by John Butman
This group agreed to invest in Ralegh’s faltering Roanoke project “for the inhabiting and planting of our people in Virginia.”34 Under the terms of the agreement, Ralegh was to remain lord governor, but the syndicate was to form an alliance with the existing colonists, led by John White. It was an intriguing group that included William Sanderson, Ralegh’s business manager; John Gerard, an expert in plants and plant-based medicines who served as superintendent of the garden at William Cecil’s London residence; and Thomas Hood, a Cambridge mathematician who may well have been recruited to perform the role played by Harriot (who was no longer available, having moved to Ralegh’s estates in Ireland).35
The syndicate seems never to have launched a voyage to Roanoke, perhaps because, in February 1590, the Privy Council once again issued an order forbidding merchant ships from leaving English ports. But John White was not to be deterred. He learned that a cloth merchant, John Watts, wanted to sponsor a privateering expedition to the Caribbean. White urged Ralegh to approach Elizabeth and persuade her to grant Watts a special dispensation to transport him and a new contingent of settlers to Roanoke.
This was arranged, but things did not turn out as White had hoped. When he prepared to board one of the ships with his group of colonists, Watts—or, more likely, one of his captains—refused to transport any settlers or supplies. White was obliged to board alone with “not so much as a boy to attend upon me.”36 The fleet finally departed in March, but as White must have feared, it did not speed across toward the American coast. Instead, the ships engaged in a series of privateering escapades.
It was not until mid-August that White finally reached Virginia. He had promised his daughter that he would return as quickly as possible. In the end, it had taken him three years to get back to Roanoke. As he looked across the island, he spotted a column of smoke rising “near the place where I left our Colony in the year 1587.” This gave him “good hope” that the settlers were alive and looking forward to seeing him.37
White stepped ashore and walked to the site of the Roanoke encampment. There, he discovered, “curiously carved” into a tree trunk, the “fair Roman letters CRO.” It was, wrote White, “a secret token” that he knew the settlers would use “to signify the place” where they might be found. This discovery further heartened him, because it indicated that he might find the colonists on the neighboring island of Croatoan, “the place where Manteo was born.”
Also, it was clear to White that the move had been voluntary. The colonists had agreed to carve “a Cross ,” if their removal had been in distress. White found no such mark. He was further encouraged when he found the complete word “CROATOAN” carved into one of the posts of the fort. Although the houses had been “taken down” and abandoned, there were no signs of battle or struggle, no bones or graves, no indicators that the settlers had suffered a cruel end. But White was less delighted when he came across several chests containing his belongings, “spoiled and broken.” His books were “torn from the covers” and his armor “almost eaten through with rust.” Just as he had feared, his “goods and stuff” had been ruined.38
White resolved to go on to Croatoan, but after a series of mishaps and the onset of bad weather, he decided to make for one of the islands in the West Indies, winter over, and then return to Virginia. That plan did not work either, and White was obliged to return to England, where he arrived in October, after a dispiriting six-month expedition. After so much hopeful planning, his valiant effort to reunite with his family in Roanoke had failed.
It was to be White’s last voyage to Virginia. He would never return to Roanoke. He would never see his granddaughter again. Some years later, when he was living on Ralegh’s estate in Ireland, he sent Hakluyt a mournful account of his final Roanoke voyage.39 He wrote that he had no choice but to “leave off” his endeavor—but wished to God that his wealth had been “answerable” to his will.40
Like so many other Englishmen, White had invested everything and lost it all in his American dream.
14
THE OLD EAST AND THE NEW WEST
AS HOPES OF ever resurrecting the Roanoke Colony faded, there followed a long hiatus in England’s expeditions to the New World. It was not until 1598, five years after receiving John White’s regretful letter, that Richard Hakluyt, by now in his late forties, made a renewed effort to rekindle England’s dreams of expansion. He brought out the first volume of a revised, greatly expanded, three-volume edition of his masterwork, Principal Navigations, first published almost a decade earlier.
Hakluyt believed the massive new work was necessary because England had not fulfilled the destiny that he foresaw when the original came out in 1589: to conquer land, find new markets for cloth, and spread the gospel across America. He knew that England had been distracted from pursuing that great quest, and for a number of reasons. Many of the great merchants, who were the masterminds of the earliest overseas enterprises, had switched their attention to the lucrative business of privateering. Meanwhile, the Spanish war had hindered overseas trade, dampened domestic demand for goods and services, and created widespread unemployment. Also, the weather—including the hottest summer of the century, 1593—had wreaked havoc, and bubonic plague returned to London, decimating the population in the true sense of the word: in one year alone, one-tenth of the capital’s population died from the pestilence and other diseases.1
But the most devastating factor that brought England’s overseas expansion to a shuddering halt was the sudden loss of the first generation of New World leaders. In April 1590, just after publication of Hakluyt’s first edition of his Principal Navigations, Sir Francis Walsingham died at his London home, the former Muscovy House. This longtime champion of New World development was just fifty-eight years old. In 1591, he was followed to the grave by Thomas “Customer” Smythe, Sir Richard Grenville, and Sir Christopher Hatton. In 1594, Sir Martin Frobisher, knighted during the Armada, suffered a mortal leg wound while fighting alongside the French against the Spanish. The war then took Sir Francis Drake, who was buried at sea off the coast of Panama. And, on August 4, 1598, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the standard-bearer of the old order, died at Cecil House, his London home along the Strand.
