Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (22 page)

By the mid-sixties envy of Spain, private greed, national pride and the cautious hints of Elizabeth’s policy had inflamed all England
with a desire to claim a place in the new worlds. The partial success of the ventures to the North-East was hopeful. The black enterprise of Hawkins, pirating and slave-running in defiance of Spain, had to prove the weakness of the Spanish giant, a weakness that Elizabeth and her sailors were delighted to exploit. The West Country seamen, many of them friends and neighbours of Hawkins, were rigging vessels, subscribing to ventures to which the Queen as often as not gave a surreptitious encouragement. Too poor to challenge Spain directly, she looked upon her privateers—her state pirates like Drake and Hawkins—to snatch for England a part of the Spanish wealth. She knew that a powerful state was built on money, and instituted the policy which Francis Bacon later set out and commended in his
Considerations touching a War with Spain
. The greatness of Spain, he said, ‘consisteth in their treasure, their treasure in the Indies, and their Indies (if it be well weighed) are indeed but an accession to such as are masters by sea. So as this axle-tree, whereupon their greatness turneth, is soon cut in two by any that shall be stronger than they by sea.’ Hawkins, Drake, Raleigh and many lesser men made themselves masters by sea. But to steal hardly diminished the wealth of the Spanish, supported as they were by the unbounded riches of the Indies. It would be better for England to find her own source of treasure, either in the North of the Americas or in Cathay and the Far East, and the way to those parts, since the journey around Russia had proved so difficult, lay by the North-West.

Sir Humphrey Gilbert was the man who re-awakened England to the possibilities of the north-west passage. As a young man from a Devon seafaring family he had naturally caught the fever for both the adventure and the profits of exploration. He had joined the Merchant Adventurers and subscribed towards their journeys to the North-East. The Adventurers, finding the way to the East blocked, settled for ordinary commerce with Russia, but Gilbert could not forget Cathay so easily. The way east was tedious and known; the way west was full of imaginative possibilities: who knew what gold, what lands, what clear passages were in the North-West? At Havre, during the French campaign, Gilbert had met Richard Eden whose translation of Peter Martyr’s
Decades
, in 1555, had given Englishmen the first full account of the New World. In his own West Country Gilbert talked to ‘our yeerly fishers to Labrador and Terra Nova’; he recalled the voyages of
Rut and Hore to Newfoundland in 1527 and 1536. In 1566 he wrote his
Discourse of a Discovery of a New Passage to Cataia
and set English sailors on a quest that was not resolved until the Norwegian Amundsen made the first passage in 1905. Frobisher, Davis, Hudson, Baffin, to name only the most famous, tried to find the passage, failed, and gave their names to some part of the desolation that defeated them.

Discovery in the sixteenth century, set about with so many uncertainties, was a field for the contest between practicality and idealism. Treasure was the spur that drove most of the adventurers; their lust for riches caused them to commit murder, piracy, robbery, perjury, blasphemy, and whatever lesser sins besides which might help them to the money they sought. Proud Protestant merchants willingly compounded with the Catholic Church for the benefit of trade with the Indies. ‘The merchant in England’, Hakluyt lamented in his
Discourse of Western Planting
(1584), ‘cometh here devoutly to the communion, and sendeth his son into Spain to hear Mass. These things are kept secret by the merchants; and such as depend upon the trade of merchandise are loth to utter the same.’ Gilbert also was in search of profits; he was an early member of the Merchant Adventurers, and advocated the north-west passage as a route to certain riches. But his thought went beyond greed and sought the ideal put forward by Richard Eden in his preface to the translation of the
Decades
. England, said Eden, should possess the coast lands of North America, from Florida to Newfoundland, as yet unexplored and uninhabited by Christians. Colonization was the ideal tentatively suggested in Gilbert’s
Discourse of a New Passage
, and in the petition that Gilbert addressed to the Queen at the same time for ‘license and favour to enterprise and give the attempt with all possible speed, for the discovery of a passage to Cathay, and all other rich parts of the world, hitherto not found’, he asked the Queen ‘to grant me during my life the Captainship unto the government to Your Majesty’s use of all such countries and territories as shall by me or my advice discovered’. The Merchant Adventurers opposed this petition, and the Queen had need of Gilbert’s service in Ireland. At the end of 1566 he was ordered back to his military command, to complete his brutal work in the bogs, to try out his ideal of English ‘plantations’ in Ireland, and when those failed to dream of the infinite space and liberty of the North American shores.

