GILBERT AND CARLEILL'S RIVAL SCHEMES 67 favoured it from the beginning. The Spaniards also learned of it at an early stage, and compared it to Coligny's projects for colonising Florida with Huguenots.1 According to Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, the Secretary was the originator of the scheme, for he saw in it an opportunity to use some of the Queen's disaffected subjects in founding an outpost of English power at the gateway of the Spanish Indies. It was true that Walsingham did much to further the project, and that he was the forerunner of those who saw in the New World an outlet for men who could not accept the religion of the State. But the recusants would not join and the scheme was dropped. The next of Gilbert's assignees were much lesser fry, but more productive of subscriptions. The ancient port of Southampton had lost much of the commercial prosperity that had enriched it in the fourteenth century and Gilbert's promise that their town should be made the sole port of entry for English ships coming from the projected colonies in America appealed to some of its citizens as an opportunity of reviving their decayed fortunes. They raised a modest capital towards which Walsingham contributed, and again lavish grants of lands and privileges were assigned by the patentee. Richard Hakluyt desired to further the plan as he did all schemes of colonisation, and he was sent by Walsingham to secure aid and subscriptions from the citizens of Bristol.2 But a rival scheme was in hand. Christopher Carleill with the support of the Muscovy Company was appealing to the Crown for the issue of a new patent in its favour, and ultimately the Bristol merchants seem to have preferred this scheme for their subscriptions rather than that of their Southampton rivals. Letters were sent to the fishing ports of Devon and the west of England urging them to support Carleill's scheme for the colonisation of Newfoundland as a means of furthering their fishing industry. Faced with this competition, Gilbert realised that, unless he was to be forestalled, he must set out upon his expedition without more delay, and through his half-brother Walter Raleigh, who was rapidly rising in the Queen's favour, he secured her permission to make an immediate start. He set sail from Plymouth in June 1583 purposing to touch first at Newfoundland and then proceed southward to found his colony upon the American coast in warmer latitudes. The heroism and tragic fate of the leader of the expedition are discussed in the next chapter and here we need only remark that Gilbert's real work in the field of colonisation is to be found not in his practical achievements, which were few, but in his unwearied. preaching of England's imperial destiny. He was the first of those many advocates of colonisation as a cure for the ills of State, of whom Richard Hakluyt is the outstanding figure. Hakluyt's Discourse of Western Planting was written in 1584 to further Raleigh's Virginia enterprise, 1 Cal. St. Pap. Span. 1580-6, no. 275, Mendoza to Philip II, 11 July 1582. 2 Hakluyt, vш, 132. but it was circulated only in manuscript and had to await publication until our own days.1 It was contemporary with two other tracts directed to the promotion of the colonising schemes we have been describing, Sir George Peckham's True Report of the late Discoveries and possession...of the Newfoundlands by...Sir Humphry Gilbert, Knight, and Christopher Carleill's Discourse prepared for the Muscovy Company in 1583. In these three writings, of which Hakluyt's is much the most substantial, the colonising theory of the time is set forth in largely identical arguments which were repeatedly employed during the next sixty years. The tracts explain clearly the grounds upon which schemes of colonisation were put forward for the national benefit during this period. If we disentangle the main lines of reasoning from the appeals to patriotic sentiment and to claims to dominion by right of prior discovery, we find that they are based upon the economic and social advantages to be achieved by the increase of commerce, the promotion of maritime enterprise and relieving England of its surplus population.4 Commercial considerations occupy the foremost place. According to the mercantile theory of the time the State should do all it could to limit the importation of goods from foreign sources while encouraging the export of English manufactures. The difference or "balance of trade" would then necessarily be paid in bullion and so the store of national treasure would be increased. But there were many necessary commodities that could not, owing to natural conditions, be produced in England. If wine, silk, sub-tropical fruits, sugar, salt and the like could be procured from English colonies, the demand for foreign produce would be greatly lessened and the balance of trade in our favour increased. All the reports concerning the American coast to the southward laid emphasis on the suitability of the land for yielding such produce. "What