New World, Inc.
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In the end, Drake’s voyage did not take place. The threat of war loomed over England, and his services were needed closer to home. In April 1581, the same month that Drake received his knighthood, Philip had been crowned king of Portugal—adding to the title he already held as king of Spain—after defeating a rival claimant for the Portuguese throne. Drake may have “encompassed” the world by his seafaring exploits, but Philip II’s empire really did encompass the world: all the lands once divided between the two monarchies under the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas now fell within Philip’s domain. At a stroke, he became the most powerful man in history—more exalted, even, than Alexander the Great. Accordingly, Philip embraced Alexander’s motto as his own: Non Sufficit Orbis—the world is not enough.37
Now Spain became even more jealously protective of its claims to overseas territories. In the wake of Drake’s triumph, Mendoza urged Philip to order that any foreign ship entering the Spanish or Portuguese territory “should be sent to the bottom” and that “not a soul on board” should be “allowed to live.” Mendoza asserted that such aggressive action was “the only way to prevent the English and French from going to those parts to plunder.”38
Also, Mendoza tried to persuade Philip to seize English goods in Spain, but this proved unworkable because, despite the tension between the two countries, Anglo-Spanish trade was booming. In February 1582, the merchants of the Spanish Company told Mendoza they had “never been received so well in Spain as during the last eighteen months.” This surge in trade with the English, Mendoza wrote, had “given rise to an impression” among Spain’s home traders that business with England was essential to their commercial success. This, in turn, had the effect of swelling the “pride and insolence” of the English.39
As evidence for this, Mendoza pointed to preparations for yet another English expedition. Through his spy network, he learned that a fleet of ships was to sail for the Moluccas. And he took the fact that the ships were “being manned with a large number of all sorts of artificers,” such as carpenters and bricklayers, as “an indication of their intention to colonise.”40
Mendoza’s information was accurate. Preparations for an expedition to the Spice Islands were underway. The new venture was backed by many of the courtiers and merchants who had supported Drake, as well as some of the leading merchants of the Muscovy Company—notably George Barne. Drake himself put six hundred pounds into the venture. Initially, it was to be led by Martin Frobisher, who was busily restoring his reputation. In the end, however, Edward Fenton, who had been second-in-command on Frobisher’s third voyage, was given the task of leading the fleet.
In May 1582, Fenton departed England, intending to sail to the Spice Islands via Brazil and Africa’s Cape of Good Hope—the traditional route of Portuguese traders. His crew included John Drake, Francis’s cousin, as well as several merchants. As the fleet approached Africa, Fenton declared that he wanted to occupy and fortify St. Helena, an island in the mid-Atlantic, where he would be crowned king and where they would lie in wait for the Portuguese fleet carrying riches from Brazil.41 Was he thinking of Drake’s coronation in Nova Albion? Fenton, after all, had been set to become the first leader of an English colony in the New World—until the prefabricated building that was to shelter the settlers was lost in an Arctic storm.
But in the end Fenton’s ships did not stop at St. Helena. Instead, they continued on to South America, where the crew broke into squabbling factions. John Drake sailed away with his followers, never to be seen again in England. Fenton ran into Spanish warships guarding the entrance to the Magellan Strait to prevent another English passage. He turned around, returned home, and wrote to William Cecil that he was “sorry to advertise… the bad success of ‘our voyage.’” He blamed contrary winds and disagreements among his crew; but mostly, he said, the failure was caused by Spain. His “honest proceedings” had all been “overthrown” by the King of Spain. “Such wrongs,” he said, were “not to be put up with.”42
As the English pursued efforts to build on Drake’s success, Mendoza did what he could to learn the exact details of the great circumnavigation, dispatching spies to Plymouth with instructions “to discover the particulars from the men who went on the voyage.”43 He managed to uncover two of Drake’s secrets: one, that Tierra del Fuego “was not [a] continent but only very large islands” with “open sea” beyond them; and two, that the English had struck a deal with the sultan of Ternate.44
He did not, however, uncover the third secret, of Drake’s landing at Nova Albion. This, it seems, was the most closely guarded secret of all, the one the English most wanted to keep from the Spanish: the idea that a New England could be established in America.
