The Pirate Queen (43 page)

Elizabeth knew that each and every one of these men was vital to the navy, and that no fault must be discovered against any of
them. Burghley had been ordered to investigate thoroughly, resolve their differences, and make certain that they knew that she wanted this to be the end of the matter. But the facts spoke for themselves. Hawkins was right. The ships were being repaired with inferior products at inflated prices. Unseasoned oak was used for planking causing excessive leaking and time in dry dock. All the ships had at last been put in good order since 1578, but at a price. All ships built at Woolwich, Chatham, or Portsmouth seemed to be clear of the inflated charges against the ships built at Deptford. This laid the blame squarely on Matthew Baker, though the inspectors were most careful to omit his name from any documentation. Pett signed the report signifying his agreement to its findings, whereas Baker did not. Nor did Winter or the other Navy Board members.
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As if to rub salt in their fresh wounds, Hawkins went on to offer the Privy Council a shipbuilding program that would not only be systematic, but would also include all ordinary and extraordinary repairs at an annualized savings of £3,200 ($956,968 or £517,280 today) to the crown. The proposal would eventually be accepted by mid-1585, when war with Spain had become inevitable.

In the interim, Philip’s naval forces had gone from strength to strength. His brilliant admiral, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, annihilated any Portuguese resistance in the Azores, crushing forces loyal to Antonio in July 1582.
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At the same time, Alba’s troops in Portugal solidified Philip’s stranglehold on his new dominion. In the Low Countries, the Duke of Parma’s vicious campaign against the Dutch insurgents went on unabated, despite Elizabeth’s support for Anjou’s puppet government. In 1583, Parma retook Nieupoort and Dunkirk on the North Sea, establishing his Spanish naval squadron there as a bridgehead to an invasion of England. Still, these were not deepwater ports, and only ships of up to 200 tons could dock from Spain there.

Inevitably, Anjou had been routed from the Netherlands, and died a month later on May 31, 1584. Two months after that, William of Orange was assassinated in his own home. And Philip’s flotas continued to pour gold, silver, and precious gems into his coffers unabated, while Elizabeth sold her crown lands, took part in risky maritime adventures, and prayed for deliverance. She must have
feared on more than one occasion that God had become Catholic again. Pope Gregory XIII had already reinforced the point with the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in October 1582. Naturally, the queen refused to adopt it (despite its being more accurate) from an institution that called her “the patroness of heretics and pirates.” From 1582 until 1751, England would lag ten days behind the Catholic empires.

There was only one option left in 1584 to the queen and England. The country must recover from its nadir, and it would have to call upon the resources and tenacity of her adventurers.

31. Water!

Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.

—SIR WALTER RALEIGH

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learly something needed to be done to reverse the tide. The old tried-and-true methods of daring plunder didn’t seem to work any longer. Unless Elizabeth gave up all hope of peace, and surrendered to the horror of war with Spain, she could see no clear way through the impasse. Spain or the papacy would continue to fund assassination plots until one day, Lord forbid, they would succeed. Over £3.3 million ($1.11 billion or £600 million today) had been shipped from the Americas to Philip’s coffers in the ten years between 1570 and 1580. That figure, unbeknown to Elizabeth, would rise nearly sixfold to £18.7 million ($5.42 billion or £2.93 billion today) by 1590.
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While the King of Spain’s financial affairs were a closely guarded state secret, the obvious benefit he enjoyed from his American colonies was difficult to disguise. Now that he had successfully overrun Portugal and subsumed its navy into his own, it seemed to most minds of every persuasion that the King of Spain was unstoppable. That is to most minds except the great commanders of the past like Drake, Hawkins, and Winter. Sharing their point of view was the new adventurer of the future, Walter Raleigh. The queen’s great political mainstays Leicester, Walsingham, and Burghley were also unwilling to look at the situation through defeatist eyes. Even Burghley had overcome his aversion to plunder, since to date it had been the only effective weapon against Spain. If England were to remain Protestant, ruled by their Virgin Queen, then it required the queen to be realistic and see that war was already inevitable.

