The Pirate Queen (57 page)

Then there was the not insubstantial matter of the Virginia grant.
Some adventurers had pointed out to the Privy Council that Raleigh’s patent of 1584 had expired since no colony had been successfully established within six years. Raleigh argued, with the support of Richard Hakluyt, that they were wrong. There was no evidence that his colony at Roanoke had perished, only that they had moved to Croatoan. Indeed, two children—Virginia Dare and a boy to the Harvies—had been born in Virginia.
⁵
So long as he could argue that point successfully (which he did), then the twelve hundred miles of prime North American coastline belonged exclusively to him. Still, the fact remained that there were no documented voyages to Virginia in the decade between 1591 and 1602, and certainly Raleigh appeared to have abandoned Virginia in favor of adventure and the quest for gold.

Indeed, Raleigh spent the 1590s busily looking for the fabled El Dorado. Virginia, according to his surveyors and experts, held no gold. And if England were to become the great empire to supplant Spain, Raleigh argued, it was gold that the country needed. It would also be the only salvation for Raleigh’s dwindling resources. In order to exploit any gold deposits or mines that he may be fortunate enough to find during his voyages of exploration in the 1590s, Raleigh needed to promote the concept of colonies and empire strongly. Without the manpower to take charge of these new lands, there would be no means of extracting, protecting, or shipping the gold back to England.

Yet, as hard as he tried, after his 1595 voyage to Trinidad and the Orinoco, where no concrete sign of El Dorado had been discerned, it remained impossible for Raleigh to attract finance to his proposed adventures. Other adventurers like Sir Robert Dudley, the “baseborn” son of Leicester and Lady Douglas Sheffield, searched as well, but they did not join in Raleigh’s expedition. Even Raleigh’s
Discoverie of the Large Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana
, published in 1596, failed to renew the gold fever at court that had prevailed at the time of Frobisher’s attempts at finding the Northwest Passage.
⁶
When this was followed a year later with his
Of the Voyage for Guiana
, outlining his proposed methods for settlement, and the attributes of converting the “heathens” to Christianity, few realized what an insightful work it was. Even Hakluyt’s preaching in intellectual
circles and at court produced no result for him. It was a pity, but the country wasn’t ready for an all out push into the great unknown while Ireland remained in revolt, and Spain continually—or so it seemed—sent out repeated armadas through the 1590s.
Of the Voyage for Guiana
set out clearly—and for the first time—the foundations necessary for the development of a tropical colony, arguing at length about how to use the local population to advantage, while importing English settlers to bring in the rule of English law and mastermind the export of goods and supplies back to England.
⁷

Despite Cecil’s agreement to send out two ships to Guiana to look for El Dorado, the level of interest in the region in the late 1590s was exceedingly limited. In addition to the Irish and Spanish problems (Spain had taken Calais and threatened Rouen), France had a Catholic king again with the conversion of Henry IV. The queen could die at any time, and the succession was not assured. The tropical jungles of the Orinoco or the Amazon were too far away and too dangerous for anyone to venture their money in when matters in Europe remained so unsettled.

Then a new adventure happened to refresh Raleigh’s interests in Virginia, though he had no part in the expedition. In 1597, a separatist Puritan sect, mistakenly called Brownists by the Privy Council, asked for a license to emigrate to the St. Lawrence region of North America. The queen agreed, providing that they never returned to England while still practicing their faith. She deeply mistrusted Puritans, as did Cecil. But Raleigh would have preferred they attempt to settle in Virginia, and cleverly wrote to Cecil “not to meddle with the state of Ireland (where Cecil had substantial holdings) nor that of Guiana. There is under our noses the great and ample country of Virginia.”
⁸

The letter continued, urging Cecil to advise the queen that if they proceeded to make a colony in Virginia, “if upon a good and godly peace obtained, it shall please the Almighty to stir up her majesty’s heart to continue with her favourable countenance…with transporting of one or two thousand of her people…she shall 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 father of Christ.”
⁹

