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when his late half-brother's patent for tent granted land in America expired, it was renewed to Raleigh.
in Raleigh's name. On March 25th was sealed the
30
OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
document that empowered him to " hold by homage remote heathen and barbarous lands, not actually possessed by any Christian prince, nor inhabited by Christian people, which he might discover within the next six years."1 As had been the custom with Spanish and Portuguese grants to explorers, one fifth of the gold and silver to be obtained was to be reserved for the crown. The heathen and barbarous land which Raleigh had in view was the Atlantic coast of North America so far as he might succeed in occupying it. He knew that Spain claimed it all as her own by virtue of the bull of Pope Alexander VI., but Elizabeth had already declared in 1581 that she cared nothing for papal bulls and would recognize no Spanish claims to America save such as were based upon discovery followed by actual possession.2 Raleigh's attention had long been turned toward Florida. In youth he had served in France under Coligny, and had opportunities for hearing that statesman's plan for fonuding a Protestant state in America discussed. We have seen Le Moine, the French artist who escaped from the Florida massacre, con- sorting with Raleigh and with Sir Philip Sidney. Upon those men fell the mantle of Coligny. and the people of the United States may well be proud to point to such noble figures standing upon the threshold of our history.
One provision in the Gilbert patent, now re- newed for Raleigh, is worth especial mention. It was agreed that the English colonies which should
1 Stebbing's Sir Walter Ralegh, p. 43.
2 Brown's Genesis, p. 10.
31
THE SEA KINGS.
be planted in America " should have all the privi- leges of free denizens and persons native of Eng- land, in such ample manner as if they were born and personally resident in our said realm of Eng- land," and that any law to the contrary should be of no effect; furthermore, that the peo- ple of those colonies should be governed Promise of self-govern- ment.
by such statutes as they might choose to establish for themselves, provided that such stat- utes "conform as near as conveniently may be with those of England, and do not oppugn the Christian faith, or anyway withdraw the people of those lands from our allegiance." A more unequivocal acknowledgment of the rights of self- government which a British government of two centuries later saw fit to ignore, it would be hard to find. Gilbert and Raleigh demanded and Elizabeth granted in principle just what Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams demanded and George III. refused to concede.
The wealthy Raleigh could act promptly, and before five weeks had elapsed two ships, com- manded by Philip Amidas and Arthur Voyage of Amidas and Barlow, had started on a reconnoitring Barlow, 1584.
voyage. On the 4th of July, 1584, they reached the country now known as North Caro- lina, at some point not far from Cape Lookout. Thence a northerly run of over a hundred miles brought them to the New Inlet, through which they passed into Pamlico Sound and visited Roan- oke Island. They admired the noble pine-trees and red cedars, marvelled at the abundance of game, and found the native barbarians polite and
32 . OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
friendly. Their attempt to learn the name of the country resulted as not uncommonly in such first parleys between strange tongues. The Indian of whom the question was asked had no idea what was meant and uttered at random the Ollendorfian reply, " Win-gan-da-coa," which signified, " What pretty clothes you wear!" So when Amidas and Barlow returned to England they said they had visited a country by the name of Wingandacoa ; but the queen, with a touch of the enphuism then so fashionable, suggested that it should be called, in honour of herself, Virginia.
In the spring of 1585 Raleigh, who had lately been knighted, sent out a hundred or more men commanded by Ralph Lane, to make the begin- nings of a settlement. They were convoyed by Raleigh's cousin, Sir Richard Grenville,
Ralph
Lane's ex- with seven well-armed ships. They en-
pedition,
1585. tered Pamlico Sound through Ocracoke Inlet, and trouble with the natives at once began. One of the Indians stole a silver cup, and Gren- ville unwisely retaliated by setting fire to their standing corn. Having thus sown the seeds of calamity he set the colonists ashore upon Roanoke Island and went on his way. The sagacious and energetic Lane explored the neighbouring main- land for many miles along the coast and for some distance into the interior, and even tried to find a waterway into the Pacific Ocean. He made up his mind that the country was not favourable for a new colony, and he gathered sundry bits of infor- mation which seemed to point to Chesapeake Bay as a much better place. The angry Indians made
33
THE SEA KINGS.