11
TO HEAVEN BY SEA
SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT may have been temporarily silenced, but he had not given up. In 1583, as Fenton was limping home, his dreams of emulating the great Sir Francis Drake in tatters, Gilbert was in Cawsand Bay, a protected haven near the entrance to Plymouth harbor, readying a fleet for his most ambitious venture of all—one that would establish a network of great colonies in northern America. Gilbert would not be crowned, as Drake had claimed to be in Nova Albion, nor would he be proclaimed king, as Fenton had hoped to be. But he would be the next best thing, a governor with power over a vast territory, ruling in the name of Queen Elizabeth.
Gilbert still held the letters patent, issued by Elizabeth in 1578, which gave him license to “discover, search and find out” new territories, and he was determined to do just that before the patent expired in 1584. He drafted a statement that amounted to a founding constitution for his imagined American domain. Gilbert and his wife, Anne, along with their sons and daughters, would hold dynastic and commercial rights to the lands. All merchants who did business in regions he controlled would have to pay him hefty customs duties on their trading activities.1
The colony would not be entirely nostalgic and feudal, however. Indeed, it would have a strikingly forward-looking and democratic feature that seems remarkably modern. As governor, Gilbert would be advised by a group of colonists who would be “chosen by the consent of the people”—that is, elected. This was a radical departure from the Privy Council, whose members were chosen on the basis of social status and royal favoritism.2
Gilbert’s imperial vision was going to be costly to realize, but his finances were in a parlous state after his last abortive enterprise to “annoy” the king of Spain. In his first effort to capitalize on his royal patent, he had frittered away his wife’s inheritance and, as he confided to Walsingham, had been forced to sell her “clothes from her back.” Also, he had suffered enduring damage to his reputation, complaining he was “subject to daily arrests, executions, and outlawries.”3
But by the terms of his license, Gilbert held an incredibly desirable asset that was potentially more valuable than any treasure or trade. That asset was land. In England, land was precious because it was scarce. In the New World, land was unknowably plentiful, but it was no less valuable for all that. For the younger sons of great families, such as Sir Humphrey, who could not inherit the family estate, the abundance of land offered an opportunity to claim an exalted place in the world that was denied them in England.
The letters patent did not set territorial limits, and given that Dee had confirmed England’s right to empire, Gilbert could consider all of America as his own property, and he did just that. In May 1582, he attracted his first major investor—Philip Sidney, Walsingham’s son-in-law and grandson of John Dudley. Gilbert, rather arbitrarily it would seem, assigned Sidney 3 million acres, an area about the size of Yorkshire or Jamaica.4
Then, Gilbert managed to attract another set of investors who pictured a colony devoted to a very different purpose: a haven for Catholics. In mid-July, Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, reported that Walsingham had “secretly” approached two “Catholic gentlemen” about Gilbert’s venture.5 Almost certainly, these two gentlemen were Sir George Peckham and Sir Thomas Ger
rard. The two men bought into the arrangement, committing unspecified sums of money in Gilbert’s expedition.6
Given Gilbert’s track record, particularly his ferocious slaying of Catholics in Ireland, his willingness to deal with Catholic investors seems out of character. On the other hand, Gilbert knew Peckham: they had been co-investors in a planned expedition through the Magellan Strait in the mid-1570s, and Peckham had some involvement in Gilbert’s 1578 venture.7 Also, through Peckham, Gilbert may have known Gerrard, since Peckham’s daughter married Gerrard’s son. Gerrard, who also hailed from a renowned Catholic family, had previously flirted with the idea of overseas colonization. In March 1570, he had petitioned Elizabeth for rights to develop a part of the Ards peninsula in Ireland that eventually went to Sir Thomas Smith.8