But the “Brownists” sailed under the auspices of two London
merchants, Alexander van Harwick and Charles Leigh, for the island of Ramea on the St. Lawrence River. The
Hopewell
and
Chancewell
set out in April 1597 but, on their arrival, were confronted by hostile Breton and Basque fishermen who had already laid claim to the territory. In the end, Leigh, who led the expedition in the
Hopewell
, had to return to England with his pioneers still aboard due to French and Spanish resistance to the formation of an English colony at the site of their fisheries.
¹⁰

Finally, in 1602, Raleigh sent two ships and a pinnace under Captain Samuel Mace to renew trade with North America. Mace was under strict orders that if the “lost colonists” had survived, then he must bring some of them back to England. They would be his best instruments for selling his ideas of empire at home after all. But while Mace worked up the coast of North America to Cape Fear, there was no serious effort to find the “lost colonists” of 1587. Instead, Mace loaded sassafras wood and china root (sarsaparilla). While sarsaparilla had no medicinal value despite reports to the contrary, sassafras fetched 3s. to 20s. for a pound weight in London (between $7 and $240 or £20 to £130 today) and was the new “miracle” cure for “the French pox” or syphilis.
¹¹

At the same time, Bartholomew Gosnold, Bartholomew Gilbert, and John Brereton sailed a small expedition to the New England coast in the hope of establishing a trading settlement there. As frequently happened in these early voyages, though, food was in short supply, planters were poorly advised, and, as a result, serious arguments threatening survival broke out. In the end, within three months, on June 18, 1602, they had all sailed again for England, anchoring at Weymouth three weeks later.

Significantly, Raleigh was there to meet them that July 1602—hopping mad. It seems that the first he had heard of their voyage had been after they left. Since he held the exclusive rights to settle and trade in that part of North America—or so he believed—he was not prepared to abide their interloping. Still, it wasn’t his plantation rights that truly concerned him: if Bartholomew Gilbert and his partners sold their sassafras on the open market, it would become flooded, wiping out the considerable profit that Raleigh himself had intended to claim from his own earlier shipment. The hapless merchant agreed that this would not be any good for either of them,
and so Raleigh sent him to Cecil in London with a letter warning, “I have a patent that all ships and goods are confiscate that shall trade there without my leave…. Gilbert went without my leave, and therefore
all
is confiscate…[yet Gilbert] shall have his part again.”
¹²

Raleigh was acting with pure economics at the heart of his argument. He merely wanted to control market flow and ensure that there would not be a glut. There were obviously no hard feelings since the group later dedicated their
Brief and True Relation of the Discovery of the North Part of Virginia
, published shortly after, to Raleigh.

Economics even ruled Raleigh’s head in the quest for the “lost colonists,” too. His interest in their survival was twofold: to protect his exclusive patent and to tempt others to follow in their footsteps. Yet, Raleigh would not be remembered for his callousness toward his “western planters.” He would be credited with far greater things: the “introduction” of tobacco and potatoes to England (both false); the embodiment of chivalry and courtly love; and the founding of Virginia.

It was an appropriate way for the queen’s favorite adventurer to be remembered. Still, it would have been more appropriate perhaps if he had been more widely seen for what he had really been: a promoter of empire and a poet. Interestingly, nearly the last surviving letter of Elizabeth’s reign is from Raleigh: it was the first piece of direct spin doctoring to attract planters to the American colonies in the early days of the seventeenth century.

42. The East and the East India Company

I cannot tell you where you should look for me because I live at the devotion of the winds and seas.

—SIR JAMES LANCASTER TO THE GOVERNORS OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY,
1603

W
hen Thomas Cavendish sailed up the Channel in the autumn of 1588—his mariners sporting silken doublets and his topsails trimmed with gold—a new era in maritime adventuring was ushered in, though no one knew it at the time. Cavendish, the second Englishman to circumnavigate the globe had also returned home with treasure, some £100,000, in fact ($2.41 billion or £1.3 billion today).