commodities soever Spain, France, Italy or the East parts do yield unto us, in wines of all sorts, in oils, in flax, in resins, pitch, frankincense, currants, sugars, and such like, these parts do abound with the growth of them all.”5 Hakluyt himself wrote that "this western voyage will yield unto us all the commodities of Europe, Africa and Asia, as far as we were wont to travel, and supply the wants of all our decayed trades". The northern parts would give us the hemp and cordage, timber, masts, pitch, tar and soap-ashes that had to be procured from the Baltic and paid the heavy Sound dues to the King of Denmark. Peckham and Hakluyt went further and maintained that Englishmen might find in the New World rich mines of gold, silver and precious stones such as 1 Hakluyt, A Discourse of Western Planting, first printed in the publications of the Maine Hist. Society, 1877. 3 Ibid. vi, 134-47. 2 Hakluyt, vm, 89-131. See Beer, G. L., Origins of the British Colonial System, 1578-1660, chaps. iii and iv. Hakluyt, Princ. Nav. vIII, 319, Ralph Lane to Hakluyt, from Virginia, 3 Sept. 1585. Hakluyt, A Discourse of Western Planting, p. 19. ARGUMENTS FOR COLONISATION 69 those which yielded her treasure to Spain. Such supplies of bullion would directly increase the English stock of treasure, and this argument was especially attractive to those who held to the older views of economic theory, but Carleill was more sceptical about the possibilities of profits from mining, for his patrons in the Muscovy Company must have had vivid memories of the fiasco of Frobisher's enterprise. To some extent all three writers believed in the possibility of lucrative trade with the American aborigines, for their small numbers and primitive life were not realised in England till a generation later. All agreed however that, to raise the commodities required, English colonists must be transported across the ocean. When they were settled in their new homes, they would need English manufactured goods, whereby a fresh outlet for export trade and thus a new source of profit to the State would be forthcoming. Considerable emphasis was laid upon this argument as foreshadowing a hope of improvement for the decayed trade of English artisans. The transport of goods in either direction would afford increased opportunities for shipping and the employment of mariners, and thus there would be an increase in our reserves of seafarers from whom the Navy might be recruited in time of war. To this advantage the fuller development of the valuable fisheries off the American coast would also contribute largely. By the prosecution of fishing England might redeem herself from her dependence upon the Dutch who held an unchallengeable position in the fisheries nearer home. The vessels needed for the North American fisheries must be larger than those little barks employed in coast fishing, and since they must be armed for protection, they would add considerably to our naval strength. The third line of argument related to the social benefits that would accrue. In the Elizabethan Age most men held that England was over-populated, and pointed to the great increase of the able-bodied and disorderly poor and the ever-growing army of vagrants. Hakluyt, Peckham and Carleill all urged that colonies in the New World would afford an invaluable outlet for the surplus of unemployed "living altogether unprofitable and often-times to the disquiet of the better sort".1 The needy and dependent might be transported from the crowded courts and alleys of London and other English cities, thus freeing their parishes from the burden of their support and emptying the hotbeds of plague and disease. The gaols might be cleared of their swarming crowds of petty thieves and vagabonds who "might be condemned for certain years in those western parts especially in Newfoundland", and more serious criminals might be reprieved from the gallows and transported across the sea to aid in building up the new colonies. It is instructive to find thus fully set forth in tracts written in 1583-4 at the very beginning of English colonial enterprise 1 Carleill's Discourse, in Hakluyt, Princ. Nav. vII, 143. 2 Hakluyt, Discourse, p. 37. the root ideas of our old colonial system. They were little modified in their essentials for a couple of centuries, and if we were to attempt to summarise in a single phrase the work of establishing the old English Empire we might say with reasonable accuracy that it was accomplished in a long series of experiments designed to carry into practice the ideas of Hakluyt, Peckham and Carleill. Returning now to Gilbert's colonising schemes, we may note that they were practically applied in two directions. On the one hand his brothers organised the voyages of John Davis in search of the NorthWest Passage (1584, etc.) and were supported by Walsingham; on the other, Raleigh, the most favoured of all the family, secured the renewal of his colonising patent on its expiry and attempted, as we shall see, to establish a colony in Terra