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his plan, and he proceeded to equip his fleet. His backers included some minor courtiers who favoured war, but his funds were mainly provided by his own friends and relatives among the westcountry gentry. The subscribers included Gilbert's own brothers John and Adrian, his half-brothers Carew and Walter Raleigh, and his old friend Sir George Peckham. The fleet was a stronger and better furnished one than had ever yet left England on an ocean voyage, and the armament was so heavy that the Spanish ambassador Mendoza had good reason to warn his master of Gilbert's hostile intentions.' The expedition left Dartmouth in September, but dissensions among the leaders ruined its chances from the start. It was too late in the season to attack the fishermen and before the end of November the only ships that sailed were compelled by storms to return to harbour and to report utter failure. Though the ostensible colonising purpose of the scheme was a sham, Gilbert's patent had some subsequent importance as the basis for his later ventures.

1

When Drake and Gilbert presented their plans it could not be foreseen that one of them would meet with resounding success and the other with failure. Drake sailed away in November 1577 with a greater design than a mere plundering raid into the South Sea. His instructions, if he ever had any, have not survived, but from other contemporary evidence we can discern that his main purpose was the discovery of new lands and new trades and their annexation to the Crown of England. His proceedings on the voyage amply verify this, and though the later course of events obscured this side of his work, its importance appears when we recall that his plans were drafted in concert with Walsingham. The story of his voyage and his annexation of the western shores of America as Nova Albion is told later, and here we need only notice his proceedings when he reached the Spiceries which very probably were his goal from the beginning. He found there such detestation of the Portuguese that his offer to the Sultan of Ternate of a treaty of alliance and protection was cordially welcomed. Whether any formal treaty was concluded has been a matter of dispute, though it is immaterial; such a treaty could never have been implemented. But when Drake returned to England his negotiations in the Moluccas were regarded by the Queen and the Council as one of the greatest results of his voyage and as offering the most permanent benefits.

3

There is no doubt that in Drake we should see one of the earliest and greatest of our imperial pioneers. His ideas were in advance of the narrow European outlook of his Queen and her generation. Not till she had passed away and peace had come, did Englishmen in

1 Cal. St. Pap. Span. 1568-79, Mendoza to Philip, 16 May, 3 June, 1578, nos. 496, 503, etc. 2 Declaration of Capt. John Winter, 1579 in New Light on Drake, p. 386. See also ibid. pp. 318-19 and xxxiii-xxxviii.

3 Vide infra, p. 101.

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general begin to grasp his great conception and try to realise his vision of a new England in the West and dream of a vast empire in the East. In after years it was always recalled that the circumnavigator had staked out claims in advance of any but the Portuguese, and for more than a century the results of his work were the sheet anchor of our diplomacy in the East.

After 1569 England's relations with Portugal became less strained than they had been for many years, and in 1576 a treaty for mutual abstention from hostilities was signed by the two Governments. But the respite was only a short one. When Philip II became King of Portugal in 1580, he seemed to have added the empire of the old Indies irresistibly to the "New India" in America of which he was already sole possessor. But in reality the annexation brought him little new strength; it afforded new opportunities for his enemies to enrich themselves at his subjects' expense. Portuguese commerce with the Indies had long been the prey of piratical attacks by the outlaws of the sea. These were now succeeded by quasi-legal privateering, at times on a formidable scale, as reprisals for wrongs done by the Spaniards. French and English corsairs seized greedily on the opportunity, and the "Sea Beggars", who were nominally Philip's own subjects, were not behindhand. The pretext for the assistance afforded more or less guardedly to the corsairs by their Governments was found in the pretensions of Don Antonio, grandson of Emmanuel the Fortunate in an illegitimate line, a weakling who was but a pawn in the tangled game of high politics. Catharine de' Medici staked her chances in the game on the desperate enterprise of her cousin Philip Strozzi against the Azores, where some Portuguese nationalists were holding out for Don Antonio. But the tragic destruction of Strozzi's fleet by Admiral Santa Cruz (26 July 1582), and the massacre of his crews, put France out of the oceanic struggle for a generation. It became clear to some men of the northern nations, and to Drake and Walsingham above all, that while it was hopeless to destroy the Spanish hegemony on the battlefields of Europe, its strength could be sapped upon the ocean and in the lands beyond. The first stage in the new era was begun; oceanic expansion was no longer merely an affair for merchants and projectors, it reckoned as a prime factor in high policy. For some time Dutch and English merchants had been planning to win a share in the gains to be derived from oceanic commerce in a different direction and to profit by the spoils of Antwerp which was rapidly sinking from its place as the centre of banking and world trade. Bills on Antwerp had been the common commercial currency of the world; and to finance any enterprise of the first magnitude recourse had been made to its international money market. But repudiation and war were proving fatal to its supremacy and the town that could afford the greatest security was likely to obtain a favoured place in international commerce. No French town, not even Rouen which

