by John Butman
Ralegh had already lost almost everything. With this imprisonment, he forfeited perhaps his most valuable asset of all: his claim to America. Under the terms of the original letters patent, the king could withdraw Ralegh’s title to the lands of Virginia if he committed “any act of unjust or unlawfull hostility.”47 His conviction for high treason meant that as long as he was in prison he would be denied the right to his lands in Virginia. Also, it meant that for the first time in more than a quarter century America was up for grabs.
PART III
COMMONWEALTH 1604–1621
15
TWO VIRGINIAS
IN MAY 1604, eleven government officials representing England and Spain convened at the resplendent Denmark House, a short boat ride up the Thames from the Tower, where Ralegh now spent his days. The purpose of the conference was to negotiate peace between the two countries, after almost two decades of undeclared war.
The move toward negotiation had begun soon after James took the throne, when a Spanish diplomat was sent to congratulate the new king. He found, perhaps to his surprise, that his mission was looked upon with favor at the English court and that he was “most amicably received.” Spanish diplomats were accustomed to much worse treatment, as was the case when Elizabeth kept Bernardino de Mendoza cooling his heels during the dispute over Drake’s treasure haul in the early 1580s. Pretty quickly, one thing led to another, and the Spanish and English diplomats agreed that there “was no reason why they should have an Enmity at one another” and that negotiations should begin.1
Denmark House, named after Anne of Denmark, James’s queen consort, had been specially prepared for the event, the walls hung with tapestries and greenery arranged before the windows. A fine carpet, possibly from Henry VIII’s grand collection, adorned the long table where the dignitaries faced each other, dressed in somber gowns with ruffed collars, all sporting tidily trimmed beards.2 The English delegation included Charles Howard, the Lord High Admiral, Thomas Sackville, the Earl of Dorset, and Robert Cecil.3 After eighteen sessions, the delegates came to terms, and spelled them out in a document entitled A Treaty of perpetual Peace and Alliance between Philip III King of Spain, and the Archduke and Archduchess Albert and Isabella on the one side, and James I King of England on the other side. Made in the Year 1604.
The breakthrough was testimony to the fresh thinking of the two kings. James had been keen to bring an end to the debilitating and unnecessary conflict with Spain and come to a peace. Likewise, the young King Philip III of Spain, twenty-six years old and nearly five years into his reign, was just as ready to bring the war to an end. Since 1555, his country had been waging war almost continuously, fighting battles on land and sea in the Narrow Seas, the Mediterranean, France, the Netherlands, Africa, and on the Iberian Peninsula—and dealing with the constant harassment of English privateers. Only in one six-month period, from February to September 1577, had Spain not been prosecuting a war or conflict somewhere in the world.4
“Know all and everyone,” the treaty announced, “that after a long and most cruel ravage of wars, by which Christendom has for many years been miserably afflicted,” God “has powerfully extinguished the raging flame” of conflict. With the treaty, “It was and is concluded, settled and agreed, that from this day forward there be a good, sincere, true, firm and perfect friendship and confederacy, and perpetual peace” and that it should be in force “by land as by sea and fresh water.”5
The delegates signed the document on August 18, 1604, and its thirty-six articles spelled out what is essentially a free-trade agreement. People of both kingdoms would be free to “go to, enter, sail into, import or export, buy and sell merchandise” everywhere, without any need for a license or passport.6 No letters of marque, essentially a license for privateering, would be issued henceforward. All past infringements would be overlooked, and no party would seek restitution of any goods or valuables lost or taken to date.