No sooner did he step ashore than Cavendish wrote to his old friend, the lord chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon, “I sailed along the islands of the Moluccas where our countrymen may have trade as freely as the Portuguese if they themselves will.”
¹
Not only had he reiterated Drake’s message of eight years before, but he also proved that the size of ship or fleet no longer mattered. Nor, indeed, did the pope’s division of the world between Spain and Portugal of a hundred years earlier.

Yet what did matter was the machinery of state that had been put in place for the queen’s adventurers to serve the crown. Elizabeth held the ultimate sanction to allow her mariners to sail. As a result, England’s merchants had been taking a backseat to the queen and her gentlemen adventurers for the past eighteen years while affairs of state intermingled with their trading aims.

In those heady days after the defeat of the “Invincible,” a huge shift in overseas trade would take place, much to the queen’s satisfaction. The better-maintained fleets belonging to the merchants doubled up as men-of-war to serve the queen. When security of the realm allowed for them to be employed by their owners in the single objective of trade, they were phenomenally
successful in most adventurers that they undertook. In turn, their vast wealth garnered from those years of freebooting and trade created their moment to reemerge as the premier economic force of the country. Whenever their trading ships anchored at faraway ports in the aftermath of July 1588, sultans and potentates were uniformly impressed to meet the men who had put Philip of Spain in his rightful place.

By the late 1590s, Londoners realized that there was no longer any need to rely solely on mariners of varying skills and honesty, or on seas that could dash their fortunes without warning. Cavendish’s second voyage in 1591, Richard Hawkins’s in 1594, followed by Dudley’s, Chidley’s, and Wood’s had all ended in disaster. No, the merchants agreed. Their thrust would be different. Their undertaking would resemble the colony “forts” of Portuguese India. The foreign rulers now wanted to trade with them, in part as protection against Spain, in part, to make more money. The London merchants envisaged huge emporia—cities and towns—from which they could turn their fortunes into a power that the world had not as yet seen. The time had come to seize the Holy Grail: trade with the East Indies.

Sir James Lancaster, a former merchant and English factor who had lived in Lisbon until the union of Portuguese and Spanish crowns in 1580, made a reconnaissance mission lasting from 1591 to 1594 to the East in the
Edward Bonaventure
—the same Levant Company ship he had captained during the armada campaign. He was shadowed by the Dutch fleet reconnoitering the same waters to develop the Netherlands’ spice trade; and where their voyage was a phenomenal success, Lancaster’s was a financial disaster. Yet despite this dismal beginning, it was by watching and drooling over the Dutch successes that the London merchants thought that they must seize their chance at once or their last opportunity to enter the spice race would be squandered. They were determined not to lose out again—this time to the Dutch, who England had saved from Spain.
²

The rivalry between Dutch and English merchants came to a head when the Dutch petitioned Elizabeth in July 1599 to purchase a number of English ships for their Eastern colonization purposes.
The Londoners protested angrily. It was a matter of national interest to hold on to its own spice trade, they argued. Then, on September 22, 1599, 101 London merchants signed a petition promising a total of £30,133 6s. 8d. ($7.23 million or £3.91 million today) “to venture in the pretended voyage to the East Indias,”
³
and set it before the queen for her consideration. Within weeks, the demand came back from court that their venturing must be suspended at once—and that the company should not be formed under any circumstances.

It seemed that Robert Cecil had finally penetrated the queen’s deep mistrust of the Spaniard, and had begun peace talks. From Elizabeth’s and Cecil’s viewpoint, the formation of a company to plunder the rich East Indies could only bring bad news to those negotiations. Philip II had died the year before, as had Lord Burghley, but it was feared that Philip’s son and heir, Philip III, harbored a venomous loathing for the English, too. After de Aguilla’s failed invasion of Ireland, naturally, these talks failed.