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her own ports to those of other European nations. But no sooner had she done so than, from world causes, the old trades began to decline in relative value. At the same time she had been opening up new trades with new methods-joint-stock organisation and small individualist syndicates. The individualist form was congenial to the western men, and it was also inevitable in the oceanic trades because some of these trades were more or less illegitimate and could not be formally sanctioned; individualism certainly developed character and enterprise on lines differing from those of the incorporated trades. When this stimulus began to operate, it was assisted by the new financial conditions which were permitting the accumulation on a small scale of the mobile capital essential for long-distance undertakings. The Reformation bore its part by producing in England a social upheaval and a sense of over-population, a prime incentive to colonisation in the next period; and in Europe a re-grouping of the Powers in accordance with religious interests, a re-grouping which the new oceanic ambitions hardened by material considerations. Amidst these changes the Tudors saw the need of a regular Navy. Henry VII laid plans which Henry VIII did much more than realise. Mary held less firmly to the ideal. Elizabeth in her early years gave it only moderate attention, preoccupied as she was with the task of bringing domestic order out of the revolutionary chaos of the preceding generation; but at least she was so far successful as to see the conspiracy of 1571 break down owing to the impossibility of a Spanish invasion. England, it is true, had only a mediocre Navy, but Spain had virtually none at all available for service in northern Europe. In the Mediterranean she had the galleys of Lepanto, and on the ocean a small semi-private squadron of sailing galleons; but the first of these forces was fully engaged by the Turk, and to the second was allocated the duty of guarding the treasure fleets against the privateers. The period of Anglo-Spanish hostility inaugurated in 1568-9 was one in which both countries increased their naval preparations. But England, thanks to the good work of the Tudor sovereigns in the past, was fully able to maintain her superiority.

CHAPTER III

THE BEGINNINGS OF ENGLISH COLONISATION,

1569-1618

AT all periods the development of England's colonising activity has

been largely influenced by the course of her foreign relations, and this not less in the days of its beginnings than in the great eras of expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Every practicable way to trade beyond the limits of Europe was blocked by the x pretensions of Spain and Portugal to monopoly. Opportunities for the expansion of commerce could be found only at the expense of their exaggerated claims, and in the attack upon them the new maritime nations were led first to seek advanced bases across the ocean and then to establish permanent colonies for trade and plantation. In the previous chapter we saw that Portuguese interests on the African coast were the first to suffer, but later the main object of effort became that trade with the East Indies which for half a century had been pouring riches into the hands of Emmanuel the Fortunate and his successors, and had made Lisbon one of the richest cities in Europe. Portugal held the prize, but Spain was the chief enemy by reason of her championship of the Counter-Reformation, and the earliest colonial attempts were made when some of Elizabeth's councillors saw a way to aid defence in Europe by diversions across the ocean. Their attempts are bound up with the changes in policy that led to the outbreak of the Elizabethan war. During the war years there was a cessation of practical effort, but theoretical interest in colonisation as a means of remedying social evils and strengthening the State was growing and it played an important part in the promotion of the first permanent colonies, when peace came under James I. The period to be treated in this chapter falls therefore into three parts, the years of change that preceded the outbreak of the war with Spain, the time of open war from 1585 to 1604, and the ensuing interval of peace that came to an end when the Thirty Years' War began in 1618.

The story of the first of these periods is not one of connected progress or even of gradual development in the colonial field. It is that of a number of unsuccessful experiments whose most lasting results are to be found in their cumulative influence on the national temper and outlook. A spirit of daring adventure was aroused that set the stay-at-home Englishmen of an earlier age on the road that has made them the most widely scattered of all the European peoples. Such spiritual movements are emphasised in other chapters, and here our

attention will be directed to the more prosaic background of the story, to the connection between the various colonial ventures and their relation to foreign and economic policy. Alongside them we must note something of the development of English mercantile enterprise whereby the foundations of oversea dominion were at last securely laid by the East India and other chartered companies during the later years of our period.

The typical Elizabethan era, the time of private war and reprisals, began in 1569. Englishmen had long been closely associated with the Huguenot party in France in their attacks upon Spanish and Portuguese commerce, and they derived the inspiration for their first systematic efforts across the Atlantic from the great Admiral of France, Gaspard de Coligny. Both French and English merchants had from time to time attempted to establish small posts on the coast of Brazil from which to carry on trade with the natives,1 but the Portuguese had easily disposed of them. Coligny strongly advocated the advantage of attacking Spain in the Indies in order to weaken her in Europe, and during the war under Henry II he had persistently pressed this policy on the Crown. But with the outbreak of the Wars of Religion France was split into warring factions, and Coligny's maritime policy ceased to be national and was regarded as merely a party interest.

The despatch of an army to France to assist the Huguenots in their campaign in Normandy brought English officers into closer association with Frenchmen than they had been for many years, and to that association we may date the genesis of constructive schemes for English colonisation beyond the seas, for serving together in the camp at Le Havre in 1562 were Richard Eden, Thomas Stukely and Humphrey Gilbert, the first promoters of colonial ideas in England. Spain was the supporter of Coligny's rivals, the Guises, and in order to weaken her he was determined to continue an aggressive policy at sea. His thoughts were turned to the establishment of colonies on the American coast to serve as outposts for his privateers, and his first colonial enterprise was in Brazil, the scene of French activity almost since the time of its discovery. He gave his patronage and help to the colony of Nicolas de Villegaignon at Fort Coligny in the Bay of Ganabara, where the city of Rio de Janeiro now stands. The colony received a party of emigrants with their pastors who were sent out from Geneva to plant the reformed faith in the New World. But the adventure ended disastrously, for after bitter religious disputes among its leaders the colony was wiped out by the Portuguese in 1560 and the remnant of the colonists massacred or dispersed among the cannibals. In the summer of 1561 when Coligny was governor of the fortress of Le Havre, he summoned a meeting of his partisans and announced to them his intention of despatching an expedition for the 1 Vide supra, p. 33.

