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The Queen was no longer interested, and his finances were too overburdened with his other schemes to spare money for Virginia. At last, in March 1589, he determined to cut his losses and made an assignment of practically the whole of his rights under the patent to certain of his creditors with results that we shall consider later.1

The year 1586 marks the close of the first period of English colonising efforts and the beginning of an interval of some eighteen years during which, though there was considerable theoretical interest in colonisation as a means of remedying social evils, little was actually attempted. None of the colonising attempts that were made during the period of private war and reprisals was successful, but they play an important part in the story, in paving the way to success after the peace. The experience they gained confirmed Englishmen in that habit of reliance upon private effort in enterprise beyond the seas wherein our colonial history has differed from that of other Powers. Individual enterprise and independence of governmental help were as characteristic of the Elizabethan naval war as of the planting of colonies and the search for profitable foreign commerce. The three forms of activity went hand in hand; they were carried on by the same set of men and financed from the same sources of private capital. The Queen was often a partner in the enterprises, but only in the same way as any other capitalist. A proper return of profit was expected whether in a privateering adventure to the West Indies, a speculation in eastern trade or an enterprise of western planting. If a project did not return a reasonable profit, it was difficult to attract investors to further ventures on similar lines. All the colonising expeditions of Elizabeth's reign largely failed from lack of reliefs with fresh supplies. The promoters could not send these reliefs because they had not sufficient capital to fit them out, and they could not attract that capital because their schemes did not hold out any prospect of immediate profit. Those who had ready money to invest could put it to more profitable use in other ways. The time had not yet come when men could see in the planting of colonies beyond the ocean national profit other than by monetary gain.

Now that the war for which they had so long been planning had begun, the most earnest supporters of the idea of colonisation, Walsingham and Drake, were too deeply occupied to spare any thought for it. The merchants who alone could finance oversea ventures found too profitable employment for their ships and capital in privateering voyages, and men of war like Grenville and Carleill had too many opportunities of advancement to continue to further the type of enterprise they had joined in between 1576 and 1586. When letters of marque or reprisal against the Spaniards could be obtained almost for the asking, as was the case during the war years, no ship or mariner need lack for employment, and the source from which the

1 Vide infra, p. 75.

THE AFRICAN TRADE

73

crews of the exploring voyages had been recruited was closed so long as the rover's trade would return a satisfactory rate of profit.1 The levies for the Queen's service, too, were frequent and oppressive. On a the other hand, an outlet for able-bodied vagrants into the armies in the Low Countries and Ireland was opened through the hands of the recruiting agents, and for a time complaints of overpopulation in England were less frequent. It was not until the inevitable exhaustion of prolonged war made its effects patent in increasing commercial depression and unemployment towards the end of Elizabeth's reign, that advocacy of emigration and colonisation as the most potent cure for social ills became once more insistent.

A few scattered ventures during the war years show that the search for opportunities of peaceful oceanic trade was still being prosecuted by individual adventurers. The easiest of those opportunities lay in the numberless creeks and havens of the West African coast between the Senegal and the Bight of Benin. It is probable that Englishmen never entirely neglected the African trade from at least the middle of the century, but there were few organised ventures, and our information is therefore very scanty. In 1588 a group of west-country merchants from Exeter and Barnstaple with Antony Dassell and another London merchant petitioned the Crown for exclusive privileges of trade along the African coast from the River Senegal southwards to the Gambia. The desired patent was granted2 and thus the first ‹ organised English Company for African trade was established, but we have little or no information as to its history. Hakluyt has preserved for us accounts of two trading voyages to the Benin coast in 15883 and 1590.4 The London merchants who set forward the voyages seem to have made a satisfactory profit, and doubtless other private ventures of a similar kind were undertaken from time to time. There is no doubt that from the beginning the English African trade was an < open one unrestricted by monopoly, and this fact is of importance in its bearing upon subsequent history.

