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This had the potential to become an enormous imperial domain; but, to claim it, Ralegh had to prove that the Roanoke Colony was still thriving. If, on the other hand, the colonists were dead, his patent would have no value. As it happens, there were plenty of experts who believed the Roanoke colonists were alive and well, even if White had not found them at their original location. In 1597, John Gerard, the herbalist and Roanoke investor, maintained that there was every reason to think that English people were still living in Virginia unless “untimely death by murdering, or pestilence, corrupt air, bloody fluxes, or some other mortal sickness” had finished them off.23
Hakluyt, Ralegh’s old friend, also asserted that the Roanoke settlers were still alive “for ought we know.”24 And he again expressed his great enthusiasm for America. “There is under our noses the great & ample country of Virginia,” he wrote, “the inland whereof is found of late to be so sweet and wholesome a clime, so rich and abundant in silver mines, so apt and capable of all commodities, which Italy, Spain, and France can afford.” Hakluyt expressed the hope that Elizabeth would, after securing “a good & godly peace,” transport “one or two thousand people” to Virginia, since he knew others who would “willingly at their own charges become Adventurers in good numbers with their bodies and goods.” If Elizabeth did this, she would “by God’s assistance, in short space, work many great and unlooked for effects, increase her dominions, enrich her coffers, and reduce many Pagans to the faith of Christ.”25
With such widespread belief in the survival of the Roanoke colonists, Ralegh revived his interest in America. Starting in 1600, he dispatched three expeditions to Virginia in as many years in an effort to make contact with them. In the final expedition, undertaken in 1602, Ralegh’s men saw nothing of the settlers, although they had been prevented from landing at Roanoke by stormy weather. All they brought home was a cargo of herbs and flora, including the leaves and bark of the tree that was becoming extremely fashionable throughout Europe: sassafras.26
IN MARCH 1602, as Ralegh contemplated the fate of his colonists, a young, enterprising man emerged whose goal—implicit if not explicit—seems to have been to test Ralegh’s claim to Virginia. Bartholomew Gosnold, aged about thirty, came from an old Suffolk family of well-to-do landed gentry with connections to some of the pioneers of the New World ventures. His father, a lawyer, had been an adviser to Lady Dorothy Stafford, a friend to the queen and mother of Edward Stafford, who had been Hakluyt’s employer in Paris.
Educated at Cambridge and, like Ralegh, at the Middle Temple, Gosnold turned his hand to privateering, and made £1,625—a significant sum—on one adventure in the late 1590s. Also, he gained further wealth from his marriage to Mary Golding, a granddaughter of Sir Andrew Judde, of Mysterie fame. Through marriage, Gosnold was related to George Barne, another Mysterie investor and former Lord Mayor of London, and thus to Barne’s nephew, Christopher Carleill, who had tried unsuccessfully to secure Humphrey Gilbert’s patent.27
The organizational structure and financial backing of Gosnold’s enterprise remain murky. No joint stock company was established for the voyage, nor did the queen involve herself. It is likely that Gosnold attracted support from his remarkable network of influential friends and relations and invested some of the money he had won in prizes during the privateering war. Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton and Shakespeare’s sponsor, may have been a contributor to, or at least an important inspiration for, Gosnold. A later chronicler wrote that “he largely contributed to the furnishing out of a ship to be commanded by Captain Bartholomew Gosnold.”28
The venture, undertaken without Ralegh’s knowledge, seems to have been an all-purpose reconnaissance, settlement, and commercial mission: to explore the largely unknown northern coast, look for a passage to China, evaluate the commercial prospects, find a suitable location for a trading post, leave some settlers behind there, and collect a variety of commodities to bring back to England—in particular, the sassafras tree, whose leaves and bark were becoming renowned throughout Europe for their medicinal properties.
Gosnold set his sights on the area well north of Ralegh’s Roanoke—a region then known as Norumbega, essentially what is now New England. In choosing this destination, almost completely unexplored by the English at this time, Gosnold may have been following the star of Giovanni de Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer who led the first comprehensive investigation of the northern American coast in 1524.
