maintained by the English negotiators of the Treaty of London. But it is disputable whether either Raleigh or the anti-Spanish party that was for the moment dominant at court was sincere. His fleet was too large and too strongly armed for a mere exploring or colonising venture, and it seems as though the whole scheme were once again a reversion to earlier precedents—this time to the policy of Walsingham's day and an attempt to precipitate a Spanish war. Instead of the promised gold mine very effective Spanish forces were found, and Raleigh was driven off. His ignominious return to England and his trial are noticed later. The preliminaries of English colonisation were over. A new era was opening when colonial affairs were to play a vital part in English politics as a matter of permanent national Vinterest. CHAPTER IV SEA POWER I. THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE WITH the dawn of the sixteenth century was born anew the spirit of adventure, the child of fruitful movements in the spheres both of thought and action. First, the Renaissance, opening up the learning of Ancient Greece, freed the mind of man from medieval trammels and revealed vistas of power and progress attainable by independent thought and resolute enquiry. Then, when the human spirit began to chafe against the narrow bounds of its European home, there burst upon it the spectacle of a New World. Thus the mental awakening due to the revived study of Greek in the West was completed by the great navigators who, near the end of the fifteenth century, discovered the routes to the Indies. The results of these double discoveries were bewilderingly great. Neither thinkers nor seamen could realise their significance, still less how the mental and material factors were destined to react one upon the other; and after the lapse of centuries. we can but dimly imagine the thrills of that springtide, when scholars revealed to man the glory of his faculties, and seamen disclosed the wonders of his home. Armed with firm resolve and insatiable curiosity, he now fared forth to try his powers and explore the universe. As his mental and physical horizons expanded, he ventured on new and startling quests in philosophy, art, literature, natural science, navigation and colonisation. The modern world is the outcome; and those peoples have forged ahead most who have best combined the mental alertness with the physical daring of that age. Succeeding centuries have but garnered the harvests of the seeds sown in the latter half of the fifteenth century. First among the thinkers who discerned the wider opportunities opened up by the discovery of the New World stands Sir Thomas More. While the successors of Columbus prepared to exploit the (presumedly) East Indies; while Vasco da Gama and the Portuguese voyaged by the Cape to those Indies; and while Sebastian Čabot urged on north-westerly ventures to that same goal, the eager brain of More discerned in the New World a new heaven wherein might dwell righteousness. His vivid imagination first brought together in fruitful union the world of Plato and the world of Columbus and Cabot. With quick intuition he saw that the ideal Republic of the Greek sage might be founded in the fertile wastes possessing the two essentials hitherto always denied to mankind-space and security. All down the dark vistas of the past, land hunger had been the parent of war, war of cruelty, cruelty of countless vices undermining the social order. Discontent with that order produced More's protest, the Utopia (ov TÓTOS = Nowhere), published in Latin in 1516. The introduction reveals a soul in revolt against the grim actualities of his age. He sees the European States in a condition of veiled or actual hostility; rulers waging wars of aggrandisement; wars breeding other wars and leaving behind a loathsome progeny of hatred and hardships; savage laws making more thieves ("what other thing do you than make thieves and then punish them?"); and thieves becoming murderers. Crime, too, springs from the craze for turning tillage into pasturage; for wool pays better than corn, wherefore sheep "devour whole fields, houses and cities", and the peasants thus expelled must beg or steal and be hanged. Such is the old order, the aftermath of the long civil strifes—a weary waste of selfishness, extravagance, injustice and misery. Over against the hopeless welter of the Old World he throws up in sharp relief an ideal commonwealth spaciously framed in the lands discovered by Amerigo Vespucci. There, in the islands of the West (for no American continent was as yet surmised), he discerns a home where mankind may start afresh. He pictures Utopia as a larger England, remote and safe from invaders, having fifty-four cities at least twenty-four miles apart. Each city holds twenty square miles of ground, which is tilled in common by husbandmen appointed yearly in rotation. Urban and rural life are interchangeable, and every tenth year houses are changed by lot. Nevertheless they are three storeys high, builded "after a gorgeous and gallant sort", along streets twenty feet wide. As for government, philosophers either rule or counsel the ruler, who holds office for life unless deposed for tyranny; weighty matters are brought before the council of the whole island, lesser affairs before magistrates chosen yearly. For the rest, social well-being is assured by peace and security, prosperity by thorough tillage of the soil, and culture by a six hours' day which leaves scope for the "free libertye of the minde and garnishing of the same". Guiding their lives by reason, the Utopians despise gold, silver, and jewels as the source of pride or folly, and they store them up only against the contingency of war. They hate warfare "as a thing very beastly", but enter upon it to defend themselves or their friends, or even to compel others to till land which, contrary to the law of Nature, is held up void and vacant. To lessen the risk of war they make no alliance. Similarly, they have few laws, and those as simple as may be; for they have all things in common. Their chief aim