No wonder their friend and fellow ‘Scholar of Night’, George Chapman – famed as the translator whose version of Homer made Keats feel:
like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken
– should have seen the potentialities of Guiana as almost limitless. In that decade when the economy was in such a parlous state – rising food prices, failed crops, a fall in the real value of money, and inflation – Guiana became a mythic source of betterment, which could return England to its wealth, and Elizabeth to the bright glory of her early years:
Riches and conquest and renown I sing
Riches with honour, conquest without blood,
Enough to seat the monarchy of earth,
Like to Jove’s eagle on Eliza’s hand.
Guiana, whose rich feet are mines of gold,
Whose forehead knocks against the roof of stars,
Stands on her tiptoe at fair England looking,
Kissing her hand, bowing her mighty breast,
And every sign of all submission making,
To be her sister and her daughter both
Of our most sacred Maid . . .2
Although he had made the sacred Maid, the Queen, so spectacular a sum of money from the Madre de Dios raid, Raleigh was still in disgrace. He and his wife were released from the Tower, but retreated to Sherborne Castle, where they missed the court, and London, keenly. Raleigh planned another expedition. By 1595 the rather grandiose schemes had shrunk. The fleet of seven vessels became four, with his friends Lawrence Keymis, Jacob Whiddon and Douglas Master in charge of them. Keymis was an interesting man – a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, from 1583 to 1591, a good mathematician and geographer, a member of the group of friends who constituted (in so far as it existed) the ‘School of Night’, and a fast friend of Raleigh’s. It would have been easy to desert Raleigh when he fell from the royal favour, but Keymis stayed loyal and, while Raleigh was in the Tower, acted as his agent and tried to keep his ever-interesting financial affairs in order. Raleigh attracted real devotion, and one still feels his attraction – of all the great Elizabethans, he is the most attractive.
As they reached Trinidad, Raleigh temporarily parted company from them to do a brief reconnaissance in the Orinoco delta in (modern-day) Venezuela. For it was on the banks of the Orinoco that he hoped to find gold. When he met the native caciques:
I made them understand that I was a servant of a Queen, who was the great cacique of the north and a virgin . . . that she was an enemy to the Castellani [that is, the Spanish] in respect of their tyranny and oppression, and that she delivered all such nations about her, as were by them oppressed, and having freed all the coast of the northern world from their servitude had sent me to free them also, and withal to defend the country of Guiana from their invasion and conquest. I showed them her majesty’s picture which they so admired and honoured, as it had been easy to have brought them idolatrous thereof . . . so as in that part of the world, her majesty is very famous and admirable, whom they now call Ezrabeta Cassipuna Aquerewana, which is as much as Elizabeth, the great princess or greatest commander.3
Raleigh was anxious that his sailors should not behave like the Spanish Conquistadors: there were to be no rapes, no violence, no plunder of the villages. He wanted the caciques to be on his side and to lead him to his obsession – the gold. Fatally, he did manage to find a few fragments of gold in the river, and this fed the mania that possessed him for the next twenty-three years: the belief that somewhere in the Orinoco he was going to find riches beyond avarice’s wildest hope. It was the failure of that last expedition to Orinoco in 1618 that cost him his life. He lost his son on that final expedition, and when he came home it was to face trumped-up charges of treason and fraud.
The night before he died, he sat up in his cell in the Tower of London and wrote that mordant verse:
Even such is Time, which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us with but age and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days.
Did he pause there, as he wrote. And was that the whole of his faith, this enquiring, sceptical man who in the 1590s had been accused of being an atheist? No. It was not mere convention that made him add the next two lines. Raleigh did not give a fig for conventions. Like so many of the most interesting men and women of the age, he was very close to scepticism. His mind questioned everything. It was one of the things that he had in common, not only with raffish young intellectuals such as Marlowe, but with the Queen. But, like the Queen, he held fast to the faith:
And from which earth, and grave, and dust,
The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.4
Likewise, we find the sceptic Thomas Hariot reading aloud from the Scriptures to the Native Americans in Virginia in 1616.
