldier respected, the diligent rewarded, the coward emboldened, the weak and sick relieved, the mutinous suppressed, the reputations of the Christians among the savages preserved, our most holy faith exalted, all paganism and idolatry by little and little utterly extinguished.
Hakluyt had no great faith in the native Virginians; they were ‘as unconstant as the weathercock, and most ready to take all occasions of advantages to do mischief’. Handling them gently was the best way forward. But if ‘gentle polishing will not serve’, then he thought it could be left to the trained English veterans of the Spanish wars ‘to square and prepare them to our preachers’ hands’.27 God’s work of converting the infidel was not for the faint of heart or purpose.
Everyone knew from John Stow and the other chroniclers of their ancient city that London itself had begun as a colony of busy merchants. Now, out of New Troy there grew a ‘Nova Britannia’, as the company called its American enterprise.28 Future settlers of this New Britain were asked in 1609 to call on Sir Thomas Smythe at his London house on Philpot Lane. The invitation went out to potential planters across London, particularly men who could work with their hands. They were offered a portion of a single share of £12 and 10 shillings divided out between them. More compelling perhaps was the promise of a country life, with a house, garden and orchard and suits of clothes at the company’s charge.29 The company tried to recruit investors from across the whole of England. Towns and cities as well as individuals were given the pitch: ‘it hath pleased God to encourage us to go on, in that great work and enterprise of planting colonies of our English nation’.30 And this vast project all emanated from London: more precisely, from the mansion of a rich and influential merchant on the lane between the church of St Andrew Hubbard and Fenchurch Street, with future settlers and hopeful investors knocking on the gate and asking for Sir Thomas Smythe.
As well as unearthing the riches of a new continent, trading across the oceans and converting the infidel, the Virginia Company of London really intended to plant a nation. In April 1609 many of the Virginia adventurers and future planters gathered in Whitechapel to hear a sermon by the preacher William Symonds. He took as his text three verses from the Book of Genesis (12:1–3):
For the Lord had said unto Abraham, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto the land that I will show thee.
And I will make of thee a great nation, and will bless thee, and make thy name great, and thou shalt be a blessing.
I will bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.31
There was no more serious a project than this. Transcending trade and commerce, it was an exercise in global nation-building blessed by God, and a natural working out of a colonial project whose political, commercial, social and ec
onomic benefits had been sketched out by Richard Hakluyt in the 1580s. Only days after Symonds’s sermon (and perhaps inspired by it), another Virginia propagandist explained how essential it was to
seek after such adventures whereby the glory of God may be advanced, the territories of our kingdom enlarged, our people both preferred and employed abroad, our wants supplied at home, his majesty’s customs wonderfully augmented, and the honour and renown of our nation spread and propagated to the ends of the world.32
William Symonds praised in his sermon the civilizing mission of the company’s investors and settlers. He ended in rousing style: ‘Be cheerful then, and the Lord of all glory, glorify his name by your happy spreading of the gospel, to your commendation, and his glory, that is Lord of all things, to whom be power and dominion. Hallelujah.’33
CHAPTER TWENTY
Time Past, Time Present
There is a wonderful panoramic view of London by Claes Visscher from 1616, the year of William Shakespeare’s death. Engraved on copper and printed in Amsterdam, it looks as though someone has taken Anthonis van den Wyngaerde’s view of London of seventy years earlier and given those impressionist strokes of the artist’s pen greater depth, shadow and body. Visscher’s city of the early seventeenth century was obviously still the one Wyngaerde had seen from his perch in Southwark, still the London of towers and spires, with the great bridge sitting across the River Thames as solidly as ever, and the quays and wharves of the port crowded with ships. Yet it is different too: much heavier and bulkier than the Tudor city, the adolescent city has filled out. But the change was more than a physical one. The worlds Londoners inhabited and imagined were simply far larger and more complex.
London’s Triumph: Merchants, Adventurers, and Money in Shakespeare’s City Page 29
