by John Guy
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Walsingham’s fascination with cartography and exploration went back to the late 1560s, when he had first become a stockholder in the Muscovy Company.29 As ambassador to Paris in the early 1570s, he had built up a network of important international contacts. He became close to Gaspard de Coligny, the Huguenot leader and Admiral of France, who had access to the astonishing maps and charts compiled by noted cartographers and hydrographers such as Jacques Cartier and Jean Rotz. A secret patron of colonial ventures in Brazil in 1555 and Terra Florida (now north-east Florida and southern South Carolina) in 1562, which were intended to create safe refuges for exiled Huguenots, Coligny was considering a proposal for an expedition to map the uncharted Pacific in August 1572 when he was assassinated in his bed by the Duke of Guise and his followers. His corpse was thrown from the window of his house into the street below, where it was mutilated by a mob of fanatical Catholics, the event that triggered the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
Throughout that terrifying fortnight, Walsingham’s house on the left bank of the Seine had become a sanctuary for English Protestants seeking shelter. Chief among them was the teenage Philip Sidney, who had escaped safely from the Louvre, where he had been staying. Sidney, whose face was badly scarred by smallpox at the same time as his mother lost her looks nursing Elizabeth, would go on to make his name as a diplomat and an imaginative writer of the highest order, only to be fatally wounded at the Battle of Zutphen. His curiosity about the New World was sparked in his first year at Oxford, when he read Thomas Hacket’s translation of André Thevet’s graphic account of Coligny’s colony in Brazil.30 Thevet, one of Walsingham’s favourite authors, was the first explorer known to have imported significant quantities of tobacco into Europe from the Americas for medicinal use. Ralegh, ever a trendsetter, was in turn the first European to make smoking dried tobacco leaves in a long-stemmed clay pipe fashionable.
For all Walsingham’s extreme caution where matters of state security were concerned, he was never that type of risk-averse investor anxious to keep his capital safe and accumulate modest profits slowly. Like so many of his generation, he was happy to serve both God and Mammon. In 1582, he put together a consortium, including Sidney, to promote a highly novel colonization venture. The project aimed to tempt English Catholics who were fearful that their property might be confiscated by Parliament for their refusal to conform to Elizabeth’s Religious Settlement to seek a new home on the other side of the Atlantic on land that the consortium would provide.31 But Elizabeth emphatically vetoed the scheme after Spain handed in a strongly worded protest.32 And once she had assented to Ralegh’s petition to enjoy the same exclusive rights of exploration and settlement as Gilbert had before him, the lie of the land was clear: if Walsingham wished to promote colonization and continue the search begun by the Muscovy Company in the 1550s for navigable routes through the Arctic ice to the Pacific Ocean, he would need to work with Ralegh, since otherwise it would be impossible to attract investors. Conversely, Ralegh would need to work with him if he hoped to persuade the queen to back the visionary grand strategy upon which he now decided to embark.33
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Just a few days after William of Orange’s assassination in July 1584, Ralegh began building a team of experts skilled in cosmography, astronomy, geometry, cartography and arithmetic. He was intent on merging his plans for colonization and conquest in the New World with a daringly global solution to the problem of King Philip and the Netherlands. He meant to appeal directly to Elizabeth, knowing from their earlier discussions of Irish affairs that she would consent to hear him out. So ambitious were his proposals, he set out to attach Walsingham to his cause to give them far greater credibility.