Though she never openly admitted that they were right, Elizabeth would agree by the autumn of 1584 to give financial and military assistance to the Dutch rebels. The top priority was to try to save Antwerp from extermination at the hands of Parma. And with Parma now in charge of two Low Countries’ ports, capable of making rendezvous with a larger invasion force from Spain, Walsingham’s spy network clicked into high gear.

It is no wonder that with war looming heavily upon the horizon Elizabeth, now aged fifty-one, would find such pleasure in the sweet and lilting banter of the charismatic Walter Raleigh. His strong sense of power, his almost Machiavellian energy in his quest of fortune, mesmerized the aging queen. While Elizabeth had sent him packing to Ireland in 1582, on his return a year later with hard proof of his “better experience in martial affairs” for his role in the massacre at Smerwick, the dashing, handsome, and well-spoken Raleigh radiated that confidence and courtly eloquence that the queen so admired.
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Within the year, she had given him the first of his nicknames, “Water,” and pretended to die of thirst every time he left her sight. Soon her “Pug” Walter would follow—her lap dog—giving her courtly love and the intellectual stimulation she so craved.

After the nicknames came the showering of wealth. Elizabeth gave her new favorite Scotney (Bletching Court) at Lydd in Kent and Newlands Farm in Romney Marsh, Hampshire, recently received from All Souls College Oxford.
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The medieval pile Durham House, in London, followed; and though it was in dire need of remedial work, Raleigh’s position with its commanding view over the Thames could not leave anyone wondering about his commanding position in the queen’s affections. To help with his upkeep, and his necessarily ruinous court expenses, Elizabeth granted him by royal patent, a license for the farm of wine. This provided him with a basic income of somewhere between £700 and £800 annually (approximately $222,000 or £120,000 today). In the spring of 1584, he was also granted a number of profitable licenses from the queen for the export of broadcloth without any of the standard statutory restrictions, making him a perceived enemy of the Merchants Adventurers, the Levant Company, the Spanish Company, and the Muscovy Company combined. Extensive plantations in
Ireland would come later, as would the estates belonging to the Babington Plotters. He had become the Member for Parliament for Devonshire, vociferously defending royal prerogatives. Indubitably, the impoverished youngest son of Katherine Champernowne had finally arrived. But it still wasn’t enough for the ambitious West Countryman.

Elizabeth was clearly entranced by him. Leicester, Walsingham, Burghley, and all her merchants and other adventurers were incensed by his colossal ego and the sway he held over the queen. No other favorite, aside from Leicester himself in the 1560s, had been shown such preferential treatment. Leicester’s own chosen successor to the queen’s heart through poetry and courtly deeds, Sir Philip Sidney, had been more or less spurned, though Elizabeth had made him Master of the Ordnance of the Tower in recompense. And so, Leicester resolved, probably with the connivance of both Walsingham and Burghley for a time, to supplant the upstart Raleigh in the queen’s affections with his own stepson Robert, Earl of Essex. But timing, as Leicester knew, was everything, and for now, he would allow Raleigh his moment of glory.
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Raleigh was nothing if not monumentally ambitious. Like his friend, John Dee, he saw colonization and a British Empire spanning all the world’s seas and continents as the queen’s, and by extension, his rightful place in the world. His half brothers Adrian and Sir John Gilbert were eager to retain Sir Humphrey’s grant of lands in the north of the North American continent, while the lands sold to Peckham and Gerrard were adjoining these to the south in modern New England. That only left Raleigh the “Mediterranean” coast north of Florida, which was far more to his personal liking in any event. This preference wasn’t only driven by the hazards of the voyage and climate. Raleigh, like Dee before him, believed that gold only “grew” in warmer climates.