much trouble, and after a year had passed the colonists were suffering from scarcity of food, when all at once Sir Francis Drake appeared on the scene with a superb fleet of three-and-twenty ships. War between Spain and England had been declared in July, 1585, when Sidney and Drake were about ready to execute a scheme that contemplated the founding of an American colony by Sidney. But the queen interfered and sent Sidney to the Netherlands, where he was so soon to die a noble death. The terrible Drake, whom Spaniards, punning upon his name, had begun to call " Dragon," gave them fresh cause to dread and revile him. He had captured 20 ships with 250 cannon, he had taken and Rescue of Line by Sir Francis "the Dragon." sacked Cartagena, St. Domingo, and St. Augustine, and on his way home looked in at Roanoke Island, in time to take Lane and his starving party on board and carry them back to England. They had not long been gone when Grenville arrived with supplies, and was astonished at finding the island deserted. Knowing nothing of Lane's change of purpose, and believing that his party must still be somewhere in the adja- cent country, Grenville left a guard of fifteen men on the island, with ample supplies, and sailed away.
The stirring days of the Armada were approach- ing. When Lane arrived in England, his services Were needed there, and after a while we find him a member of the Council of War. One of this first American colonizing party was the wonderful Suf- folk boy, Thomas Cavendish, aged two-and-twenty,
34 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
who had no sooner landed in England than he set sail in command of three ships, made his way into the Pacific Ocean, and repeated the exploits of Drake from Chili to California, captured
Cavendish's one of Spain's finest galleons, and then in
voyage around the
two years more completed the circumnav-
world,
1586-83.
igation of the globe. While the pupil was thus nobly acquitting himself, the master in the spring of 1587 ontdid all former achievements. Sailing into the harbour of Cadiz, Drake defeated the warships on gaard there, calmly loaded his own vessels with as much Spanish spoil as could safely be carried, then set fire to the storeships and cut their cables. More than a hundred trans- ports, some of them 1,500 tons in burthen, all laden with stores for the Armada, became a tan-
Drake gled and drifting mass of blazing ruin,
" singes the
beard " of while amid the thunder of exploding
Philip II. magazines the victor went forth on his
way unscathed and rejoicing. Day after day he crouched under the beetling crags of Cintra, catch- ing and sinking every craft that passed that lair, then swept like a tempest into the bay of Coruña and wrought similar havoc to that of Cadiz, theil stood off for the Azores and captured the great carrack on its way from the Indies with treasure reckoned by millions. Europe stood dumb with amazement. What manner of man was it that could thus "singe the King of Spain's beard "? " Philip one day invited a lady of the court to join
· him in his barge on the Lake of Segovia. The lady said she dared not trust herself on the water, even with his Majesty," for fear of Sir Francis
35
THE SEA KINGS.
Drake.1 Philip's Armada had to wait for another year, while by night and day the music of adze and hammer was heard in English shipyards.
Just as "the Dragon " returned to England another party of Raleigh's colonists was approach- ing the American coast. There were about 150, including 17 women. John White, a man deft with water-colours, who had been the artist of Lane's expedition, was their governor. Their set- tlement was to be made on the shore of White's
Chesapeake Bay, but first they must stop Roanoke Island, 1587.
colony on
at Roanoke Island and pick up the fifteen men left on watch by Grenville. Through some carelessness or misunderstanding or bad faith on the part of the convoy, the people once landed were left in the lurch with only one small vessel, and thus were obliged to stay on that fatal Roan- oke Island. They soon found that Grenville's little guard had been massacred by red men. It was under these gloomy circumstances that the first child of English parents was born on the soil of the United States. The governor's daughter Eleanor was wife of Ananias Dare, and their little girl, born August 18, 1587, was named Virginia. Before she was ten days old her grandfather found it necessary to take the ship and return to England for help.