Then, soon after Cecil’s death, came the news that proclaimed that an era had indeed come to an end: Philip II, king of Spain, at last succumbed to the terrible illness that had kept him in excruciating pain for months. Elizabeth did not mourn the passing of her former brother-in-law, onetime suitor, and longtime adversary. With his death, it was possible that peace negotiations might begin and the protracted Anglo-Spanish war might end.
FOR HAKLUYT, THIS seemed to be a time of new possibilities, an opportune moment to release the first of what would be three volumes of his expanded Principal Navigations. When all three were released, the final one appearing in 1600, the new edition constituted a monumental achievement: a two-thousand page trove of more than a hundred accounts, testimonies, and commentaries on English activities of exploration, discovery, and settlement, as well as many additional narratives on foreign initiatives.2
In the dedicatory epistle to the first volume, Hakluyt honored an old stalwart of the sea war with Spain: Charles Howard, the lord admiral who had commanded the navy against the Armada. But Hakluyt chose to dedicate the second volume to Sir Robert Cecil, son of Sir William. In doing so, he signaled his belief that England was on the cusp of a new beginning. Still only thirty-six years old, Cecil was, nevertheless, uniquely influential and, Hakluyt knew, a progressive when it came to English overseas activity. In the wake of his father’s death, people whispered about the continuation of England as “Regnum Cecilianum,” Cecil’s kingdom.3 It was striking testimony to the young man’s astonishing rise to power. Unlike Elizabeth’s other favorites at court, Cecil was physically unprepossessing: small, hunchbacked, with an awkward walk. It was said that a negligent nurse dropped him as a child, although it is more likely that he suffered from inherited scoliosis.4 Elizabeth called him “my pigmy,�
� but he had a giant intellect and she knew his value as an administrator and adviser. Not only was he clever, he was formidably conscientious. If he owed his spectacular ascent to his father—he was a privy councillor at the age of twenty-eight—he earned the queen’s affection through diligence and dedication. He had the energy and drive that was so characteristic of second sons in England at this time. His elder brother, Thomas, had inherited Lord Burghley’s title and glorious estate near Stamford in Lincolnshire, and Robert knew he would have to follow in his father’s footsteps, building his own fortune through bureaucratic brilliance.
Hakluyt may have first met Cecil in Paris in the early 1580s, when the future royal adviser studied at the Sorbonne, as part of a broad education that included time at Cambridge and Gray’s Inn, his father’s beloved institutions. There, Cecil was hosted by Sir Edward Stafford, the ambassador and Hakluyt’s employer at the time. Later, Hakluyt expressed “no small joy” that Cecil knew so much about “Indian Navigations,” referring to America as well as Asia.5 In his dedicatory epistle in Principal Navigations, Hakluyt acknowledged Cecil’s role in the book’s publication—a sure sign that the young courtier, like his father before him, was eager to lead a second generation of English expansionists.
As always, the search for new cloth markets remained one of Hakluyt’s chief concerns. “Because our chief desire is to find out ample vent of our woollen cloth, the natural commodity of this our Realm,” Hakluyt argued, “the fittest places, which in all my readings and observations I find for that purpose, are the manifold Islands of Japan, & the Northern parts of China, & the regions of the Tartars.” In winter, he reported, these lands were “as cold as Flanders,” the capital of Europe’s clothmaking industry.6
Given his great knowledge of England’s efforts to establish trade in Asia, Hakluyt was called to advise the Privy Council on “why the English Merchants may trade into the East Indies, especially to such rich kingdoms and dominions as are not subject to the king of Spain & Portugal.” He noted that although some lands were off-limits under the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas, most of the world was open to English mercantile development: in particular, “the most mighty & wealthy Empire of China” and “the rich and & innumerable islands of Malucos and the Spicerie.”7 The longing for Cathay had not subsided.
There were complications, however. Philip’s death, while promising to the cause of peace, had unleashed a new disruptive force for the English: the Dutch. In the mid-1580s, they had turned for help to Elizabeth, inviting her to become queen of their dominions. She had rejected their appeals, although she lent them military support.8 Now, the Dutch, still waging a long war of independence against Spain, saw an opportunity to assert themselves on the global stage. Sensing Spain’s waning interest in fighting them, they launched the first of a series of voyages to the Spice Islands. They sent some forty ships to trade in Asian ports in the last five years of the century.9 In 1598 alone, they dispatched twenty-two ships. When, in July 1599, one of those ships returned with a particularly spectacular haul of spices, the English merchants sat up and took notice.10 It seemed that just as the Spanish threat was abating the Dutch were making a bid to supplant Spain as the major commercial power.