once seemed to have a chance, could hope to compete in the struggle, for civil war is fatal to mercantile enterprise. The old commercial cities of the Hansa, Hamburg and Bremen, lay too far to the east to be good distributing centres, and only London and Amsterdam remained. Each of them was as favourably situated as Antwerp, and each was better protected from the dangers of war. Each had a nucleus of commercial experience, some stock of fluid capital, gained mainly in the trade of northern Europe, and enterprising merchants anxious to benefit by the break-up of the Antwerp system. But the Dutch had a long start, for they had the privileges of denizens in the Spanish dominions. When in November 1576, during four days, Antwerp was a prey to the sack and fury of the unpaid and mutinous Spanish soldiery, it was to Amsterdam that the fleeing merchants betook themselves. They could bring with them little from the wreck but their immense commercial skill and experience in world trade, the most important of all assets to the rising city. When a little later the United Provinces solemnly abjured their allegiance to the King of Spain and Philip retaliated by forbidding trade with them, English and Dutch were placed upon an equal footing as competitors for world commerce and its necessary accompaniment, the opportunity to gain colonial power. For thirty years their paths lay parallel. The two Protestant Powers only diverged into rivalry when their prime object had been achieved, and the Iberian monopoly was broken.

England, and especially London, had experienced a fairly steady rise in commercial prosperity from the founding of the Muscovy Company down to the Flanders embargoes of 1569, and she had considerably increased her stores of fluid capital.1 But the five years from 1569 to 1574 were a time of serious depression overcome only by the combined efforts of the Government and the great merchants. These efforts were successful, and the eleven succeeding years were a period of great prosperity that gave the country for the first time sufficient available capital for oceanic trade on the great scale. The main national effort was directed to the pursuit of commerce and to privateering, but the period of prosperity was also marked by the most important colonising attempts of Elizabeth's reign.

By 1581 the great organisations of aliens who had taken the lion's share of English commerce under the early Tudors had been wholly thrust out. English merchants were at last masters in their own house, and both Burghley and Walsingham were anxious for them to compete for any profitable field of world trade. The policy of the two statesmen was directed to a common purpose, the increase of England's treasure, but they differed as to the best means of securing their aim and they drew their support from different sources-Walsingham from the privateering merchants and the courtiers of the war party, Burghley from the more conservative London merchants of the old 1 See Scott, W. R., Joint Stock Companies to 1720, vol. 1, chap. ii.

THE LEVANT COMPANY

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regulated companies and the lawyers. The reorganisation in 1578–9 of the Eastland Company under the lord treasurer's patronage has already been mentioned. He furthered next the foundation of a company to revive the English trade with the Levant that had begun under Henry VIII. The profitable but short-lived trade of the Muscovy Company in the products of the East by way of Persia and the White Sea or Baltic had been blocked by the attacks of the Tartars, but there were high hopes of a profitable trade in the wines and currants of Turkey and of access to the markets of India through Damascus and Baghdad and by way of Egypt and the Red Sea.

