New World, Inc.

by John Butman

  At Pomeiooc, White found a well-kept village containing eighteen buildings arranged in a circular formation, with a communal fire roaring at its heart. It was encompassed by a palisade formed of tree branches ten or twelve feet high, embedded in the ground and sharpened at the tip—obviously prepared for protection against attack. Farther along, the Grenville party encountered another village, Secotan, with a wide boulevard running through its center. Seemingly more agricultural, it was bounded by fields of corn, or maize, one patch with plants ripe and ready for harvesting, another with green corn, and a third with corn just “newly sprung.”

  In addition to landscapes, White produced several portraits, including one of Wingina, a local chief, or werowance—meaning “he who is rich.” The chief looks benign, with his graying hair tied in a knot and adorned with feathers. He wears a swatch of fringed cloth around his waist, a necklace, and an impressive status symbol—a large square copper plate hanging from his neck. Other images depicted a mother and daughter, the child holding an Elizabethan doll, evidently a gift from one of the colonists; a medicine man identified as “the flyer,” who is shown hovering above the ground; and a squatting man and woman sharing a meal of hulled corn, which looks like popcorn, laid out neatly on a wooden platter. Also, White captured family gatherings, religious ceremonies, burial rituals, fishing, and farming.34

  White’s paintings were not intended as works of art, although that is what they have become. They were visual marketing designed to stimulate interest from prospective investors and settlers. It was hoped that they would reassure would-be English colonists and quell their fears about making a life in America. White went to great lengths to portray the Indian culture as friendly, charming, and even familiar. Indeed, some of the Indians are presented in poses similar to those found in the costume books then popular in Europe.35 The chief crooks his elbow to rest the back of his wrist on his hip, looking almost like a gentleman waiting for his carriage. One of the chief’s wives hooks her left foot around her right and lays her palms upon her shoulders, covering her breasts, as a shy teenager might. All in all, White presents an idyllic image of Virginia. The people are well-fed and even-tempered—they appear as if they would be delighted to welcome English settlers into their communities, offer them a home-cooked meal, and support them in their battle against the Spanish empire.

  While White painted his exquisite watercolors, Thomas Harriot prepared his report on the commercial potential of the new land.36 He searched for what he called “merchantable commodities,” and he found many: “grass silk,” sassafras, deer skins, otter fur, iron ore, copper, some silver, pearls, medicinal plants, and dyes for the clothmaking industry. Also, he looked for staple goods that could sustain a colony, year after year, and found maize, beans, peas, pumpkins, and a variety of wild animals for meat: rabbits, squirrels, bears, “wolfish dogs,” and “lions,” by which he meant panthers, pumas, and cougars.

  Above all, Harriot embarked on an ethnographical study of the Algonquian peoples. Were they people that Ralegh, his fellow investors, and Englishmen could do business with? The answer was, in a word, yes. “They, in respect of troubling our inhabiting and planting, are not to be feared,” he reported. “They shall have cause both to fear and love us that shall inhabit with them.” They dressed simply and were naked but for “loose mantles” and skirts or “aprons” made from deer skin. They lived in small villages, of typically about ten houses—although Harriot did see one with thirty. So scattered were the communities that the most powerful ruler controlled no more than eighteen villages and could amass an army of around eight hundred warriors. For all their apparent simplicity, Harriot noticed that “in those things they do, they show excellence of wit,” and he believed they could become good neighbors and trading partners.

  GRENVILLE LEFT ROANOKE in August 1585, promising to return by the following Easter with fresh supplies. He got back to England in mid-October, and presented Ralegh with, among other things, an album of White’s paintings that provided the English people with their first view of America. They had read the detailed accounts of Frobisher’s voyages. They had seen the Inuits and Indians brought back from Meta Incognita and Virginia. But they had never seen the country with their own eyes. Looking at White’s watercolors would be the closest most of them would come to doing so.