And although the dreams of gold in Guiana turned out to be a dangerous fantasy, Raleigh’s involvement with the fledgling colony of Virginia was not useless.
In his essay on ‘Plantations’, the malicious Francis Bacon wrote, ‘it is the sinfullest thing in the world to forsake or destitute a plantation once in forwardness, for besides the dishonour, it is the guiltiness of blood of many commiserable persons’. It was clearly a dig against Raleigh, who had claimed that the voyage of 1595 had been to protect the new colony of Virginia, but he had become distracted by the prospect of finding gold in Guiana. Yet it was unfair to blame Raleigh for the financial setbacks of the early settlers in Virginia. He lived on borrowed money and, until he found his crock of Guianan gold, he could not subsidise Virginia. He did abandon the Roanoke settlers, but no one else helped them either in the 1580s or 1590s. ‘I long since presumed to offer your Majesty my service in Virginia,’ he wrote to James I, ‘with a short repetition of the commodity, honour and safety which the King’s Majesty might reap by that plantation, if it were followed to effect. I do still humbly beseech your Majesty, that I may rather die in serving the King and my Country than to perish here’ (he was writing from the Tower).
Raleigh, however, was the pioneer who literally put Virginia on the map, and who, simply by his fame and colourful personality – smoking tobacco, cutting a figure – reminded people of the colony’s existence. It was really Hakluyt who had the prescience to see Virginia’s vast historical potential. We began this book with the observation that the world created by the Elizabethans had ended in our lifetime: and as far as England is concerned that is very largely true. The class who rose to eminence under Elizabeth as the governing class – the Cecils, the Cavendishes, the Herberts – were in positions of political power until the early to mid-twentieth century. Now, though they might still inhabit Hatfield, Wilton and Chatsworth, they are not in government. The Church of England still exists, and its bishops still wear Elizabethan lawn-sleeved rochets with gathered cuffs. But the claim of that Church to speak for England looks, in the multicultural atmosphere of twenty-first-century Britain, more notional than practical. The grammar schools created by Elizabethans to educate poor scholars either became private schools in the nineteenth century (Rugby, Harrow, and so on) or in the twentieth century were made into comprehensive schools and lost much of their distinction. So, as we began by saying, the Elizabethan world has gone.
But in one respect that generalisation is not true. Although Virginia has not been an English colony since 1776, the fact that the largest and most powerful nation in the world is English-speaking is the direct consequence of the Elizabethan view of things; and, in particular, it is the consequence of Richard Hakluyt’s vision of things. In 1587 Hakluyt produced a new edition of the Decades of Peter Martyr (1457–1526). Martyr was an Italian who went to Spain in his early twenties and was one of the leading humanists at Salamanca University. He was a geographer of great renown – he was the first person, for example, to understand the significance of the Gulf Stream – and he wrote about
the transatlantic voyages and discoveries in a ten-part work known as the Decades.