For some years after his return from Ireland in 1570 Gilbert was kept from his dreams abroad by the press of affairs at home. In 1570 he married Anne Ager who was to bear him, in the thirteen years of their marriage, six sons and one daughter. In the next year he entered Parliament, he and Sir John Hawkins being the representatives for Plymouth. In Parliament, he was an outrageous supporter of the Queen against the Commons and won the enmity of Peter Wentworth, that independent parliamentarian, who called Gilbert ‘a flatterer, a liar, and a naughtie man’. As a reward for his flattery, the Queen appointed him Surveyor of Artillery. He dabbled in alchemy; seeking as usual rare knowledge and profit, he tried to turn iron into copper and thereby lost £400. With unabated curiosity, and still thinking of England’s needs, he put his mind to education and composed his
Achademy
. He was, said his friend and poet Gascoigne, ‘endowed with great gifts of mind and well given to the advancement of knowledge and virtue’. And between the times of his studies, in 1572, he took up arms again. Accompanied by his young half-brother Walter Raleigh, Gilbert went to the Netherlands on one of Elizabeth’s typical double-dealing ventures, designed to get the advantage of Spaniard, French and Dutch alike. This expedition, which culminated with the rout of the English at Tergoes in the winter of 1572, won no praise for either English diplomacy or English arms.

The disappointment, even ignominy, of this campaign can only have increased Gilbert’s resolve to serve the Queen in the free airs of the Americas where his nationalism could make some notable mark unconstricted by the perils of European policy. By 1574 he was in his prime, a man of reputation and achievement. He now gave himself wholeheartedly to enterprise beyond the seas. His first attempts, in March 1574, were petitions to the Queen and to the Lord High Admiral, ‘Supplicated of certain gents in the West parts for a new navigation’. These petitions, asking permission to discover rich and unknown lands ‘fatally, and as it seemeth by God’s providence, reserved for England and for the honour of Your Majesty’, were refused. It seemed that Elizabeth, though assured of divine providence, hesitated to annoy Spain. In the next year, under pressure from the Privy Council, the Merchant Adventurers took up once again the search for a route to Cathay. Martin Frobisher was chosen for this venture, and at first he intended to go by the North-East. But Frobisher had known
Gilbert in Ireland and met him again in London in 1575, and after talks between the two, talks which incidentally led also to the publication by Gascoigne of Gilbert’s
Discourse
written ten years before, Frobisher decided to try the north-west passage.

Although Gilbert did not sail with Frobisher in 1576, his hand may be seen behind the expedition. He turned Frobisher from the North-East to the North-West, and perhaps it was he who suggested that a colony of one hundred men should be left in Meta Incognita—as the wilderness was called—to possess the land and make an English staging-post on the way to Cathay.

Frobisher’s voyage was a failure; he found no passage and he planted no colony. But he did bring back a lump of black ore which the assayers wrongly pronounced to be rich in gold, and so this dismal voyage caused a great excitement. Frobisher hurried back to the North-West in search of gold and brought his ships to England laden with stones; ‘when neither gold nor silver nor any other metal could be extracted from them,’ wrote Camden, ‘we have seen cast forth to mend the highways.’ The way in which Frobisher’s voyages were transformed from scientific exploration to a gold-rush confirmed, if any proof were still needed, that plunder was the chief end of English voyages. The Queen was not interested in colonization; the accepted opinion was that England was underpopulated, and the Queen needed all her subjects at home to face her rivals on the continent. Perhaps learning from the example of Frobisher, Gilbert saw that Elizabeth would give way to his plans only if there were advantages in them for the Queen. In November 1577, therefore, he sent her a paper entitled ‘How Her Majesty may annoy the King of Spayne’, in which he suggested that, under the pretext of forming a colonizing expedition, a large fleet might be sent to St Lawrence Island from where it could attack the fishing boats of Spain, Portugal and France, taking and keeping both the fishing-boats and their catches. Since Gilbert knew the Queen well, he cunningly arranged his scheme so that no blame would attach to her, and so that it would cost her nothing. In June 1578, he received a patent from Elizabeth for the occupation and settlement of Newfoundland.