When Anthony Parkhurst in 1578 described the fitness of Newfoundland for English colonisation he expressed the hope that profit might be found in a search of the River of Canada, for Frenchmen and "Portugals" were in that river and about Cape Breton.5 Nothing was done at that time, but in 1591 Burghley was informed that Bretons from St Malo had found a new and valuable source of train oil, hides and ivory by the hunting of the morse or walrus on the shores of an island that they called Ramea, and he was urged to further English competition for this promising source of profit. The heirs of the explorer Jacques Cartier were also endeavouring to obtain

1 Vide infra, chapter Iv; also Cheyney, E. P., Hist. of England, 1, 463-76.
2 Hakluyt, VI, 443-50.
3 Ibid. vi, 450-8.
Ibid. vi, 461-7.
• Now Isle Madeleine, ibid. vIII, 155.

Ibid. vi, 15.

from the King of France monopoly rights to pursue his discoveries in the River of Canada,1 and the time therefore seemed fitting for an extension of English enterprise in that direction. The first English voyage was set forth by fishing merchants of Redruth and Apsham in 1593,2 and another expedition explored the river as far as the Isle of Assumption or Anticosti in the following year in search for the whale fishery that was being exploited by Biscayans from St Jean de Luz; but Breton and Basque fishermen were visiting the fisheries within the Grand Bay between Cape Breton and Newfoundland every year in such rapidly increasing numbers and with such well-armed ships that there was little hope for successful English competition. The Spaniards and Portuguese had mostly been driven out from the fisheries by the war and they never returned in any considerable numbers. In 1597 Charles Leigh and Abraham van Herwick, merchants of London, made a fresh attempt upon Ramea and the St Lawrence fisheries which is of interest in connection with a project for a colony of those who were dissatisfied with the religious policy of the English Government. A petition was presented to the Lords of the Council by certain Brownists for permission to establish a colony and exercise their own form of worship. The petition was granted, and certain members of the sect departed with Leigh for Ramea, but the project came to nothing owing to the hostility of the French fishermen.4 This was the last attempt of Englishmen to get a footing in the St Lawrence estuary for many years, and its waters remained a close preserve of the French until at length Samuel de Champlain consolidated their power by the founding of his colony at Quebec in 1608. Our efforts were directed further south, and before the close of the sixteenth century the rival colonising powers in North America had laid down the general lines of their expansion as they were to be maintained for the next century and a half.

After the failure of his Virginia schemes Raleigh devoted little attention to ideas of colonisation oversea and turned his interest wholly to English affairs and the plantation of his Irish estates. But when in 1592 he forfeited the Queen's favour, and was driven into retirement, his fertile imagination again turned towards America as the treasure-house of Spain. The adventurous story of his Guiana expeditions (1594-7) is dealt with in the following chapter. Some writers have ranked the Guiana enterprise high among Elizabethan efforts at expansion. In reality it hardly deserves this credit, for it was but a reversion to the least profitable methods of the Spanish gold-seekers which, save in the case of Pizarro, had never met with success. Its story sounds like a faint echo of the great days of the conquistadores that had passed away sixty years before. Raleigh's first

1 See Biggar, H. P., The Voyages of Jacques Cartier no. 11), pp. 259, 313-14.

Cal. St. Pap., Col. Add. 1574-1674, no. 47.

(Publicns. of the Archives of Canada,
2 Hakluyt, vi, 157-62.
Hakluyt, vi, 162-80.

SIR THOMAS SMYTHE

75 attempt in Guiana marks the end of the typically Elizabethan colonial ventures, although his voyage under James I revived that type of expedition once again twenty years later. The interval between his return in 1597 and the foundation of the Virginia Company in 1606 covers a change of epoch, and it is in those years that we must seek the beginnings of the first permanent English colony.

The true line of development is to be traced in the later story of the Virginia patent that Raleigh had passed over to his creditors. As was x stated above, his financial difficulties as early as 1589 had led him, in order to satisfy his creditors, to mortgage the privileges that had been bestowed upon him by the Queen. Among the least valuable of those privileges was the patent for exploration and colonisation in Virginia. A legal assignment was made transferring the powers of the patent to a group including John White and Ananias Dare representing the "City of Raleigh" colonists who were prepared to go to any colony that might be founded, Richard Hakluyt and others who favoured colonisation on theoretical grounds, and above all Sir Thomas Smythe, the typical merchant venturer.