On March 25, 1584, Raleigh’s application to take over some of his dead half brother’s patent was granted by the queen. He “owned” exclusive rights to control the settlement and access to land in North America within six hundred miles to the north and south of any plantation he could establish and maintain within the next six years.
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Raleigh wouldn’t make the same mistake that his half-brother
had made, and prepared two barks to sail from the West Country on a reconnaissance voyage to the east coast of North America the moment the patent was granted. His servants, Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlow, captained the two ships, with Simon Fernandez as their pilot.
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Raleigh edited Barlow’s narrative with an exceedingly heavy hand prior to its publication, yet the excitement Barlow felt on first sight of America remains breathtaking today:

We viewed the land about us, being, whereas we first landed, very sandy and low towards the water’s side, but so full of grapes as the very beating and surge of the sea overflowed them of which we found such plenty, as well there as in all places else, both on the sand and on the green soil on the hills, as in the plains, as well on every little shrub, as also climbing towards the tops of high cedars, that I think in all the world the like abundance is not to be found.

We passed from the sea side towards the tops of those hills next adjoining, being but of mean height, and from thence we beheld the sea on both sides. Under the bank or hill whereon we stood, we beheld the valleys replenished with goodly cedar trees, and having discharged our harquebus-shot, such a flock of cranes (the most part white) arose under us, with such a cry redoubled by many echoes, as if an army of men had shouted all together.
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Three days after making landfall at Hatteras on the Carolina Outer Banks, their first contact with Native Americans was made by three men rowing a canoe. They communicated through the use of sign language, with one of the Native Americans receiving presents of food, drink, a hat, and a shirt. He returned a short while later with a boatload of fish for the Englishmen. Soon, brisk bartering took place. The English exchanged their pots, pans, tools, and weaponry for skins, furs, and pearls. Fresh meat, vegetables, and fruit were brought as gifts. Some of the food in the cornucopia of delights, like potatoes, had never been tasted before. It was on a clear summer’s day that Barlow remarked their “maize” that was “very white, fair and well tasted.”
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Their friendship thusly sealed, the Englishmen were shown the way to Roanoke, an island lying between the reef and the shore near the mouth of the Albemarle Sound. There, the tribal village of “nine
houses, built of cedar, and fortified round about with sharp trees, to keep out their enemies, and the entrance into it made like a turnpike very artificially” greeted them. Their hosts were “kind and loving people,” the likes of which “there can not be found in the world.”
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Barlow omitted all reference to their other encounter—that time with hostile natives, where some of the English were certainly killed and possibly eaten. Instead, he depicted the natives as “very handsome and goodly people, and in their behaviour as mannerly and civil as any of Europe…void of all guile, and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the golden age.”
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The ships returned to England in September, with two Native Americans named Manteo and Wanchese from Roanoke in tow along with their Indian wares. Raleigh was presumably informed of the full details of the expedition by Barlow, Amadas, and Fernandez—from the tricky crossing in the Florida Channel to the difficult navigation around the Outer Banks. But Raleigh was the most expert Elizabethan salesman to date, and knew that all of the negative and more truthful remarks would need to be crossed out of any account of the voyage outside of their inner circle if he were to succeed in funding and forming a colony. Perhaps by the time his settlers had been recruited he actually believed that “Virginia” was indeed the land of milk and honey, but, more likely, he had his eyes firmly focused on the need to get official and royal backing for the voyage that lay ahead.

Raleigh doctored the Barlow narrative, redesigning it to attract the greatest support possible among the people who would ultimately be his settlers, but also in large measure to assure royal backing. With his poetic ability and rosy picture of a promised land, he by and large achieved his wishes. Where five years earlier the court had been gripped with gold fever, it now saw the merit—despite its general and strong dislike for the swaggering Raleigh—of his Western Plantation scheme.

The queen was truly excited about the new possibilities Raleigh’s scheme offered after an era of prolonged ignominious failures. When his bill was passed by the House of Commons to confirm his title to the appropriately named “Wyngandacoia” (the Native American expression for “you wear good clothes”), Elizabeth knighted Raleigh in January 1585, authorizing the change of name for his lands to the
also appropriate moniker, “Virginia.”
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