1691994
But the day of judgment for Spain and Eng- land was at hand, and lesser things must wait. Amid the turmoil of military preparation, Sir Walter was not unmindful of his little colony. Twice he fitted out relief expeditions, but the first
1 Froude, History of England, xii. 392.
4
36
OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
was stopped because all the ships were seized for government service, and the second was driven back into port by Spanish cruisers. While the anxious governor waited through the lengthening days into the summer of 1588, there came. ble Armada, with its imperious haste, its deadly agony The Invinci- 1588. and fury, its world-astounding triumph, the event most tremendous, perhaps, that mankind have witnessed since the star of the Wise Men stood over the stable at Bethlehem. Then you might have seen the sea kings working in good fellowship together, -- Drake and Hawkins, Winter and Fro- bisher, with Howard of Effingham in the Channel fleet ; Raleigh and Grenville active alike in council and afield; the two great ministers, Burghley and Walsingham, ever crafty and vigilant ; and in the background on her white palfrey the eccentric figure of the strangely wayward and wilful but always brave and patriotic Queen. Even after three centuries it is with bated breath that we watch those 130 black hulks coming up the Chan- nel, with 3,000 cannon and 30,000 men on board, among them ninety executioners withal, equipped with racks and thumbscrews, to inaugurate on English soil the accursed work of the Inquisition. In camp at Dunkirk the greatest general of the age, Alexander Farnese, with 35,000 veterans is crouching for a spring, like a still greater general at Boulogne in later days ; and one wonders if the 80.000 raw militia slowly mustering in the busy little towns and green hamlets of England can withstand these well-trained warriors.
In the English fleet there were about as many
37
THE SEA KINGS.
ships as the enemy had, much smaller in size and inferior in weight of metal, but at the same time far more nimble in movement. Of cannon and men the English had scarcely half as many as the Spaniards, but this disparity was more than offset by one great advantage. Our forefathers had already begun to display the inventive ingenuity for which their descendants in both hemispheres have since become preeminent. Many of their ships were armed with new guns, of longer range than any hitherto known, and this advantage, combined with their greater nimbleness, made it possible in many cases to pound a Spanish ship to pieces without receiving any serious hurt Defeat of the Invinci- ble Armada.
in return. In such respects, as well as in the seamanship by which the two fleets
were handled, it was modern intelligence pitted against mediaval chivalry. Such captains as served Elizabeth were not reared under the blighting shadow of the Escurial. With the discomfiture of the Invincible Armada before Dunkirk, the army of Farnese at once became useless for invading England. Then came the awful discovery that the mighty fleet was penned up in the German Ocean, for Drake held the Strait of Dover in his iron grip. The horrors of the long retreat through northern seas have never been equalled save when Napoleon's hosts were shattered in Russia. In the disparity of losses, as in the immensity of the issues at stake, we are reminded of the Greeks and Persians at Salamis ; of Spaniards more than 20,000 perished, but scarcely 100 Englishmen. The frightful loss of ships and guns announced the
38 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
overthrow of Spanish supremacy, but the bitter end was yet to come. During the next three years the activity of the sea kings reached such a pitch that more than 800 Spanish ships were destroyed.1 The final blow came soon after the deaths Battle of Cadiz, 1596. of Drake and Hawkins in 1596, when Raleigh, with the Earl of Essex and Lord Thomas Howard, destroyed the Spanish fleet in that great battle before Cadiz whereof Raleigh wrote that "if any man had a desire to see Hell itself, it was there most lively figured." 2
It was not until March, 1591, that Governor White succeeded in getting to sea again for the rescue of his family and friends. He had to go as passenger in a West Indiaman. When he landed, upon the return voyage, at Roanoke Island, it was just in time to have celebrated his little grandchild's fourth birthday. It had been agreed that should the colonists leave that spot they should carve upon a tree the name of the place to which they were going, and if they should add to the name a cross it would be understood as a signal of distress.
Mystery of the fate of White's colony. When White arrived he found grass growing in the deserted blockhouse. Under the cedars hard by five chests had been buried, and somebody had afterwards dug them up and rifled them. Fragments of his own books and pictures lay scattered about. On a great tree was cut in big letters, but without any cross, the word CROATAN, which was the name of a neighbouring
1 Brown's Genesis. i. 20.
2 Stebbing's Ralegh, p. 129.
39
THE SEA KINGS.
island. The captain of the ship was at first willing to take White to Croatan, but a fierce storm over- took him and after beating about for some days he insisted upon making for England in spite of the poor man's entreaties. No more did White ever hear of his loved ones. Sixteen years afterward the settlers at Jamestown were told by Indians that the white people abandoned at Roanoke had mingled with the natives and lived with them for some years on amicable terms until at the insti- gation of certain medicine-men (who probably accused them of witchcraft) they had all been murdered, except four men, two boys, and a young woman, who were spared by request or order of a chief. Whether this young woman was Virginia Dare, the first American girl, we have no means of knowing.1
Nothing could better illustrate than the pathetic fate of this little colony how necessary it was to destroy the naval power of Spain before Significance of the defeat England could occupy the soil of North of the Armada.