Walsingham, on the other hand, favoured an attempt to extend English trade to the East by the long sea route where no dues would have to be paid to the Turks of Egypt or Constantinople. Immediately after Drake's return in 1580 he proposed to the Queen to send him to Calicut to enter into relations with the Portuguese there who adhered to Don Antonio, or to the Moluccas to obtain spices direct from Ternate and to carry forward his treaty. He prepared and submitted a plan for the erection under Drake's governorship of a company for eastern trade and its management on the exclusive Spanish pattern through a casa de contratación. At the same time another plan was considered for sending Drake with a strong fleet to assist Don Antonio's partisans in the Azores and establish an advanced base there for English privateers on the track of the treasure fleets.2 This was the plan that Strozzi ventured upon a little later, and his fate proves that Elizabeth was right in her rejection of both plans as too perilous. Instead, she sent Walsingham to Paris to disentangle her tortuous marriage negotiations and to work for a firm alliance against Spain. He had thus to drop his oceanic schemes which fell into the hands of others of less judgment. The project for the Levant Company proceeded and by the middle of 1581 a capital of over £80,000 had been subscribed by the great London merchants and the Queen, who invested £42,000 out of her share of Drake's plunder. The Company was launched upon a profitable course that we need not here discuss; but its activities were the main root of the later enterprise of the East India Company.

While Walsingham was absent, the Earl of Leicester pushed on the schemes for seizing the Portuguese trade, but they became involved in personal intrigues that boded ill for their success. The Queen would not accept the Azores design though it had already cost a good deal of money, and a scheme was proposed instead for seizing Sao Jorge da Mina, the Portuguese headquarters on the African coast. Frobisher knew the place for he had been a prisoner there in 1554–5; and he was concerned in a scheme for its capture in 1566; as he was put forward by the promoters for the command, the idea probably 1 St. Pap. Dom., Eliz. CXLIV, no. 144, printed in New Light on Drake, p. 430. * Read, C., Walsingham, 11, 399-401. * Corbett, op. cit. 1, 325-31.

2

CHBE 1

5

originated with him.1 But the plans were changed again and Frobisher retired. As the Muscovy Company provided most of the capital, it claimed a voice in selecting the leaders and drafting their instructions. It would not accept Christopher Carleill, who was nominated by Walsingham, but chose instead Captain Edward Fenton who had been Frobisher's second in command in the Kathai voyages. It was an unfortunate appointment from the first. Fenton's instructions were prepared in accordance with the best advice in the City, and he was ordered to proceed by way of the Cape of Good Hope to the Moluccas and there to open up trade in pursuance of Drake's treaty. But when he sailed in May 1582, he flatly disregarded these instructions. After touching at Sierra Leone he steered to the coast of Brazil on his way to the Straits of Magellan. There he was attacked by the Spanish fleet waiting for him, and, broken and disorganised, his ships had to return to England in June 1583 and almost the whole invested capital was lost. The Cape route was still to remain untouched for ten years more. } Sir Humphrey Gilbert rightly regarded the merchants belonging to the Muscovy Company, who had opposed the grant of his patent in 1578, as his most jealous and dangerous rivals. When it seemed likely that he would be forestalled by Fenton, he turned to the common device of grantees at the time, and tried to find adventurers who would finance expeditions on their own account under assignments of his rights. He found his first assignee in Dr John Dee, the celebrated physician and astrologer, who had long been interested in projects of discovery and frequently entertained at his house in London a small circle of influential friends for the discussion of problems of geography and navigation.2 As early as 1570 Dee had urged that Englishmen, owing to the situation of their country, might make surpassing discoveries of rich countries if they would only bestir themselves, and in September 1580 he purchased from Gilbert the right of discovery under the patent of all lands to the north of the 50th parallel. Dee made no use of his licence, however, and Gilbert sought for other purchasers of his assignments.

3

Sir George Peckham, one of his old friends and companions-inarms, though not himself a Roman Catholic, was closely associated with many recusants. To him and Sir Thomas Gerrard, a well-known recusant, Sir Humphrey in August 1582 made a lease under his patent of the right to explore and colonise 1,500,000 acres upon the coast of North America between Cape Breton and the south of Florida. The proposal was to people these lands with English Roman Catholics who would find there a refuge from the disabilities under which they suffered at home. Walsingham knew of the scheme and

1 Brit. Mus., Lansdowne MSS, 31, f. 81.

2 Diary of Dr John Dee (Camden Soc. 1842).

3 In his Preface to Euclid.

• See Merriman, R. B., Amer. Hist. Rev. (Apr. 1908), XIII, 492–500

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