Verrazzano was not only an accomplished mariner, he was also a skilled chronicler. Nearly eighty years after his voyage, his celebrated account remained the only substantive report on the north stretch of American coast, from what is now Cape Fear in North Carolina all the way north to New York harbor (the Verrazano Narrows and the bridge that spans them are named after him) and beyond to the great bays of the Gulf of Maine. He reached as far north as the “land that in times past was discovered by the Britons, which is in fifty degrees”—a reference to John Cabot and his claim to Newfoundland, whose northern extent falls along 51 degrees north latitude.
Verrazzano made the area sound even more alluring than Thomas Harriot had done with his portrait of Virginia. The people were “courteous and gentle,” Verrazzano wrote, adding that the place was shaded with trees as “delectable to behold as is possible to imagine,” with “good and wholesome air,” and a profusion of flowers. In the most elegiac passage of the account, Verrazzano described one of their stopping places—the bay now known as Narragansett in the state of Rhode Island. It was “very fertile and beautiful, full of tall spreading trees” and blessed with a harbor in which “any large fleet could ride safely… without fear of tempest or other dangers.” Verrazzano and his mariners took sanctuary there from the rough seas, christening the place Refugio.29
Gosnold may have been alerted to Verrazzano’s travels by Richard Hakluyt, who lived in the village of Wetheringsett, not far from the Gosnold residence, and who included the Verrazzano voyage in his Principal Navigations. Certainly Gosnold knew about Verrazzano’s account. In a letter to his father, Anthony, he mentioned Verrazzano’s narrative in Hakluyt’s work, noting that it contained useful information about America.30
GOSNOLD, COMMANDING A single ship, the Concord, and thirty-two men, including mariners, adventurers, and twelve who had committed to staying on as settlers, set sail from Falmouth on March 26, 1602.31 The Concord made land early on the morning of May 14, somewhere along the middle coast of Maine. It is not clear if Gosnold was intentionally trying to avoid infringing Ralegh’s rights, but he had in fact landed beyond the two-hundred-league perimeter of the Roanoke domain.
Gosnold was the first Englishman to reach those shores on an expedition of discovery and trade, but he was hardly the first European to do so. Soon after arriving, a group of Indians appeared in a shallop, a small, shallow-draft boat rigged with mast and sail—clearly not a native vessel. They approached the Concord, hoving themselves boldly aboard. In the shallop, the English could see an iron grapple and a large copper kettle. Even more striking, one of the Indians was dressed in European attire: a waistcoat, breeches, hose, shoes, and a hat.
The Indians could speak “divers Christian words”—some in English, some in other languages. Gosnold’s men delighted in the Indians’ ability to speak and mimic. One of them tossed out the playful sentence “How now sirrah, are you so saucy with my Tobacco?” to an Indian, who immediately shot back the entire sentence, as if he had long been a “scholar in the language.” Thanks to the Indians’ facility with language, the English were able to learn that the foreign-made goods, such as the waistcoat, had been acquired through trade with “Basks”—that is, people of the Basque region at the border between France and Spain who had long frequented the waters around Newfoundland.32 The English probably did not realize how extensive the Indian-European trading network was at the time. Indians acted as middlemen in a sophisticated trading economy that linked the American hinterland, and its great supply of furs and timber, with the coast, and its fish and str
eam of exotic commodities coming from Europe.33
The Gosnold party caught so many cod, herring, and mackerel that John Brereton, the official scribe of the voyage, became “persuaded that in the months of March, April, and May, there is upon this coast, better fishing, and in as great plenty, as in Newfoundland.” Compared to the “far off” Newfoundland banks, where waters were forty or fifty fathoms, the fishing grounds lay close to shore and in waters just seven fathoms (forty-two feet) deep.34
Sailing south, the Concord and her crew, always on the lookout for trading opportunities, continued engaging with Indians. They partook of tobacco, a variety they found more pleasant than that available in England, though they did not seem to consider it as a marketable commodity. In exchange for deer skins and the furs of beaver, marten, otter, and wildcat, they traded the small objects they had brought for the purpose: knives, mirrors, bells, and beads. As other Europeans had learned, the Indians prized most what they did not have—manufactured goods of glass and metal. Particularly popular were points, little tubes of tin used to finish the end of a strip of cloth or leather, like the aglet encasing the tip of a modern shoelace.35 Points were cheap to buy in England and took up little space in the ship’s hold, and the differential in value between a small quantity of points and an animal pelt was substantial.