RIBAULT AND STUKELY'S SCHEMES

55

exploration of Terra Florida preparatory to the establishment of a colony there to be called "New France". He had completed his preparations by the beginning of 1562, and the expedition set sail in February under the command of Jean Ribault, a Huguenot captain of proved worth who was well known to the English Government. Queen Elizabeth was at this time lending support to the party of the reformed religion and was certainly not displeased to learn of the admiral's plans against Spain in the New World. Sailing out across the Atlantic by an unfrequented direct route to avoid Spanish vessels, Ribault established a garrison on the River of May in what is now South Carolina. He called his little fort "Charlesfort” in honour of King Charles IX, and returned to France for reinforcements in July 1562. But the times could hardly have been less propitious, for the first War of Religion had begun, and though an English force had been sent to the assistance of the Huguenots, the struggle was already going against them. Ribault was compelled to flee to England after the surrender of Dieppe to the Catholics in October 1562, and there he wrote for the first time a full account of his Florida enterprise, which was published in English in London in 1563.1

Ribault's tract found the English public ready for stories of American adventure, for Richard Eden, who was a personal acquaintance of Sebastian Cabot, had already published a translation of Sebastian Munster's Cosmographia in 1553 under the title of A Treatise of the new India with other new found Lands and Islands. His next book, which appeared in 1555 as The Decades of the New World or West India, contained selections from the Spanish historians of the conquest and had a considerable circulation.

The Queen's attention was drawn to the story of Ribault's expedition by Thomas Stukely, one of the most reckless and unprincipled of the Devonshire soldiers of fortune. The idea of forestalling the French attracted her fancy, for since Ponce de Leon's first discovery of Florida that land had always been reputed to contain rich stores of gold and silver, and Ribault claimed to know where to find the treasure. But Elizabeth made an unfortunate mistake in selecting Stukely to command the expedition that Ribault was engaged to pilot. He betrayed the whole plan to the Spaniards and promised to deliver over the ships to Philip's service. When he sailed in June 1563 he gave himself up to a course of indiscriminate robbery of Spanish, Portuguese and French ships upon the high seas. In all probability he never went near the Indies, but his pretence of a colonising design is of interest in the history of expansion oversea, because it was the first suggestion of American colonisation by Englishmen, and was a link between the projects of Villegaignon and Ribault and those of the later Elizabethans. Further the alleged connivance 1 For the original text see Biggar, H. P., in Eng. Hist. Rev. XXXII (1917), 253-70. 2 Cal. St. Pap. Span. 1558-67, no. 328, de Silva to Philip II, 22 Oct. 1565.

of the English Queen in Stukely's piracy antedated her approval of Drake's designs, and gave colour to the Spanish suspicion of every professed English colonist as a potential pirate.

Cecil knew from the first that Stukely was not to be trusted, and early in 1564 he decided to entrust the Florida design instead to the experienced hands of his partners, the Hawkinses, of Plymouth. John Hawkins, who was ordered to call and report on the prospects of the colony on his return from his second voyage, found that the second batch of French colonists, who had been sent out under Réné de Laudonnière in April 1564, were starving, and he offered them a passage to Europe. This they refused and on his return to England Hawkins reported that there was little prospect of finding treasure in Florida, and the English plans for ousting the French were dropped. The colony came to a tragic and long-remembered end. Ribault's relief ships were cast away in a terrible storm and their shipwrecked crews fell defenceless into the hands of Pero Menéndez de Avilés; no mercy was afforded them; everyone captured was put to death, and only Laudonnière and a handful of followers saw France again.

The massacre horrified Englishmen and fanned the growing conviction of Spanish brutality and ill-faith. Coligny's schemes of colonisation had failed, but they were not forgotten, for though France stood aside from the struggle for forty years, a whole generation of Englishmen took up the fight and bracketed the Florida massacre with the slaughter of Hawkins's men at San Juan de Ulua as justifying the merciless reprisals of their privateering war. From the time of Drake to that of the buccaneers the legend of Spanish treachery was never forgotten. The prejudices and passions that were deliberately fostered by the Queen and her ministers not only keyed up the national spirit, but created the temper in which every English colony from Raleigh's Virginia to Cromwell's Jamaica was planted. If we judge only by the rival propagandists, it would seem that most Englishmen were as incapable of rendering justice to Spain's claim to colonial empire as Spaniards were to admit that every English seaman was not a Lutheran savage. The truth is less highly coloured. The main impetus to English colonisation in the Elizabethan age was the search for economic advantage, and not solely the high-flown desire for revenge and glory that legend has painted it, but we must not neglect the importance of the psychological forces fostered by anti-Spanish propaganda.

Though the English Government made no systematic efforts, like those of Spain and Portugal, to foster colonisation across the ocean, yet in one sense it was engaged in colonising efforts on a very large scale. Colonisation was undertaken in Ireland under direct governmental control for political ends and with public money. The drain in men and treasure was such that, while the Crown was endeavouring to solve the perennial Irish difficulty by planting colonies of English

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