Ralegh recruited the highly regarded Thomas Harriot to lead his team of experts. An Oxford mathematician who left the ivory tower at about the age of twenty-three to make his fortune in London, Harriot had revolutionized algebra and the art of navigation by pioneering complex mathematical approaches to map theory and astronomy. Ralegh offered him ‘a most liberal salary’ and lodged him at Durham House, where he gave impromptu lectures to his new patron’s circle of friends. Like Ralegh, Harriot smoked a pipe, a habit that would give him the less desirable distinction of being the first Englishman on record to die of cancer from tobacco-induced causes.34
Next to be recruited was Richard Hakluyt, another brilliant Oxford graduate, who, at thirty-two, was Walsingham’s most knowledgeable adviser on anything to do with oceanic exploration.35 A leading editor, translator and compiler of geographical and exploration literature, Hakluyt had already been given access to some of Walsingham’s most confidential state papers. Then employed as a secretary by Sir Edward Stafford, Elizabeth’s ambassador in Paris since 1583, he was approached by one of Ralegh’s contacts and asked to return to London to write up a dossier for presentation to Elizabeth setting out Ralegh’s plans for a global solution to the Spanish problem.36
Hakluyt was ideally suited to the role. Well acquainted with the leading French experts on the Americas, he knew Thevet, from whom he had borrowed a manuscript.37 Encouraged by Walsingham, he had mingled in Paris with the many Portuguese exiles who fled there after King Philip claimed the throne of Portugal in 1580. Several had shown him secret maps and charts of the New World.38
On 5 October 1584, less than a week before the first of the two crucial Privy Council meetings to debate the crisis in the Netherlands, Hakluyt personally presented Elizabeth with a thick dossier setting out Ralegh’s grand strategy.39 He found her at Oatlands, with a reduced Court, having just returned from entertaining Castelnau at Windsor and preparing to move on the next day to Hampton Court. The timing was not coincidental: Leicester, whom Ralegh feared would oppose his strategy strenuously on the grounds that he had set his heart on leading an expeditionary force to the Netherlands, had left Oatlands a day or so earlier to return to London.40
The genius of the dossier on which Hakluyt had worked continuously for three months was its ability to explain fully and persuasively, in non-technical language, the New World’s potential to redress the imbalances of the Old.41 Its advocacy on Ralegh’s behalf was not limited to short-term expedients, such as Gilbert’s when he had scoured Newfoundland for precious metals or Walsingham’s when he had planned to resettle intractable Catholics. The central premise, worked out in astonishing depth, was that nurturing a colonial empire in North America would create fresh markets for English labour and goods, thus compensating for the catastrophic drop in international trade that was likely to be triggered by war with Spain. In parallel, the threat of Spanish dominance in Europe could be averted – perhaps for ever – and the balance of power shifted in England’s favour by using North America as a permanent naval and military base.42
Hakluyt divided his dossier into twenty-one chapters and began with a series of moral arguments. Colonization, preferably in the (as yet) unsettled lands between present-day North Carolina and Virginia, where the climate was less harsh than in Newfoundland, would be ‘greatly for the enlargement of the Gospel of Christ whereunto the princes of the reformed religion are chiefly bound amongst whom Her Majesty is principal’. Since the indigenous people of North America worshipped idols and Elizabeth enjoyed the title Defender of the Faith, it would be both a godly and charitable thing to convert the infidels. As Hakluyt had sharply reminded Sidney in 1582, the first aim of overseas discovery was always ‘God’s glory’.43
Colonization would in addition liberate the native populations of the Americas from the unjust yoke of Spanish tyranny. Like the Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, from whose Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indians he quoted extensively, Hakluyt argued that repeated Spanish atrocities had turned fully rational if, as yet, economically undeveloped peoples into mutinous slaves. Although still culturally immature, these indigenous tribes were far from barbarous: if treated with consideration, as human beings rather than as disposable commodities, the
y could be turned into powerful allies and trading partners.44 An English translation of Las Casas’s classic work had appeared in 1583 under the title The Spanish Colonie, possibly at Walsingham’s behest, and it was from this edition that Hakluyt quoted.45
Having established a moral basis for colonization, Hakluyt turned, point by point, to the practical arguments which Ralegh saw as central to his case. An aggressive Atlantic policy, he explained, would do much to insulate English merchants from the risks of trading in Europe, as the New World would supply them with the exotic commodities which so far had to be imported from Asia and Africa and could at present be purchased only in Antwerp, Seville, Lisbon and Venice. New employment would be created throughout England for cloth workers and others in the finishing and manufacturing trades, who would find fresh purchasers to buy their goods in North America. As transatlantic trade increased, the queen’s revenues from customs and excise duties would rise correspondingly. So would the fortunes of the shipbuilding industry, as shipwrights rediscovered the confidence to invest. Since royal navy ships were vastly outnumbered in wartime by armed merchantmen hastily requisitioned by the Crown, such investments would greatly strengthen national defences. Besides, a thriving colony in North America would be a convenient place to send the unemployed, criminals and bankrupts, who might otherwise be idle or in prison but would now be able to lead productive lives.46