Coasting still farther southward, the Concord lost sight of land for some days until Gosnold’s men spotted a headland they first took to be an island because it was separated from the mainland by a “shole-hope”—a shallow haven—and a capacious sound. There, they caught so many fish that they named the land Cape Cod.
They traveled on until they hailed a group of “fair isles.” They named one of these islands Martha’s Vineyard, possibly in honor of Gosnold’s mother-in-law, Martha Golding. In this area, they decided to establish their trading post and settlement, choosing another of these islands, which they named Elizabeth’s Isle (probably the modern-day Cuttyhunk). The island was uninhabited, and offered a good anchorage, a source of fresh water, easy access to the mainland, rich fishing, and plenty of crabs and shellfish.
Gosnold and his crew set about their operations, constructing a house and rudimentary fort. They planted wheat, barley, oats, and peas in the “fat and lusty soil,” and then watched, amazed, as the tendrils sprang up nine inches in two weeks. Every so often, Indians of the Micmac tribe came to visit and trade with them. They noticed that these visitors possessed seemingly large amounts of copper, which was used to create jewelry, arrowheads, and eating utensils, including drinking cups and plates. Gosnold wondered if copper mines were close to the island. The Indians seemed to confirm this, although the Englishmen did not go in search of them.36
From this site, Gosnold’s men applied themselves to the gathering of sassafras. The tree—which grows to between twenty and forty feet in height, and has broad leaves and cinnamon-colored berries—was plentiful on the island. In this work, which continued over a number of days, the Indians sometimes lent a hand. They also dined with the English, drinking beer and eating dried codfish. They did not, however, fancy the strong mustard their hosts used to improve the taste of the fish. “It was a sport to behold their faces made being bitten therewith,” wrote one of Gosnold’s men.37
By the middle of June, Gosnold’s crew had packed the hold of the Concord with sassafras, cedar logs, furs, and skins—the commodities they considered most valuable in the European markets. Gosnold hoped this would be the first of many consignments from his new trading post in Norumbega. But when it came to depart, the men who had signed up to stay behind to manage the trading post began to have second thoughts. Perhaps the fear that they would be left stranded, like the colonists at Roanoke, weighed on their minds. Also, as Gosnold realized, there were not sufficient supplies if the settlers were to survive the six months of winter. In the end, Gosnold’s little trading post was abandoned and the entire party sailed home, arriving in Exmouth in late July after a brisk five-week passage.38
IN AUGUST, RALEGH caught wind of Gosnold’s voyage, and he was furious at what he saw as an infringement of his American rights. He had traveled to the port town of Weymouth, on the southwest coast, not far from Exmouth, where Gosnold had put in with the Concord. He was planning to meet with Samuel Mace, who had just returned from his voyage to southern Virginia in search of the Roanoke colonists and whose ship’s hold was also full of sassafras. While there, Ralegh appears to have bumped into Bartholomew Gilbert (no relation of Sir Humphrey), who was Gosnold’s second-in-command and who may have told him about the sassafras brought in from Norumbega.39
Outraged by this breach of his monopoly, Ralegh had the Concord detained, tried to track down the sassafras that had already been unloaded, and fired off an urgent message to Robert Cecil asking him to secure a letter of seizure from the lord admiral because his patent stated “that all ships & goods are confiscate that shall trade” in America without his license. He contended that sassafras was selling for as much as twenty shillings a pound, and that the Gosnold shipment would flood the market, suppress prices, and reduce his profits. Before discovering Gosnold’s sassafras, Ralegh had calculated that his own sassafras would be worth up to ten times its cost—such was the demand.40