is reasonable pleasure, both of mind and body. Such, on its political and social sides, is the transoceanic life depicted in Utopia. More contrasts it sharply with the greed, injustice and misery rampant in Europe. Though deriving his inspiration from Plato and the New Testament, he may also have been influenced by the stories of the kindly natives who ministered to the needs of Columbus THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MORE'S UTOPIA 95 and were oppressed or slaughtered by his followers. For already the ills wrought by the lust for gold were clamant; and his sketch was doubtless intended partly as a warning against the prostitution of Nature's bounties offered in the New World. "Shun the precious metals, till the land, let all share alike, and so build up a new community founded on peace, goodwill and equity." This is the moral of More's message. It sets forth the two forces which were to draw myriads oversea-the lure of a new life and discontent with the old life. Above all More bids mankind rely, not on the precious metals, but on tillage of the soil. Herein he sounded a Cassandra note; for during a century gold and silver were to be the curse of the New World, enticing men from tillage to pillage, from colonisation to buccaneering. Published first at Louvain, then at Paris, Utopia was not englished until 1551, and by that time its gracious author had fallen a victim to regal tyranny and to his later reverence for the Papacy. Perhaps the inconsistency of the earlier and later halves of his life (social seer and dévot) lessened the influence of this, his greatest work, which was regarded as a whimsical play on life rather than a call to a new life. In the England of Henry VIII his seed fell on stony soil; and many convulsions had to occur before even the meagre firstfruits appeared. Some admirers have seen in Henry's cessation from French wars his respect for More's teaching.1 The suggestion is improbable. Henry ever went his own way, and cramped and insulated England during half a century. According to Henry's biographer, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, some of his councillors in 1511 urged maritime expansion rather than a continental policy: Let us in God's name leave off our attempts against the terra firma. The natural situation of islands seems not to consort with conquests in that kind. England alone is a just Empire. Or, when we would enlarge ourselves, let it be that way we can, and to which it seems the eternal Providence hath destined us, which is by the sea. The Indies are discovered and vast treasure brought from thence every day. Let us therefore bend our endeavours thitherward; and if the Spaniards and Portugals suffer us not to join with them, there will be yet region enough for all to enjoy. 2 In this eloquent appeal Herbert projected the thought of Charles I's reign back into that of Henry VIII, when no thinker, save More, pictured a New England overseas. This is not surprising. The home-loving practical English then felt no need for expansion; the prevalent westerly gales of the North Atlantic discouraged enterprise; Robert Thorne was almost alone in urging Henry to undertake the discovery of the North-East or North-West Passage to the Indies; for "I judge there is no land unhabitable nor sea innavigable". All was in vain. Henry and his nobles took little interest in maritime ventures, a fact deplored by Frobisher's biographer, Best, inasmuch 1 Kautsky, K., Thomas More and his Utopia (Eng. transl. p. 141). 2 Lord Herbert of Cherbury, The Reign of Henry VIII (edit. of 1649, p. 18). as "our chiefest strength consisteth by sea".1 This dictum is of Elizabethan, not of early Tudor times. Much had to happen before it commanded wide assent. The breach with Rome, the loosening of continental ties in Mary's reign; next, the dawn of a fresh national consciousness linked with a growing hatred of Spain and a growing resolve to rifle her oversea treasuries; lastly, a confident belief that sea prowess there gave us the mastery-all conspired to endow the Elizabethans with unique freshness and force. "The world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open" exclaims Ancient Pistol in the Merry Wives of Windsor; and the braggart does but blurt out the roystering vitality of the Shakespearean age. Much ink has been spilt in the effort to discover how the poet, bred by the Avon, could, as if to the manner born, dole out travellers' tales and the jargon of the fo'c'sle. Indeed, the thesis has been plausibly maintained that only a gentleman-adventurer, like Raleigh, could have written the Tempest and parts of other plays. But the land vibrated with an adventurous spirit conducive to mental daring and inquisitiveness. Only the dull clods stayed at home. Even men of slender reputation Put forth their sons to seek preferment out, Plymouth, Bristol, Southampton, London hummed with excitement at the return of every successful venture to the Indies. Would not the master mind of the age soon absorb the master spirit of the age? And to a Warwickshire lad were not the treacherous calms and awesome storms a spur to a new realm of thought and expression? What wonder that he "milked" the seamen of Wapping; and that, thanks to his soaring spirit, English thought and expression underwent Visions of the ocean light up the talk. In As You Like It Rosalind, eager to hear of Orlando, bursts out with "One inch of delay more is a South Sea of discovery". Pistol, when urging Falstaff in pursuit of Mistress Page, becomes for the nonce a sea-captain: Clap on more sails; pursue; up with your fights; The map in the new edition of Hakluyt's prose epic is pressed into service by nimble-witted Maria, who, in Twelfth Night, thus hits off Malvolio's smirks-"he does smile his face into more lines than are in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies". Now, as the Elizabethan playwrights wrote for the many, not for the few, it is clear that topical allusions such as these would not be too obscure even 1 Frobisher's Three Voyages (Hakluyt Soc., 1867, ed. Collinson), p. 22. |