According to Mendoza, Peckham and Gerrard were “spendthrift gentlemen,” facing ruin.9 This may have been another reason that the prospect of a great deal of land, along with the freedom to act on that land as they pleased, was attractive to them. Certainly, life was not easy for Catholics in England at this time. Although Peckham was a moderate Catholic, and was knighted by Elizabeth in the year that she was excommunicated by the Pope, he had, by 1580, become more outspoken, even doing a stint in prison for sheltering the renowned Jesuit Edmund Campion, who had secretly come to England.10 Gerrard had also spent some time in prison for his participation in a plot to free Mary, Queen of Scots, who was living in England under a kind of house arrest having long before fled her homeland after a Protestant coup d’état.11
When Elizabeth had first come to the throne, she endeavored to take a tolerant approach in religious matters—a via media, or middle way. She herself was Protestant, but she did not abandon the crucifix in her chapel, despite opposition from her advisers.12 After 1570, when the Pope excommunicated her, Elizabeth became the target of many Catholic plots, and she got much tougher on Catholic practices. There were no persecutions or bloodlettings in England to rival the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in Paris in 1572, but there were new prohibitions and tougher laws. In 1581, the English Parliament passed a bill authorizing a fine of twenty pounds per month to be levied on people who refused to attend English church services—a hefty amount and certainly enough, over time, to ruin a Catholic of modest means.13
Elizabeth and her councillors had little interest in expelling Catholic recusants, as they were called. Instead, they preferred to keep them at home, where they could monitor their movements, and, through fines, reduce their ability to organize any action of their own. If Catholics were ousted or banished from the country, so the reasoning went, they might join forces with fellow Catholics in France or Spain, plan an invasion, coup, or assassination, or further torment Protestant groups in those countries.
However, the idea of sending Catholics far from England—to a distant, unpopulated place such as America—was an altogether more appealing proposition. In the New World, they would not pose a serious threat and they could follow their religion without being seen to defy the practices of the English church. Walsingham seems to have come to the conclusion that the time was right for contemplating a colony of Catholics, and that is probably why he helped smooth the path for a deal between Gilbert, Peckham, and Gerrard.
Gilbert granted the two men 1.5 million acres of land, a massive estate, about the size of the state of Connecticut or the county of Devon. As an extra incentive, he threw some islands into the deal—although they were unidentified, undiscovered, and may not have actually existed. Also he granted the Catholic colonists the freedom to trade without regulation. In return, Gilbert was to receive rental income, customs duties, and two-fifths of any gold and silver they discovered on their land. As the negotiations progressed, Gilbert doubled the land grant to 3 million acres in exchange for the Catholic colonists’ pledge to supply armed ships and men for a colonial militia. Then, he granted a further 1.5 million acres to Peckham and his son, near a scoop of water that John Dee had marked on his map as Dee River, and is now known as Narragansett Bay.14
Peckham and Gerrard, perhaps concerned about Gilbert’s past violence toward Catholics, sought some assurances from Walsingham about the details of the grant.15 They wanted guarantees that, when the time came, their colonists, including recusants, would be permitted to leave England and travel to the new territories, as Gilbert had promised them. In return, they agreed that their colonists would not leave America, once there, and travel to any other foreign realm. Nor would they participate in any treacherous act that might cause a breach between the queen and “any other Prince.” Also, they promised that one in ten of their colonists would be a person unable to “maintain themselves in England.” This would help England with the problem of “idle persons.”