America. The defeat of the Invincible Armada was the opening event in the history of the United States. It was the event that made all the rest possible. Without it the attempts at Jamestown and Plymouth could hardly have had more success than the attempt at Roanoke Island. An infant colony is like an army at the end of a long line of communications; it perishes if the
1 The fate of White's colony has been a subject for speculation even to the present day ; and attempts have been made to detect ity half-breed descendants among the existing population of North Carolina. The evidence, however, is too frail to support the conclusions.
40 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
line is cut. Before England could plant thriving states in America she must control the ocean routes. The far-sighted Raleigh understood the conditions of the problem. When he smote the Spaniards at Cadiz he knew it was a blow struck for America. He felt the full significance of the defeat of the Armada, and in spite of all his dis- appointments with Virginia, he never lost heart. In 1602 he wrote to Sir Robert Cecil, " I shall yet live to see it an English nation."
In the following chapters we shall see how Raleigh's brave words came true.
CHAPTER IL.
A DISCOURSE OF WESTERN PLANTING.
IN all the history of human knowledge there is no more fascinating chapter than that which deals with the gradual expansion of men's geographical ideas consequent upon the great voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is not a tale so written that he who runs may read it, but its events have rather to be slowly deciphered from hundreds of quaint old maps, whereon islands and continents, mountains and rivers, are delineated with very slight resemblance to what we now know to be the reality; where, for instance. Gog and Magog show a strong tendency Sixteenth century maps. to get mixed up with Memphremagog, where the capital of China stands a few hundred miles north of the eity of Mexico, and your eye falls upon a river which you feel sure is the St. Lawrence until you learn that it is meant for the Yang-tse-Kiang. In the sixteenth century scarcely any intellectual stimulus could be found more po- tent than the sight of such maps, revealing un- known lands, or cities and rivers with strange names, places of which many marvels had been recounted and almost anything might be believed.
One afternoon in the year 1568, the lawyer Richard Hakluyt was sitting at his desk in the
42 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
Middle Temple, with a number of such maps and sundry new books of cosmography spread out before him, when the door opened and his young consin and namesake, then a boy of sixteen study- ing at Westminster School, came into the room. The elder Richard opened the Bible at the 107th Psalm, and pointed to the verses which declare that " they which go downe to the sea in ships and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep; " then he called the lad's attention to the maps, in which he soon became absorbed. This incident determined Richard the career of the younger Richard Hak-
Hakluyt. luyt, and led to his playing an important part in the beginnings of the United States of America. A learned and sagacious writer upon American history, Mr. Doyle, of All Souls Col- lege, Oxford, has truly said that it is "hard to estimate at its full value the debt which succeeding generations owe to Richard Hakluyt."1 In 1570 he became a student at Christ Church, Oxford. and took his master's degree in 1577. His book called " Divers Voyages," dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, was published in 1582. From 1583 to 1588 he was chaplain of the English legation at Paris, and before his return he was appointed canon of Bristol. an office which he held till 1605. Thus for many years he lived in the city of the Cabots, the cradle of the new era of maritime ad- venture. He came to be recognized as one of the foremost geographers of the age and the greatest living English authority on matters relating to the
1 Doyle, Virginia, etc. p. 100.
A DISCOURSE OF WESTERN PLANTING. 43
New World. The year following the defeat of the Armada witnessed the publication of his book enti- tled " Principal Voyages," which Froude well calls " the prose epic of the modern English nation." 1 In 1605 he was made a prebendary of Westmin- ster, and eleven years later was buried with distin- guished honours beneath the pavement of the great Abbey.