At first sight, it would seem puzzling that Hakluyt should have reissued this by now all-but-obsolete book, which dated from the very beginning of the century, and the beginning of Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Americas. But that was the point. He published the book in Latin, and in Paris, because it was aimed at a European-wide market, and he dedicated this particular edition to Raleigh. Martyr had been a great geographer, and Hakluyt paid handsome tribute to this fact. He praised Martyr for his anthropological boldness in recounting the Spanish ‘avarice, ambition, butchery, rapine, debauchery, their cruelty towards defenceless and harmless peoples’. It was Martyr who chronicled the Spanish conquest of ‘vast regions of the New World’. In other words, what Hakluyt was doing by publishing this book in this particular way was saying to the world: ‘although the Pope famously divided the New World between Portugal and Spain and told them to share it between them, he had no authority to do so’. Peter Martyr demonstrated that the Spaniards conquered much, but not all, of the Americas. The rest was waiting for new and more benignant conquerors. Geography is the eye of history, said Hakluyt – Geographiam esse historiae oculus. He hoped that this work by a foreigner might inspire ‘our island race’ . . . ‘For he who proclaims the praises of foreigners rouses his own countrymen if they be not dolts.’5
Furthermore, Hakluyt urged Raleigh on to Virginia. The ‘sweet nymph’ needed to be pursued and wooed like any other woman. ‘There yet remain for you new lands, ample realms, unknown peoples’. Moreover, the English efforts to colonise Virginia were sanctioned by Holy Scripture itself. Christ’s command in St Matthew’s Gospel to baptise and teach all people was understood by Hakluyt to mean ‘to recall the savage and pagan to civility’, a serious call, given the twin threats still posed to the world by Islam and Roman Catholicism.6 If Raleigh had the boldness to pursue the colonisation of America, he would, Hakluyt promised him, ‘find at length, if not a Homer, yet some Martyr – by whom I mean some happy genius – to rescue your heroic enterprises from the vast maw of oblivion’.7
Hakluyt’s own multi-volume work is perhaps more comparable to the work of Herodotus than to that of Homer. It was a history of his own people, but written from the point of view of naval exploits, geographical curiosity and the new ideology of Empire. He announced the coming of the work in 1589 and it would include ‘the most remote and farthest distant Quarters of the earth at any time within the compasse of these 1500 years’. So, from the journey of that Colchester girl, the Empress Helena, to find the relics of the True Cross in Jerusalem in the fourth century, to the circumnavigation of the globe by Francis Drake, was seen as one vast Bible of English world-exploration, an allegory of imperial expansionism. And it is worthy to be placed beside Herodotus as one of the most absorbing set of narratives ever collected in book form.
In 1590 Hakluyt was able to give up being the ‘preacher’ at the English Embassy in Paris and retire to the English countryside. His ambassador’s wife, Lady Douglas Stafford, was the patron of the living of Wetheringsett in Suffolk. It was as the rector of All Saints’ church there that Hakluyt could repair, and it is clear that he did not regard it simply as a sinecure. He was the resident parish priest. His son was christened there in 1593; his first wife was buried there in 1597.
When, as a sixteen-year-old Westminster schoolboy, Hakluyt had visited his namesake cousin in the Middle Temple and ‘found lying open upon his boord certeine books of Cosmographie, with an universall Mappe’, he had experienced something like an epiphany; and in the early years of his career it looked as if the Queen and her Council had seen the point of English expansionism. Rather than shoring up the creaking economy by occasional piratical forays to steal merchandise and gold and jewels from Spanish vessels, the English could think of themselves quite differently: as a small maritime power rather like Venice, capable – by a mixture of commercial enterprise and large-sightedness – of ruling other lands and other seas. To the young Elizabethans this had seemed like a realisable vision. To the Elizabethans grown old, to the court dominated by feuds between Cecil and Essex, to a queen who could allow Ireland to fall into bloody crisis because one arrogant young man had seen her in her nightie (as we shall see in the next chapter), the world had become a smaller place. Hakluyt’s vision was not much heeded.