According to Mendoza, Elizabeth accepted the terms and gave Peckham and Gerrard a “patent under the Great Seal of England to settle in Florida”—as the entire east coast of America was known. But Peckham and Gerrard’s vision did not seem to inspire others, and the two men struggled to generate support from fellow Catholics. They were not helped by Mendoza, who fought a kind of rearguard action to scuttle the plan. He instructed Catholic clergymen to warn prospective colonists that the lands in the New World belonged to Spain, and if they dared travel there, “they would immediately have their throats cut.”16
The specter of Spanish retaliation on American colonists could prove disastrous to the undertaking, so Peckham sought to confirm that England had the necessary sovereignty, turning to the expert who knew most about it: John Dee. Peckham asked Dee if their proposed estate would constitute an encroachment on Spanish rights, contrary to the Treaty of Tordesillas. Dee assured him that the lands did not fall within Spain’s domain. Peckham rewarded Dee with five thousand acres in the New World, a tiny sliver of his millions.17
EVEN WITH FINANCIAL support from Sidney, Peckham, and Gerrard, Gilbert needed to attract a broader group of investors to raise the full amount of capital required to found a colony in the New World. To do this, he embarked on a far-reaching marketing campaign. He had seen the value of promotional literature when his A Discourse of a Discovery of a New Passage to Catai was published to help promote Frobisher’s voyages. So when a young former Oxford don named Richard Hakluyt stepped forward, perhaps on Walsingham’s recommendation, and suggested he might write just such a pamphlet, Gilbert gratefully accepted the offer.18
Hakluyt was beginning to establish a reputation as a powerful advocate of English overseas endeavor. He first came to public notice with the appearance of a report, completed in 1580, that made a compelling case for England’s taking possession of the Strait of Magellan—although no such audacious move took place. After gathering information from John Winter, Francis Drake’s second-in-command on the voyage around the world, Hakluyt wrote that “the Strait of Magellan is the gate of entry into the treasure of both the East and the West Indies, and whosoever is Lord of this Strait may account himself Lord also of the West Indies.”19
But Hakluyt had been in the thrall of travelers’ tales, voyages of discovery, and explorers since he was a schoolboy. When he was about sixteen, he paid a visit to his cousin, also named Richard. The elder Hakluyt was a lawyer, but his real passion was for maps and geography. There, lying on the table in his study, were “certain bookes of cosmography with an universal map,” Hakluyt remembered, years later. Seeing his young cousin’s interest, the elder Hakluyt picked up his “wand” and pointed out the “seas, gulfs, bays, straits, capes, rivers, empires, kingdoms, dukedoms, and territories of each part.” He identified the commodities available in each place, the needs of the people there, and talked about the “traffic and intercourse of merchants” supplying them.20
All of this made such an impression on the young Richard that he resolved to study geography when he went on to university. Indeed, soon after, Hakluyt went up to Oxford, where he read widely on the subject and, thanks to scholarships from two livery companies—the Skinners and the Clothworkers—gained an understanding of merchants and th
e commercial impulse. After taking his master of arts degree, he embarked on a series of lectures, presenting to his audiences a variety of “Maps, Globes, Spheres, and other instruments of this Art,” much to the “singular pleasure, and general contentment” of his listeners.21
Now, ahead of Gilbert’s intended voyage, Hakluyt began putting together a compendium of narratives, maps, and other information that traced the story of English exploration. Published in May 1582 as Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America and the Islands Adjacent, it was dedicated to Philip Sidney.22 But if Hakluyt’s immediate goal was to promote Gilbert’s venture, his larger goal was to ignite a whole new spirit of adventure for overseas enterprise. He marveled “not a little” that, since the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, the Spanish and Portuguese had accomplished “great conquests and plantings” in the New World. By contrast, during the same period, “we of England” had not had “the grace to set fast footing in such fertile and temperate places.” This was puzzling to Hakluyt and, in his eyes, a national failing.23
He was an optimist, however, and believed that the time was right for England to take her fair share in those parts of America and other regions that were “as yet undiscovered.” He argued that the purported motive of the Spaniards and the Portuguese for their ventures of exploration and colonization—to convert and bring salvation to the heathens—had been exposed for what it was: a false and cynical cover-up for their real intentions. All the Spanish and Portuguese really wanted, Hakluyt proclaimed, was “the goods and riches” of the New World.
Hakluyt asserted England’s historical right, based on John Cabot’s claim of 1497, to inhabit the vast American territory from modern-day Florida to 67 degrees north (roughly the northern border of modern Canada). He argued that England’s need to expand had become an urgent one because the prisons were full to bursting, and such “superfluous people” could be sent to inhabit the “temperate and fertile parts of America.”24 He exhorted that the effort would take grit and determination—and, frankly, a change of attitude. “If there were in us that desire to advance the honor of our country which ought to be in every good man,” he wrote, the English would have long ago taken advantage “of those lands which, of equity and right, appertain to us.”25