Turning to geopolitical considerations, Hakluyt argued that the presence of vibrant English colonies in North America would thwart Spanish claims to universal monarchy. Sailing from their fortified transatlantic anchorages as well as from home, English seamen could ‘be a great bridle’ to Philip. Much of the ‘mischief’ in the world, Hakluyt continued, sprang from the prodigious wealth accruing to Spain from its annual influx of precious metals. By intercepting these convoys and denying Philip gold and silver from the New World, Elizabeth could strip him of the revenues that paid his European armies.47
Finally, Hakluyt set out Ralegh’s belief that North American colonies would be the best possible stepping stones to China and the East Indies by way of a navigable channel through the north-western Arctic waters or, conceivably, a land route across Newfoundland to the Pacific Ocean. In common with Walsingham, Hakluyt believed that the chances of identifying a viable route to Asia by heading west were now more likely than finding a path through the north-eastern zone into the Bering Sea.48
If she were still in doubt, Hakluyt invited Elizabeth to consult ‘an old excellent globe’ standing in her own privy gallery at Whitehall, given to her father by ‘Master John Verasanus’. She would, he claimed, win everlasting fame if she could bring to fruition the work her father had begun.49 Psychologically, this seemed on the face of it to be a winning argument: Henry VIII had been an intrepid collector of maps and scientific equipment and had been especially impressed by a navigational instrument known as a ‘differential quadrant’ (a combined magnetic compass and universal dial which enabled a ship’s pilot to attempt to determine longitude) presented to him by Jean Rotz. Persuading Elizabeth that her father, had he still lived, would have backed Ralegh was, however, a little misleading, as Henry had been decidedly reticent when petitioned by the London merchant community to become a sponsor of their early exploration ventures. His interests in navigation and cartography were geared towards military applications in his wars with France.
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Elizabeth received Hakluyt’s dossier graciously. After conversing with him briefly, she rewarded him with a grant of the first canonry or other church preferment to fall vacant at Bristol Cathedral.50 On cue and in grand theatrical style, Ralegh then made his entrance, accompanied by two native Algonquians named Manteo and Wanchese, whom he paraded before the queen dressed in their traditional costumes. They were still on display when a puzzled Lupold von Wedel visited Hampton Court a few days later. ‘Their faces as well as their whole bodies’, he observed, ‘were very similar to those of the white Moors at home. They wear no shirts, only a piece of fur to cover their genitals and the skins of wild animals to cover their shoulders.’ To keep warm, they swaddled themselves in brown taffeta.51
In the spring of 1584, Ralegh had sent Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, two experienced sea captains, on a short reconnaissance expedition to the Outer Banks of present-day North Carolina, an area that he was already naming Virginia in Elizabeth’s honour. They had surveyed the many barrier islands lying off the mainland, notably the island of Roanoke, which they found to be densely wooded and abundantly supplied with fresh water, game and fish. After exchanging gifts with the local tribes and negotiating with their leaders, they had returned to Devon with the two Algonquians, making landfall in mid-September. Manteo and Wanchese were taken to Durham House, where Thomas Harriot quickly set about teaching them English. He also recorded their dialect and common idioms, intent on inventing a phonetic alphabet and handy phrasebook for the use of the first batch of Ralegh’s colonists.52
Determined to persuade Elizabeth to approve a full-scale colonizing expedition, Ralegh set about making lists of the kinds of equipment and specialist manpower that would be required to support a North American settlement. In addition to military and naval personnel and construction workers, his lists included engineers, surveyors, shipwrights, agriculturalists, surgeons, physicians and apothecaries, who would provide the services the colonists would need.53
So persuaded by the force of his own gilded rhetoric had Ralegh become, he was confident Elizabeth would back his global strategy unreservedly. This may explain why he made no attempt to circulate Hakluyt’s dossier more widely. Leicester asked for a copy several times but was refused. Walsingham alone received one, although his copy has since disappeared.54 (Walsingham’s papers are known to have survived intact for ten or so years after his death, but then much material, especially papers of a more personal nature, was weeded out and lost.)