The book of Hakluyt's which here most nearly concerns us is the "Discourse of Western Plant- ing," written in 1584, shortly before the return of the ships of Amidas and Barlow from Roanoke Island. It was not published, nor was immediate publication its aim. It was intended to influence the mind of Queen Elizabeth. The manuscript was handed to her about September, 1584, and after a while was lost sight of until after a long period of oblivion it turned up in the Adventures
library of Sir Peter Thomson, an inde- of a manu- script.
fatigable collector of literary treasures,
who died in 1770. It was bought from his family by Lord Valentia, after whose death it passed into the hands of the famous bibliophile Henry Stevens, who sold it to Sir Thomas Phillips for his vast collection of archives at Thirlestane House, Chel- tenham. In 1869 a copy of it was made for Dr. Leonard Woods, President of Bowdoin College, by whom it was ably edited for the Maine Historical Society ; and at length, in 1877, after a sleep of nearly three centuries, it was printed at our New England Cambridge, at the University Press, and
1 Hakluyt's Discourse of Western Planting (in Maine Hist. Soc. Coll.), Cambridge, IST7, p. x.
44 OLD VIRGINIA AND HIER NEIGHBOURS.
published with valuable notes by the late Dr. Charles Deane.
Hakluyt wrote this document at the request of Raleigh, who wished to persuade the queen to in- vest money in a colonizing expedition to the New World. Such an enterprise, he felt, was too great for any individual purse and needed support from government. No one had studied the subject so thoroughly as Hakluyt, and so Raleigh enlisted his serviees. In twenty-one brief chapters Hakluyt sets forth the various reasons why England should plant colonies on the coast of North America. The chief reasons are that such colonies will Reasons for
planting enlarge the occasions and facilities for
English col-
onies in driving Spanish ships from the New- America. foundland fisheries and capturing Span- ish treasure on its way from Mexico and the isth- mus of Darien ; they will be serviceable as stations toward the discovery and use of the northwest pas- sage to Cathay ; after a while they will furnish a valuable market for the products of English in- dustry, especially woollen and linen cloths : they will increase the royal revenue by customs duties ; they will afford new material for the growth of the navy ; and in various ways they will relieve England of its idlers and vagrants by finding occu- pation for then abroad. In his terse quaint way, the writer emphasizes these points. As for the Spanish king, " if you touche him in the Indies you touche the apple of his eye : for take away his treasure, which is nervus belli, and which he hath almoste [all] out of his West Indies, his olde bandes of souldiers will soone be dissolved, his pur-
A DISCOURSE OF WESTERN PLANTING. 45
poses defeated, . his pride abated, and his tyranie utterly suppressed." "He shall be left bare as Esop's proude crowe." With regard to creating a new market he says: "Nowe if her Majestie take these westerne discoveries in hande, and plant there, yt is like that in short time wee shall vente as greate a masse of clothe yn those partes as ever wee did in the Netherlandes, and in tyme moche more." In this connection he gives a striking illustration of the closeness of the commer- cial ties which had been knit between England and the Low Countries in the course of the long alli- ance with the House of Burgundy. In 1550, when Charles V. proposed to introduce the Spanish In- quisition into the Netherlands, it was objected that all English merchants would then quit the country, and the English trade would be English trade with . the Nether- lands. grievously diminished. At this sugges- tion, "search was made what profite there came and comoditie grewe by the haunte of the Englishe marchantes. Then it was founde by searche and enquirie, that within the towne of Ant- werpe alone there were 14,000 persons fedde and mayneteyned onlye by the workinge of English commodities, besides the gaines that marchantes and shippers with other in the said towne did gett. which was the greatest part of their lyvinge, which were thoughte to be in nomber halfe as many more ; and in all other places of his Netherlandes by the indraping of Englishe woll into elothe, and by the working of other Englishe comodities, there were 30,000 persons more mayneteyned and fedd; which in all amounteth to the nomber of 51,000
46
OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
persons." When this report was given to Charles V. it led him to pause and consider, as well it might.
According to Hakluyt an English colony in America would soon afford as good a market for An Ameri- English labour as the Netherlands. He
can market. was impressed with the belief that the population of England was fast outrunning its means of subsistence. Now if the surplus of popu- lation could be drawn to America it would find occupation in raising the products of that new soil to exchange for commodities from England, and this exchange in its turn would increase the de- mand for English commodities and for the labour which produced them, so that fewer people in England would be left without employment. Such is Hakluyt's idea, though he nowhere states it quite so formally. It is interesting because there is no doubt that he was not alone in holding such views. There was in many quarters a feeling that, with its population of about 5,000,000, England was getting to be over-peopled. This was probably because for some time past the supply of food and the supply of work had both been diminishing relatively to the number of people. For more than a century the wool trade had been waxing so profitable that great tracts of land which had for- merly been subject to tillage were year by year
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