To win these Letters Patent from the Queen had been a desperate business. For more than four years Gilbert had looked for a way to make his colonizing plans acceptable, and had managed at last only by a piece of notable dishonesty. Was Sir Humphrey
Gilbert really interested in plundering defenceless fishermen? No doubt he was thoroughly confused. In the manner of his time he was quite prepared to accept the profits from robbery, and a persuasive, specious argument could be made that his action would weaken England’s enemies. But most of all he showed the ruthlessness of the idealist—that same terrible purpose which had first appeared in Ireland—and had won by this the charter he longed for, ‘to inhabit and possess at his choice all remote and heathen lands not in the actual possession of any Christian prince’; this was the first serious attempt among Englishmen to establish a colony overseas.

Perhaps the dubious foundation for this expedition ensured its complete, and almost farcical, failure. Amidst many quarrels, and with the Spanish Ambassador Mendoza keeping watch, the fleet met at Dartmouth. In September 1578, with winter coming on, they put out to sea; in October they were driven back. Finally, on 19th November they left for unknown parts and disappeared from sight and mind. They were gone, wrote Churchyard:

But whither, no man knows,

Save that they are in Bark.

On 26th February 1579 Gilbert slipped back into port, and hardly anyone would have known had not the careful spies of Mendoza been keeping watch. The ambassador reported to Spain: ‘Not only have they abandoned the navigation to Cathay, but they have been so sickened with the little profit produced from their last voyage that not a man or a sailor has been paid his wages.’ The details of this voyage have never come to light; but Spain, convinced that Gilbert’s party had been pillaging the coast of Galicia, complained so loudly that the Council temporarily withdrew the patent and sent Gilbert to subdue the rebellious ships of his old enemy James FitzMaurice off the coast of Ireland, a venture that caused him much vexation and expense.

The original terms of Gilbert’s patent had allowed him six years to complete his enterprise. The failure of 1578 had cost him dearly; he had mortgaged his family, lands and credit to the limit, and now he saw time running out. In order to mount a final attempt he needed money and hit upon the brilliant idea of selling off some of the rights granted to him by the Letters Patent. The wastes of Labrador were sold to the ingenious alchemist, Dr John
Dee, but the greatest part of the capital was provided by Sir George Peckham and Sir Thomas Gerrard, two moderate Catholics, who wished to purchase land in the Americas to which English Catholics could emigrate away from the persecution they suffered at home. The all-knowing Mendoza reported that this scheme was devised by Walsingham, the Queen’s secretary, who promised to spare Peckham and Gerrard if they would take their troublesome Catholics away; if this was so, and Mendoza was always well-informed, Elizabeth had at last found a use for colonization. Gilbert granted the two Catholics the right to explore between Florida and Cape Breton, and contracted to sell them 2 million acres of their choice. A further 3 million acres were granted to Sir Philip Sidney who immediately assigned his rights to Peckham. And yet still more money was required. A joint-stock company was formed with Walsingham at the head, and the funds were raised. Gilbert made his Will, grandly disposing of his future commonwealth; the Queen sent a token and good wishes by her new favourite Walter Raleigh; learned Stephan Parmenius of Buda composed an
Embarkation Ode
in three hundred elegant Latin hexameters; in June 1583 the five ships of the expedition, varying in size from the
Raleigh
of 200 tons to the minute
Squirrel
of 10 tons, sailed from Plymouth on ‘the trade way to Newfoundland’.

The voyage, like all journeys of the time, was full of incident, danger and disappointment. The
Raleigh
, the ‘Vice-admiral’ and the largest of the fleet, turned back for England pleading a strange sickness. Fog and contrary winds delayed the rest, and then the remaining ships were separated only to meet up again with great joy in Conception Bay. On 30th July they sighted Labrador and fled south along this forsaken coast of ‘hideous rocks and mountains, bare of trees and void of any green herb’. On 3rd August the small fleet entered the harbour of St John’s, Newfoundland, where Gilbert, despite the great number of foreign fishermen about, took possession of the place, promulgated laws, imposed taxes and demanded the revictualling of his fleet. ‘And afterwards’, wrote Edward Hayes, captain of the
Golden Hind
and historian of the expedition, ‘were erected not far from that place the Arms of England ingraven in lead, and infixed upon a pillar of wood.’ Gilbert had claimed for England her first colonial possession. Sir Humphrey was cheerful; his plans were developing well and Newfoundland pleased him.