  It soon became apparent, however, that the Roanoke Colony did not match the idyllic environment portrayed by White. Grenville had brought with him two letters from Ralph Lane, one addressed to Walsingham, the other to Philip Sidney. They presented very different views of Roanoke: the opportunity and the challenge.

  To Walsingham, Lane described “Her Majesty’s new kingdom” as a “vast and huge” territory that was “by Nature fortified” and blessed with many “rare and… singular commodities.” He pledged that he and his men would rather “lose our lives” than lose possession of so “noble a kingdom.” He showered praise on Ralegh and his “most worthy endeavor” to make a “conquest” of Virginia.37 In his letter to Sidney, by contrast, Lane complained about the “unruliness” of the men and suggested that the colony was in trouble. Later, he concluded that only if England discovered “a good Mine” or a “passage to the Southsea” could her countrymen ever expect to successfully inhabit this part of the world.38 The lure of gold and Cathay continued to loom large in the minds of England’s colonists.

  One incident of unruliness involved Philip Amadas, the hotheaded twenty-one-year-old who co-led the reconnaissance mission with Barlowe the year before. He razed an Indian village to the ground after suspecting a native warrior of stealing a silver cup. This was not a solitary act of violence, and Wingina, the local chief who struck such a graceful pose in one of White’s paintings, started to lose patience with the English colonists—especially after they began to make ever greater demands for food.

  The colonists managed to survive the winter, but the situation gradually grew desperate. As supplies dwindled, they engaged in a battle that left the inhabitants of an entire Indian village, including Wingina, dead. By now, relations between the Indians and the English had slumped to a new low. The only salvation for the settlers would be fresh supplies from England. They anxiously awaited Grenville’s return, and at the beginning of June 1586, as if in answer to their prayers, they spotted a fleet on the horizon. It was not Grenville’s, as they hoped. Nor was it Spanish, as they feared. Instead, the fleet was commanded by Sir Francis Drake.

  WHILE LANE AND his fellow colonists had been busy battling to survive in the New World, England had begun battling with Spain in the first of a series of conflicts that amounted to an undeclared war. Drake was at the forefront of England’s campaign. In September 1585, he commanded a massive fleet—twenty-five ships (two supplied by the queen) and twenty-three hundred men—to wreak havoc in Spanish territories in the New World.39 It was, in effect, a terror campaign, with Drake and his men, including Martin Frobisher and Christopher Carleill, burning, spoiling, and looting Spanish settlements on their way from Santo Domingo to Hispaniola, Cartagena, and Cuba.

  Drake had then proceeded north and reached St. Augustine, the Spanish outpost in Florida, in May 1586. The English believed that the purpose of the fort there was to “keep all other nations from inhabiting any part of all that coast.”40 So Drake sacked the town, destroyed the fort, and took whatever equipment he could find that might be useful to the settlers in Roanoke. He then went in search of his countrymen.

  When he arrived at Roanoke, Drake found a colony that was much smaller than he had expected—and suffering great distress. He offered Lane one of his smaller ships, the Francis, as well as men, and enough supplies to tide the colonists over until Grenville returned. But when a storm hit the coast and scattered Drake’s fleet, the Francis disappeared over the horizon and with it the hopes of those colonists who wanted to stay in Virginia. At last, the entire company abandoned Roanoke and boarded Drake’s vessels to return home.

  Just days after the settlers sailed for England, a sm
all supply ship that Ralegh had organized arrived at Roanoke. Finding no English in residence, it turned around and headed home. Soon after, Grenville arrived, with his larger relief expedition. When he, too, found the settlement abandoned, he made an inexplicable decision. He did not disembark his entire company of three hundred to four hundred, nor did he take them all home again. Instead, he left behind just fifteen men provisioned for two years, a tiny squad of Englishmen settled on a scrap of island that Walter Ralegh—some four thousand miles away—dreamed would one day be the seat of a great empire.41