The Treaty of London, as it came to be known, seemed to swing open the gates to long-closed ports and shipping lanes. However, there was something missing from the agreement: there was no mention of the enormous, largely overlapping, territories that the Spanish referred to as Florida and that the English called Virginia. In other words, the treaty avoided the tricky, unresolved, and potentially contentious issue of who had the rights to claim, inhabit, and develop America. As it later transpired, Spain’s negotiators had been reluctant to raise the issue because they fully believed that England’s Roanoke colonists were alive and living somewhere in Virginia and that, as they put it, the English had been “in peaceful possession” of the land “for more than thirty years.”7
Meanwhile, in the Tower of London, the man who had been involved in almost all of England’s New World initiatives for a period of twenty years—from settlement at Roanoke to gold-seeking in Guiana to colonization in Ireland to trafficking in sassafras in northern Virginia—tried to adjust to life in prison. Thanks to the relative freedom that gentlemen with no fixed term were afforded there, Ralegh kept busy, displaying his many talents as a Renaissance man. He built a smelting furnace, grew and cured tobacco, investigated methods for distilling fresh water from salt. Above all, he wrote and wrote, sitting down at his desk in the morning to make entries in his diary, compose poetry, and pen his monumental History of the World. Indeed, he became a kind of celebrity tourist attraction. Passersby sometimes caught sight of the famous Sir Walter as he exercised his six-foot frame along the crest of a Tower wall.8
IN RALEGH’S ABSENCE, a young man named George Waymouth declared his intentions to be one of the next generation of New World pioneers. Waymouth was no Ralegh in status, style, or worldview. He came from a seafaring and fishing family that had long lived in Cockington, Devon, not far from the coast. George’s grandfather, William, had accumulated enough wealth to leave his son, also William, a half share in a ship, the Lyon, worth some fifty pounds. The younger William expanded his activities, acquiring a number of vessels for plying the waters of the Newfoundland fishery, progressing to the purchase of larger ships and, finally, to shipbuilding. Also, he had invested in overseas ventures, plowing money into Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s mission to “annoy” Spain in 1578. George, described as a navigator, probably learned the skills of his profession, and gained his passion for adventure, on his father’s vessels.9
Although he was no courtier, Waymouth managed to secure an audience with King James, who was only a few months into his reign and as yet had no track record of sponsoring or rejecting proposals for overseas ventures. No one knew what James really thought about his lands in the New World and perhaps he had not yet formed an opinion on them. But, apparently to encourage the king, Waymouth presented him with an elaborate, leather-bound volume called The Jewell of Artes, a title that provided little clue as to its actual contents. The young seaman and would-be adventurer wrote that his book was intended for anyone who wanted to undertake the “discovery of any strange countries.” It was essentially a handbook filled with instructions and advice about how to create a fortified town in a wilderness setting.10
No previous English book had contained this kind of practical detail. Humphrey Gilbert’s plans had focused on how millions of acres of land might be divided, leased, and turned into profitable estates. Richard Hakluyt had put forward the intellectual arguments and emotional pleas, selecting stirring narratives for the delectation of his stay-at-home readers. By contrast, Waymouth’s Jewell delivered the how-to, contained in a beautifully designed volume fit for a king. The brown calf cover is decorated with a field of hand-tooled gold flowerets and emblazoned with King James’s coat of arms. The text is handwritten, in English, by a single scrivener in a looping, flowing font.11 The book contains many illustrations—“demonstrations” as Waymouth calls them—including engineering drawings, colored diagrams, functional volvelles, and cut-paper pop-ups of the kind more commonly found in a modern children’s book.
The production of such an elaborately lettered, copiously illustrated
, and richly bound book must have been time-consuming and expensive. It was obvious that Waymouth fervently wanted to enlist James’s support for a New World venture and sought to convince him that he was the right man to lead it. In this regard, Waymouth carried some baggage. Although he was in his early twenties, this was not his first attempt to gain support for an overseas expedition. In July 1601, he had sought to revive the search for the Northwest Passage, petitioning the East India Company for sponsorship.