Florida and to find a way through the northern continent to the sea. Another of the projects which Gilbert had set forth in his memorial of 15771 was also revived by Walsingham, and Raleigh with the Council's approval was entrusted with its organisation. Large numbers of Spanish and Portuguese fishermen sailed every year to the Grand Banks, and in June 1585 three ships were sent under the command of Sir Bernard Drake to seize their barks in the Newfoundland harbours or intercept them on their voyage homeward. Orders were given that the vessels captured were to be brought into the western ports without disturbing their cargoes. The crews were to be imprisoned in reprisal for Philip II's seizure in May 1585 of the English ships and mariners in his ports. The enterprise was entirely successful. More than 600 Spanish and Portuguese mariners were seized with their ships and cargoes just when their fishing was completed, and the fish was sold forthwith in England and abroad.2 For some years the Spanish and Portuguese fisheries off Newfoundland were badly crippled, and the English and the French (including the Bretons, Normans and Gascons) were left as the only serious competitors in the annual voyages. Elizabeth had now at last been persuaded to sanction active steps against the Spanish Indies and Drake was charged with the fitting out of a powerful fleet with Frobisher and Carleill as his chief lieutenants. But the orders for its departure were delayed for many months by the Queen's irresolution, and the war party determined to demonstrate to her the defencelessness of the Antilles. For this reconnoitring they were already provided with the old cloak of a colonising scheme. Walsingham, Drake and Sidney all aided Raleigh in financing the expedition, and in April 1585 it sailed from Plymouth under the command of Sir Richard Grenville and Ralph Lane with orders to discover the state of defence of the Spanish islands and to 1 Vide supra, p. 61. 2 Privy Council to Sir John Gilbert, 10 Oct. 1585, St. Pap. Dom., Eliz. CLXXXIII, no. 13. THE FIRST COLONY IN VIRGINIA 71 report home on their arrival in Virginia. Accordingly they landed and fortified themselves for a short time in Porto Rico and again in Hispaniola. Their report was sent off a few days after the vessels touched on the coast of Terra Florida, and the information of the Spaniards' comparative defencelessness at last persuaded the Queen to give Drake licence to depart. With a fleet of thirty vessels he sailed out hurriedly from Plymouth on 14 September 1585 before the countermand that he expected could arrive. Drake's fleet was furnished and equipped mainly by the London merchants who had financed the earlier exploring voyages, and it was in similar privateering ventures that they employed most of their fluid capital for the next fifteen years. The course of events seriously prejudiced the chances of the Virginia scheme. Public interest was diverted to what seemed more important happenings, and the colonising plan shrank to a private venture. The colonists were unable to accomplish any of their designs and the surviving remnant took passage home with Drake when he returned from his Caribbean raid in 1586. While the Virginia colony appeared likely to interest the Queen, Raleigh had made much of it with ideas borrowed from Gilbert's schemes, but now that it seemed to offer no chance of prestige or profit, he took little further interest. But he still held the rights of his patent, and he was ready to make what he could of them. Some of his associates were more persistent of purpose, and in 1587 John White and twelve others purchased from him a licence of incorporation as "The Governor and Assistants of the City of Raleigh" with power to plant a colony on the shores of Virginia. The assignees of the licence bound themselves to pay certain royalties to the patentee, but he undertook no corresponding responsibility for the adventure, which was wholly the affair of White and his associates. It was even less successful than Lane's attempt. A settlement of some 150 colonists, including a few women, was established at Roanoke during the summer of 1587, and at the desire of his followers White returned to England to secure further help. The times were unpropitious, for England was in the grip of war. A small relief force was got together with difficulty, and when White sailed back in April 1588 his sailors mutinied and carried him off on a piratical cruise among the islands. It was not until three years later that he could try again to succour his deserted followers, and when at last he reached Virginia, scarcely a trace of the colonists could be found. All had perished or had disappeared among the savages. Though Hakluyt had done his best to urge upon Raleigh the great future awaiting him if he would but continue his search for the South Sea through Virginia,1 the great courtier had had enough. 1 Hakluyt, "Epistle Dedicatory" to his translation of a French account of Florida (1587), Princ. Nav. vIII, 439–45. |