  13

  PRINCIPAL NAVIGATIONS

  WHEN THE BEDRAGGLED Roanoke colonists arrived back in England at the end of July 1586, after just one year in Ralegh’s Virginia, they found England in a state of high tension as a result of the undeclared war with Spain. Sir Francis Drake’s tormenting of Spanish colonies had provoked outrage across the Iberian Peninsula. “Monstrous robbery” is the way Mendoza—who was now stationed in Paris, having been expelled from London for plotting to overthrow Elizabeth—characterized Drake’s actions.1

  But El Draque was not the only marauding English sea captain harassing the Spanish. Elizabeth issued hundreds of letters of marque, or reprisal, permitting profit-hungry merchants to use their privately owned ships to capture Spanish vessels and seize their goods, ostensibly in recompense for losses of goods or shipping that they themselves had suffered at the hands of the Spanish or Portuguese. These privateers—or “voluntaries” as they were called at the time—often exceeded their commission and essentially waged an incessant, warlike campaign of harassment up and down the Spanish coast and across the Atlantic.2

  Soon after Elizabeth let loose this de facto navy, Philip retaliated by declaring a prohibition on any voyage to the West Indies that did not originate from the Spanish port of Seville. The ban was virtually unenforceable, and the privateering activity grew so rampant that Mendoza could scarcely keep track of it all. In November, he wrote an extensive report to Philip explaining how difficult it was to gather intelligence about what was going on in England. He had tried to “tempt” or bribe “merchants of all nations” to supply him with information, but they were too afraid. Nor could any of his spies sneak into English ports because the “arrival of a man, or even of a fly” who was not known in the neighborhood would be noticed. As Mendoza melodramatically put it, any foreigner who set foot on English soil “drags the hangman’s rope after him.”3

  For Walter Ralegh, the intensifying conflict had become all-consuming, and he was now one of the busiest men in England, scarcely able to take the time to fully assess the consequences of his failed colony. In the year that Ralph Lane and his fellow settlers had been away, Ralegh had taken on three hugely powerful positions: lord lieutenant of Cornwall, vice-admiral of the West, and lord warden of the Stannaries—the Cornish tin mines.4 The first two positions put Ralegh in charge of heading up the defense of the counties in the southwest. In effect, he was Elizabeth’s personal envoy in those regions, responsible for mobilizing soldiers and sailors in the event of an invasion. Cornwall was a place of particular vulnerability for England. It was virtually a land apart, where the Celtic language was still spoken, and where its misty moorlands and hundreds of smugglers’ coves could provide sanctuary for an invading Spanish force. But Ralegh’s offices did not just hand him new responsibilities; they also handed him new opportunities to increase his personal wealth. As vice-admiral and lord lieutenant, he could extract profits from the privateering exploits of England’s sailors. As head of the Stannaries, he could extract a slice of one of the country’s most valuable industries.

  While fulfilling these responsibilities, Ralegh seized the chance to do something that his beloved half-brother, Humphrey Gilbert, had tried and failed to do: establish a colony in Ireland. A few months before the Roanoke colonists returned, John Perrot, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, wrote to William Cecil and the rest of the Privy Council warning of the “great preparation… by the Spanish King against this realm.” In his opinion, Spain’s invading force was “likely to be bent against Munster”—and particularly its towns and cities, “which in truth are very weak.”5

  To prevent Munster falling into Spanish hands, the Privy Council, with Cecil and Walsingham taking the lead, drew up plans for attracting prospective colonists, especially from “the younger houses of English gentlemen” who might profit from the opportunity to create dynastic estates in Munster.6 As in Gilbert’s day, the Privy Council’s rationale was that an Ireland populated by loyal Englishmen would be less likely to join forces with Spain than would the hostile native population, who might be eager to “shake off the English government.”7 In June 1586, as the Roanoke colonists were preparing to abandon Virginia, Ralegh was granted letters patent giving him and his associates the title to lands in the counties of Cork and Wexford. Under the terms of the grant, no investor was to be given more than one land unit, or seignory, of 12,000 acres. But Ralegh was always the exception. By February 1587, he laid claim to 42,000 acres.8