Smythe occupies an unique position among the founders of the Empire, for he was not only a link between the older and the newer forms of commercial enterprise, but was connected with almost every effort to extend English trade overseas for more than thirty years. His father was the celebrated Customer Smythe who farmed and organised the collection of the Queen's customs for many years and amassed a large fortune; his mother was a daughter of the great merchant Sir Andrew Judd who had been engaged in every sort of mercantile venture under Henry VIII. Sir Thomas therefore began with considerable ready capital, and this he invested in the cloth trade of the Merchant Adventurers. He was one of the original members of the Levant Company in 15811 and was also a large investor in the enterprises of the Muscovy Company. He took part in profitable contracts for the victualling of the Navy, but he seems to have avoided investment in privateering enterprises. He supported the views of the mercantile party that the national interest could best be served in the fostering of peaceful trade and he took full advantage of the › change in the international situation in 1598–9.

France made peace with Spain by the Treaty of Vervins in May 1598, and Burghley did his best to bring about a general peace that should include the Dutch and secure freedom of maritime trade. But these efforts failed, and later in the same year Elizabeth and the States-General agreed to further joint naval efforts against the oversea possessions of the common enemy. The main result of this agreement was a favourable attitude on the part of the Government towards the organisation in 1599 of an East India Company on a large scale for the exploitation of the Cape route to the Spiceries. The prime movers 1 Hakluyt, v, 193.

came from the Levant Company, and Sir Thomas Smythe, the organiser of the enterprise, filled the position of governor in both bodies. When Essex left the court in 1599 to serve as lord deputy in Ireland, the ascendancy in the Council passed to the peace party and definite negotiations with Spain were opened at Boulogne. The envoys were instructed to demand freedom of trade to the Indies on the same terms as the old trade to Spain and Portugal, and in return to promise a concession as to colonies. "We are contented to prohibit all repair of our subjects to any places where [the Spaniards and Portuguese] are planted, but only to seek their traffic by their own discoveries in other places, whereof there are so infinite dimensions of vast and great territories as themselves have no kind of interest in."2 This was a clear statement of the doctrine that only effective occupation could be recognised as giving a valid title to new lands, but the Spaniards were not prepared to agree to this doctrine whether put forward by England or by France, and the negotiations of 1600 in consequence proved abortive. The state of war continued until, on Elizabeth's death in March 1603, James I succeeded to the throne. In May 1604 fresh negotiations for a definite settlement were opened in London, and again the English representatives strove hard to secure an acceptance of their doctrine that, subject to customary commercial restrictions, trade to the Indies both East and West should be as free as to the European possessions of the King of Spain. They also sought for an acknowledgment that our men might legitimately colonise in unoccupied lands discovered by them, but no acceptance of these propositions could be obtained, either formal or informal. Ultimately all reference to the lands beyond the ocean was omitted from the treaty save indirectly in an article that was studiously left ambiguous. It was merely stipulated that there should be free commerce both by land and sea between the subjects of the two parties "in all and singular their kingdoms, dominions [etc.] where commerce existed before the war, agreeably and according to the use and observance of the ancient alliances and treaties before the war". Herein lay the ambiguity, for whereas the English traders had always maintained that no treaty or agreement had ever prevented them from sailing to the Indies as freely as they could to Seville or Lisbon, the Spaniards denied such free commerce on the authority of their own domestic regulations. The result was that the matter was left by the Treaty of London to be hammered out in practice until some workable compromise could be reached.4

The lines of the compromise appeared early, for each party insisted on one of their claims and rather neglected the other. The Spaniards were immovable in their refusal of freedom of trade to America, 1 Treaty of Westminster, Aug. 1598, in Davenport, F. G., Treaties bearing on Hist. of U.S. to 1648, p. 241. 2 Ibid. p. 247 n. 3 Ibid. p. 256.

See Stock, L. F., Proceedings and Debates of British Parliaments respecting N. America, 1,

12, 17.

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