Remarkably, given the magnitude of Waymouth’s proposal and his youth and relative inexperience, the general court of the East India Company gave serious consideration, forming a six-man committee “for the Northwest passage,” led by John Watts, the merchant-privateer who had collaborated with Ralegh and who financed the ship that took John White back to Roanoke on his last fateful expedition.12 It took some time to hammer out the deal. To start with, the East India Company had to gain the permission of the Muscovy Company, which still held monopoly rights to the territory. Eventually, after much negotiation, the two companies agreed to collaborate on Waymouth’s venture. Then the East India Company drove a hard bargain. They agreed to invest three thousand pounds to purchase and outfit two pinnaces and to provide one hundred pounds for Waymouth’s “instruments and other necessaries.” But they would pay the handsome sum of £500 if, and only if, he successfully discovered the passage. If he failed to do so, he would get “nothing for his pains and travail.”13
He failed. Waymouth’s two-ship fleet departed London on May 2, 1602, provisioned for sixteen months. In mid-September, however, the ships returned to England. It seems that Waymouth, like other commanders before him, had suffered a mutiny and been forced to turn back. Nevertheless, he expressed his belief that the passage was there.14 The East India Company even considered making another attempt, but at last came to the conclusion that they should focus their energy on the conventional, well-established route to the East Indies—around the southern tip of Africa, not through the Northwest Passage.
After that crushing blow, Waymouth, still young and full of ideas, turned his attention to colonization and to the Jewell of Artes. For all the book’s ornate flourishes, the actual content is rather rudimentary. Readers were told that the leaders of colonial voyages needed technical knowledge of navigational instruments and a good grasp of shipbuilding, as well as an understanding of the art of surveying so that they can “make choice of the most fit and commodious place” to settle—a discipline not mentioned by other advocates. Devoting much of the book to the “practice of fortification,” he recommended specific types of guns that had a dual purpose: effective on ships against “rovers” and other attackers and yet easily taken ashore to protect a fort.
Waymouth went on to address the creation of entire towns and how to lay out settlements with “fair and large” streets, sturdy foundations, and protective ditches and bulwarks. His designs look a bit like mandalas—a square, a cogged wheel, a rosette, a circle. Within the walls, he depicted neat villages of regular housing blocks, some with straight streets, some with curved. One plan looks like a formal garden, another like a maze. Each of these cozy habitations bristles with ordnance, cannon aimed in every direction.15
GEORGE WAYMOUTH COULD not persuade James to fund his proposed venture, but his appearance at court may have led to his introduction to a potential sponsor: Sir Thomas Arundell. Aged about forty-five and the scion of a noble family with a long history of military and political service, Arundell was attracted by the idea of an American refuge for English Catholics—in effect, reviving the plans first developed by George Peckham and Thomas Gerrard with Humphrey Gilbert. His interest came after James authorized a tightening of anti-Catholic legislation, including new restrictions on the sale of certain books and the creation of a revised catechism.16
But Waymouth did not rely on just one or two main sponsors. Like Gilbert before him, he presented his case to other investors—in particular, the merchants of Devon. They valued the proposed American plantation for a different purpose: fishing. These backers included William Parker, a Plymouth trader and privateer, and possibly John Gilbert, Humphrey’s eldest son, who lived near Dartmouth.17 Perhaps it was Gosnold’s report of abundant fishing grounds close to shore—untroubled by many, if any, competitors from other countries—that led Parker and others to conclude that fishing outposts could be established to manage the catch and process fish all year round. Such settlements would be purpose-built and could quickly begin producing revenue, just as the fishing fleets of Iceland and Newfoundland had done for decades. The fishing trade, while not glamorous, was reliable and the demand was steady. People had to eat, and the English were devoted to their stockfish.
It is not clear how much money Waymouth raised from these different investors, with their contrasting aspirations—as a Catholic refuge and as a fishermen’s outpost. But by the time he sailed out of Dartmouth on the last day of March 1605, he no longer had the support of Arundell, who seems to have bowed out of the venture. Commanding a single ship, the Archangell, with twenty-eight men, Waymouth led what was in effect a reconnaissance voyage, much like Gosnold’s to Norumbega.18
Six weeks later, the Archangell reached Monhegan Island, one of the jewels of the Maine coast—a craggy mound of rock, topped with scrub and fir, set in the sea well out from the mainland but still within its sight, with an anchorage that opens to the southwest providing shelter from northeast storms. Unlike Gosnold, who had sailed south to Cape Cod and the Massachusetts islands, Waymouth lingered in Maine, exploring the islands and the coastal inlets, and venturing on foot, tracking along a great river, probably the St. George, whose mouth lies just north of Monhegan.