  With these activities commanding so much of his attention, Ralegh’s commitment to Roanoke might well have faltered. It did not help that some of the returning settlers made accusations about mismanagement, overselling, and unmet expectations. Some of the gentleman travelers railed that the colonial lifestyle, under Ralph Lane’s strict military rule, was far harder than they had been led to expect. Others, who had hoped to create homes on their vast American estates, claimed they instead had been financially ruined by the experience. Thomas Harvey, for example, who had gone along as the cape merchant—the official authorized to buy and sell goods within a settlement—was left “poor and unable to pay” his obligations in England. He had invested “the greatest part of his own wealth,” and borrowed additional funds, to buy commodities for trade. In a polite understatement, he said the voyage had not fallen out “so prosperous as was expected.”9

  This disaffection risked undermining Ralegh’s position at court, where there was no shortage of people who would celebrate his misfortune. But his trusted allies assured him that Virginia remained a land of opportunity and advised him to ignore the complaints. Thomas Harriot, for one, expressed disdain for the gentlemen’s accusations. As he later wrote, some of the settlers were nothing more than gold seekers, who “had little or no care of any other thing but to pamper their bellies.” They had led sheltered, comfortable lives, having enjoyed “a nice bringing up only in cities or towns” and had “never… seen the world before.” In America, they found neither cities nor “fair houses,” nor any of “their old accustomed dainty food, nor any soft beds of down or feathers.”10

  For his part, Ralph Lane acknowledged there had been difficulties, but he argued that these were largely to do with the chosen location: Roanoke was a small island, affording little room to expand the colony, while the lack of a deep-water harbor limited access by larger ships. He was convinced that the area to the north, now Chesapeake Bay, would offer a better location for a settlement and port. He also believed that copper and even gold might be found inland and that the Pacific Ocean might not be far away.11

  Given the negatives, Ralegh might well have considered walking away from the Virginia project, but the greatest advocate of overseas enterprise reminded him why he shouldn’t. In February 1587, Richard Hakluyt’s latest publication appeared at the book stalls in St. Paul’s Churchyard. It was a reissue of Peter Martyr’s classic work Decades of the New World, which Richard Eden had translated thirty years earlier as the Mysterie prepared to launch its second voyage to Muscovy.

  In a powerful dedicatory letter, Hakluyt made an impassioned plea for Ralegh to continue the glorious enterprise: “Reveal to us the courts of China and the unknown straits which still lie hid,” Hakluyt urged. “Throw back the portals which have been closed since the world’s beginning at the dawn of time. There yet remain for you new lands, ample realms, unknown peoples.” Hakluyt insisted that these lands were just waiting “to be discovered and subdued, quickly a
nd easily.” This was something that Ralegh could achieve, especially given the support he enjoyed from Elizabeth, whom Hakluyt described as the “Empress—as even the Spaniard himself admits—of the Ocean.”

  Not afraid to speak his mind, Hakluyt reminded Ralegh that he had made a commitment to keep going—no matter what. Indeed, Ralegh had sworn, in letters to Hakluyt, “that no terrors, no personal losses or misfortunes could or would ever tear” him from “the sweet embraces” of Virginia, “that fairest of nymphs.” Such grand poesy was out of character for Hakluyt, and it reveals not only his great passion for the enterprise but also his great fear that the American initiative might be abandoned.

  As for the naysayers, Hakluyt, echoing Harriot, encouraged Ralegh to dismiss them and the disgruntled ex-planters: “Let them go where they deserve, foolish drones, mindful only of their bellies and gullets.”12

  HAKLUYT’S APPEAL DID not fall on deaf ears. In fact, by the time his book was published, Ralegh had already entered into an agreement to form a new corporation to open up the New World: the Governor and Assistants of the Cittie of Raleigh in Virginia. But if this demonstrated that Ralegh did not lack for commitment, his choice of governor showed a peculiar lack of judgment.