Sassafras was the plant of the moment. There was a vast apothecary of decoctions, lineaments, and herbal admixtures made from the sassafras tree that was administered as a cure for almost everything. With the added cachet of the exotic, a New World remedy favored by Indians, it became widely accepted as a cure-all after its inclusion in a book, published in English in 1577, called Joyfull Newes out of the newe Founde Worlde wherein is declared the rare and singular vertues of diverse and sundrie hearbes, trees, oyles, plants and stones. This tome, written by Nicholas Monardes, a Spanish physician, and translated into English by John Frampton, a Bristol merchant, revealed how sassafras bark from Florida could “dissolve obstructions in the body” and thereby “engender good humors.”41 In his Discourse of Western Planting of 1584, Hakluyt mentioned sassafras as a promising commodity, while Thomas Harriot, in his Brief and True Report of the Newfound Land of Virginia, reported that the Indians called sassafras Winauk and used it “for the cure of diseases.”42 Over the years, people came to rely on sassafras as a cure for stomach ache, coughs and colds, diarrhea, nosebleeds, indigestion, scurvy, syphilis, and as a way to increase menstrual flow and thus encourage pregnancy.43
These medicinal properties made sassafras a reliably marketable commodity. But if there was a surfeit of sassafras for sale, then its price, and possibly its allure, would fall. It is not clear how the dispute resolved itself. Ralegh may have been able to impound some of Gosnold’s shipment and sell it on his own behalf. Also, he seems to have made arrangements with a German merchant to export an unspecified amount for sale across Europe. This was an early instance of the re-export of English New World goods to the European market.44
In any case, Ralegh took no further punitive action against Bartholomew Gosnold. In fact, they evidently came to an amicable solution to the patent infringement, since Brereton’s published account of the voyage was subsequently dedicated to Ralegh. In capital letters, the subtitle assures the reader that the voyage to northern Virginia had been undertaken “by the permission of the honourable knight, Sir Walter Ralegh.”
As the first published narrative of an English voyage to the northern part of America since Verrazzano’s account, Brereton’s little book A Briefe and True Relation of the Discoverie of the North Part of Virginia proved a popular hit. Brereton’s prose, while not as lyrical as Verrazzano’s or as rigorous as Harriot’s, painted a pleasing picture of this virtually unknown stretch of territory, making it sound ideal for a colony: the friendly Indians, lovely trees, copious fruits and plants, abundant fish—all this, and the “goodness of the Climate,” which was neither as hot as that of the West Indies nor as cold as that of Newfoundland. “We found our health and strength all the while we remained there,” Brereton wrote. Far from suffering any disease o
r sickness, the adventurers returned home “much fatter and in better health than when we went out of England.”45
GOSNOLD’S VOYAGE SPARKED new interest in the north of America, and before long, another expedition was dispatched, paid for by Bristol merchants who had been advised by Richard Hakluyt. But this venture was overshadowed by the death of Elizabeth I on March 24, 1603. The last of the Tudors, she was the first queen of America, giving her name to Virginia, claiming sovereignty over Nova Albion.
Always, she had been wary of committing herself too visibly to the cause of empire. But she had found discreet ways to fund imperial dreamers such as Walter Ralegh—diverting customs revenues from the cloth and mining industries and crown revenues from landed estates. And in the wake of the victory over the Armada, she had gladly posed with her possessive hand stretched wide over the American continent depicted on a globe.
With Elizabeth’s passing, the champions of overseas expansion lost one of their staunchest, if sometimes mercurial, supporters. Nobody knew whether her successor would continue her imperial project. But James I, the Protestant son of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, was known to be keen to strike a peace deal with Spain. And so for one person, the omens were not good: Sir Walter Ralegh.
If Ralegh had been one of Elizabeth’s greatest favorites, he was one of the new monarch’s least. Ralegh’s was the embodiment of an archaic, anti-Spanish way of doing things—the last of the old generation of merchants and courtiers who had defined themselves by their virulent opposition to the Iberian superpower. Now, the times were changing, and James did everything he could to marginalize the lord and governor of Virginia.
Ralegh stoically endured one ignominy after another. He was replaced as Captain of the Guard, stripped of his monopoly in the wine trade, and booted out of Durham House, his beloved residence of twenty years. Then, while joining James in Windsor for a hunt—in an effort to maintain his relationship with the crown—he was detained for questioning. A few days later, he was sent to the Tower, and eventually found guilty of involvement in a couple of intertwining plots against the king, including a scheme to replace him with Arbella Stuart, a great-great-granddaughter of Henry VII.46