During the course of the expedition, Waymouth and his crew engaged with the local Indians, probably members of the Eastern Abenaki tribe, one of the Algonquian people. The relationship developed in a familiar pattern. At first, the wary Indians kept their distance. They appeared on an islet adjacent to the ship and made gestures. Eventually they came aboard ship. Trading began. Then they smoked tobacco—the Indians sometimes used a lobster claw as a pipe—and took meals together. There was singing and dancing, and eventually Englishmen and Indians had sleepovers, in camp or aboard ship.
Over time, this increased familiarity led to easier relations, and the more the English observed the Indians the more impressed they became, admiring their abilities and attributes. They especially marveled at the Indians’ canoes. According to James Rosier, a young Cambridge-educated Catholic convert who was hired to write the official account of the voyage, the boats defied belief.19 They were made “without any iron,” consisting instead “of the bark of a birch tree, strengthened within with ribs and hoops of wood, in so good fashion, with such excellent ingenious art, as they are able to bear seven or eight persons, far exceeding any in the Indies.”20 Birch trees of the requisite circumference to build such a canoe—a single sheet of bark formed the hull—grew plentifully in Maine, but not much farther south. As such, Rosier was reporting on a highly specialized, localized craft.21
Another “especial thing,” Rosier wrote, “is their manner of killing the whale, which they call Powdawe.” He described how the English watched as a whale, twelve fathoms long—a daunting seventy-two feet, if his estimation was correct—surfaced and cleared its blowhole. The Abenakis set out in a flotilla of boats and skewered the whale using a harpoon-like weapon, a sharpened bone fastened to a long rope, made from twisted tree bark. They let out the line as the whale plunged, and when it resurfaced “with their arrows they shoot him to death,” Rosier wrote.22 He took time to make these observations because he knew investors would be interested in the potential for whaling, which was growing in importance as a commercial activity for European merchants, especially after the Dutch got involved in the trade in the late 1590s.23 Whale blubber was particularly prized by cloth manufacturers, since it produced train oil, which was used in the finishing process.
Rosier proved to be an astute choice as chronicler. He
went beyond the recounting of noteworthy events, choosing to make observations of commercial and ethnographical value, as Thomas Harriot had before him. He paid particular attention to the Indian language. When he went ashore with Waymouth and two Abenakis to spend some time fishing with a net, he began asking the Indians to tell him their words for various items. Rosier would point to something, ask for the Indian word, and then write it down, employing, as Harriot had done, a phonetic system of his own devising. The Indians found this so intriguing that they began to fetch things—everything from fish to fruits—just to watch as Rosier wrote down their words.
The bond that seems to have developed between Waymouth’s men and the Indians—at least as the English understood it—might have provided the foundation for a future peaceful English settlement. But then Waymouth committed an act of betrayal that shocked the local people and soured relations. One evening in early June, Waymouth’s men brought a platter of peas ashore to share with several Abenakis. One of the Indians, suspecting treachery, walked away. At that moment, the mariners “suddenly laid hands” on two others, grabbed hold of the “long hair on their heads,” and wrestled them aboard ship, along with their bows, arrows, and canoes.24
It seems that the kidnapping—a total of five Indians were ultimately seized—had been one of the primary goals of the reconnaissance mission all along. As Rosier later noted, the capture of Indians was “a matter of great importance for the full accomplishment of our voyage.” He insisted, however, that after this violent encounter the Abenakis received “kind usage” from the English and, once aboard ship, concluded that no further harm would befall them. They never seemed “discontented with us,” Rosier wrote, but rather were “tractable, loving, & willing by their best means to satisfy us in anything we demand of them.”25