This did not deter him. He continued to use his compilations of geography and travellers’ tales as a spur to colonial action.8 Richard Mulcaster, whom we met earlier – first as the young man who described the elaborate ceremonies preceding Elizabeth’s coronation in London, and next as the first headmaster of the Merchant Taylors’ School and a noted grammarian – was someone who saw the point of Hakluyt. By now the High Master of St Paul’s, a post he was granted in 1596, his sixty-sixth year, Mulcaster composed a long tribute to Hakluyt in Homeric Greek verse. The Fatherland, wrote Mulcaster, owed much to Hakluyt, ‘since, for what reason does our England boast itself more than because, in addition to everything else, it becomes powerful through its fleet? Which fleet, before hidden in shadows, Hakluyt liberates, so that now everyone may know how noble is its activity. If we use it like Daedalus, we shall rise to the heights; if we are to be Icarus, then the sea will have something to swallow’.9
Hakluyt dedicated his Principall Navigations to Robert Cecil. No more forceful indication could be given of the book’s political motivation – to spur the highest authorities to encourage colonialisation. And not just to America. Hakluyt led the life of a private scholar and we know little of his day-to-day life, but one of the few acts that we can date is in mid-October 1599, when he attended a meeting in London of the directors of the East India Company. A couple of years later, in January 1601, Hakluyt met them again to tell them the best places in the subcontinent where trade was ‘to be had’ and to assemble ‘out of his notes & books divers instruccions for provisions of jewelles’.10 After the debacle of the first attempts to settle Virginia, Hakluyt patiently continued to advocate the advantages of maintaining the colony there. ‘To the southwest of our old fort in Virginia,’ he reported, in 1609, there existed, ‘a great melting of red metal, reporting the manner of working the same.’ . . . Besides, ‘our owne Indians have lately revealed either this or another rich mine of copper or gold in a towne called Ritanoe, near certain mountains lying West of Roanoac’.11
Hakluyt had deplored, in many of his writings, the cruelty of the Spanish Conquistadors towards the natives of invaded lands. He urged gentleness on the new colonists, but gentleness could – in his scale of values – have its limits. The Native Americans were, he decreed from his Suffolk parsonage, never having set foot in the new colonies, ‘great liars and dissemblers’ who could be ‘as unconstant as a weathercock’. Yet Hakluyt did not advocate eliminating the Native Americans, as the Spanish had done in the Caribbean and elsewhere. The Algonquin and other peoples ‘should be treated gently, while gentle courses may be found to serve’. If such a strategy were successful, ‘then we shall not want hammerours and rough masons now, I meane our old souldiours trained up in the Netherlands, to square and prepare them to our Preachers hands’.
Hakluyt urged the Council to finance the new colony and to encourage English settlers there. As was to happen in India and Africa, the Imperial Idea was driven forward by a peculiar blend of avarice and piety. While hoping to find gold, pearls, copper and fertile land, Hakluyt also saw magnificent opportunities for missions among the Algonquin. ‘The painfull Preachers shall be reverenced and cherished, the valiant and forward souldier respected, the diligent rewarded, the coward emboldened, the weake and the sick relieved, the mutinous suppressed, the reputation of the Christians among the Salvages preserved, our most holy faith exalted, all Paganisme and Idolatrie by little and little utterly extinguished’.12 In 1618 Hakluyt was listed as one of the ‘Adventurers to Virginia’ and bought two shares in the venture, later valued at £21.
It is interesting, in his writing to Raleigh, th
at Hakluyt saw himself as conveying Homeric status on the explorers and settlers in the Principall Navigation. He could see that by establishing interests on the other side of the Atlantic, the Elizabethans had expanded much more than their investment portfolios.
The young John Donne, in one of the most beautiful, and witty, erotic poems – ‘To his Mistris Going to Bed’ – likened the experience of seeing her naked, and ‘exploring’ her with his hands, to the explorations of the transatlantic voyagers:
License my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below,
O, my America! My new-found land
My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man’d,
My mine of precious stones, My Emperie,
How blest I am in this discovering thee!13
Donne’s poem is not describing a ‘Special Relationship’ of long-standing. It is not about warm-hearted, cosy or marital sex, or sex between two people whose bodies are familiar with one another. It is about the intense excitement of discovering new love, led on by mutual lust. ‘How blest I am in this discovering thee!’ By implication, the corollary is almost true: that the discovery of America for the English – the real discovery, which came into the Elizabethan Age, rather than the mere knowledge that America was ‘there’ – was as exciting as new love. We know what the American future held, which makes the early colonisation of Roanoke, and the far-sighted optimism of Raleigh and Hakluyt, all the more extraordinary to contemplate.
The Elizabethans Page 46