Ralegh was still awaiting Elizabeth’s answer on 7 October, when she gave Hakluyt leave to return to his duties at the Paris embassy.55 Finally, she moved towards a decision, one that shaped much of the flow of energy for the rest of her reign. A month or so before Christmas, she told Ralegh he could indeed call his new colony Virginia and granted him the right to make a seal of his arms with the legend (in Latin) ‘Walter Ralegh, Knight, Lord and Governor of Virginia’. Then, on Twelfth Night (6 January 1585), when the Court was at Greenwich and she was eagerly looking forward to the evening’s entertainment, she knighted him and offered him some assistance towards a second expedition to Roanoke.56
Well informed in Paris about these events by his spies, Bernardino de Mendoza fantasized that she would finance Ralegh’s venture in full as long as her handsome new favourite did not sail with it and so leave her side.57 In reality, Elizabeth’s aid would be minimal. She gave Ralegh one of her own royal navy ships: the Tiger, a vessel rated at 160 tons, with a crew of eighty mariners, twelve gunners and eight soldiers. She also provided him with an inordinately large quantity of gunpowder. But she refused to back his global strategy or pay his men and made it plain she would never change her mind. ‘The planting of those parts’, she protested, ‘is a thing that can be done only with the aid of the Prince’s power and purse.’ In her eyes, these were monstrously open-ended commitments, requiring almost unlimited resources. She saw colonial expansion as a dream to damnation.58
Ralegh received another crushing blow when his Roanoke expedition failed. On 9 April 1585, five ships, including the Tiger and two pinnaces, sailed out from Plymouth via the West Indies, carrying six hundred men under the command of Sir Richard Grenville, Ralegh’s friend and an investor in his half-brother’s earlier voyages. But calamity struck almost as soon as they arrived in North America: the Tiger ran aground and much of the food intended to support the colony during its first year was ruined by salt water.
Only a hundred or so of those, mainly soldiers, who landed on Roanoke Island would stay there for more than a few weeks. While Grenv
ille and the rest sailed for home, these would-be settlers built a fort and some cottages and explored the surrounding territory as far north as Chesapeake Bay. Left in command was Grenville’s deputy, Ralph Lane, a fortifications expert whose release from service in Ireland Ralegh had secured as a favour from Elizabeth.59
By June 1586, conditions were unexpectedly severe. Skirmishes with local tribes and a threat of famine meant that when Sir Francis Drake, Ralegh’s fellow Devonian and England’s most daringly versatile, if also most temperamental, seaman, sailed along the coast of ‘Virginia’ on his way home from death-defying raids on the Spanish settlements at Santo Domingo and Cartagena in the Caribbean, the settlers jumped at the chance of a safe passage home. Weeks later, Grenville, unaware of the evacuation, would return with a small relief expedition, but when he found the settlement deserted, he sailed away, leaving behind fifteen men, literally, to hold the fort, with enough provisions for two years.
No Englishman ever saw them again. The following year, Ralegh sent out yet another expedition, but the venture was no more successful. After that, Elizabeth was embroiled in the Armada crisis and forbade the dispatch of further expeditions, putting an end to Ralegh’s plans to colonize ‘Virginia’ while she was on the throne.60