Two months later, sixty English merchants met urgently to discuss the idea of a direct venture to the distant market they had long coveted: the Spice Islands of the East Indies. It was twenty-five years since Sir Francis Drake had cut a deal with the local ruler of Ternate, one of the Moluccas, but there had been no successful follow-up. Now, belatedly, London’s merchants were looking to capitalize on that earlier success. Before long, more than one hundred investors had pledged around £30,000 in support of the proposed East India venture. Even though the English economy was in the doldrums, this was the largest sum ever invested in a single English expedition, and it showed not only the enthusiasm for the venture but also the sheer quantity of liquid capital available for high-risk investment, which largely came from the spoils of war.11 More than a quarter of the capital came from merchants who had made their fortune from privateering, when profits soared as high as £200,000 per year.12
These London merchants drafted a petition to Elizabeth that sought royal support for a voyage “for the honour of our native Country and for the advancement of the trade of merchandise within this Realm of England.”13 The petition stated that “divers merchants” of England, “being informed that the Dutchmen prepare a new voyage… were stirred up with no less affection to advance the trade of their native country than the Dutch merchants were to benefit their commonwealth.” They requested to be “incorporated into a company,” since the East India trade, “being so far remote from hence, cannot be traded but in a joint and a united stock.”14
But no sooner had these merchants put together plans for a new overseas trading company than they had to put them on hold because peace negotiations with Spain had reached a sensitive stage and the Privy Council was reluctant to do anything that might cause the Spanish to walk away from the table. The merchants agreed to postpone their preparations “for this year.”15
As good as their word, the adventurers reconvened on September 23, 1600, after a hiatus that had lasted a year and did not produce a peace agreement. The directors were, for the most part, members of the new generation of venturers—men like Robert Cecil. The star of this new generation was a scion of the Judde-Smythe family: Thomas Smythe. Ten years earlier, he had led the syndicate—which included Richard Hakluyt—that acquired the rights to the City of Raleigh in Virginia. After the debacle of John White’s voyage to rescue the Roanoke colonists, Smythe occupied himself in other ways. Following the death of his father, Customer Smythe, he inherited the lucrative tax-collecting contract for the Port of London, the foundation of his wealth. Also, he joined the Levant Company—the entity formed by the merger of the Turkey Company, which his father had cofounded, and the Venice Company.
In the 1590s, Smythe became a civic figure, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, who had served as Lord Mayor. He was elected to the House of Commons in 1597, representing Aylesbury, a market town north of London, and two years later he joined the ranks of London’s governing elite, becoming an alderman in London and master of one of his livery companies, the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers.16 As the new century dawned, he was elected governor of both the Muscovy Company and the Levant Company.17 It was a stellar ascent. And there was yet another honor to come his way. In October 1600, when the general court of the new East India Company met at Founders Hall, “a proper house” along Lothbury, not far from the Guildhall, the shareholders elected Smythe as their first governor.18
Even with all this capital and commercial know-how, the merchants still faced one major obstacle: the aging queen. They needed her to sign the letters patent that would give them permission to conduct England’s business in the Far East. Eventually, on December 31, 1600, the queen duly completed the paperwork, and the East India Company, under the governorship of Thomas Smythe, came into being. The merchants were granted the right to “set forth one, or more voyages, with a convenient number of ships and pinnaces, by way of traffic and merchandise to the East-Indies.” They promised to do so “at their own adventures, costs and charges” and “for the honour of this our realm of England,” the “increase of our navigation,” and the “advancement of trade of merchandise” from England.19
Now that they had royal approval, Smythe and his fellow directors moved quickly to launch the first voyage. Hakluyt was hired to brief the senior commanders of the voyage on the best places to find pepper, cloves, and a host of other spices.20 Thus prepared, five ships, loaded with five hundred men and victuals for twenty months, and led by James Lancaster, a renowned English captain, set sail for the East Indies in February 1601.21
TWO HUNDRED AND thirteen people subscribed to the East India Company venture in 1600. But one man was notable by his absence: Sir Walter Ralegh. This was strange because, like many of the other backers, he had reaped rich rewards f
rom his bold enterprises beyond England’s shores. In 1592, he and his associates hit the jackpot when their privateering fleet captured a Portuguese vessel, Madre de Dios, which carried jewels, spices, silks, calicoes (cotton cloth), ivory, porcelain, and other luxury commodities worth around half a million pounds, the single biggest prize of that privateering era.22
But Ralegh had also suffered his share of failures. In the mid-1590s, he sailed to South America in search of El Dorado, a fabled kingdom of gold that was said to be located deep in the Amazon jungle. He did not find it. It may have been this setback, together with the gradual ending of the privateering war, that caused Ralegh to ignore the East India venture and revive his interest in the Roanoke settlement. Under the terms of his letters patent, he could still lay claim to his title as lord and governor of Virginia.
Ralegh’s patent gave him enormous power and scope in the New World. He had the right to hold and occupy the lands he discovered and to dispose of them as he saw fit. Also, he could “expulse, repel and resist” any person or group who tried to trespass on his territory in America. In other words, without his say-so, no one could settle within two hundred leagues—about six hundred miles—of any colony that he founded in the first six years of holding the patent. In effect, that gave him a huge, twelve-hundred-mile holding along the American coast from Florida in the south to modern-day Maine in the north, as well as across to what is now Kentucky to the west.