Good sailors sing songs of lassies and
bravery and fortune
How the sea fills their hearts with the
courage to do mighty deeds
It commenced in the late 16th
century, the trickle from England to the esoteric New World. Sir Walter Raleigh
was granted a charter by Queen Elizabeth in 1583; it granted him the right to
establish a colony in America. In fact, it demanded he establish a colony or he
would lose the right to colonization in America. He was granted the charter
after his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, drowned in the Atlantic Ocean
attempting to colonize America himself. His attempts to reap wealth from
America resulted in his death, giving Raleigh the opportunity to claim a colony
for England.
Gilbert spent his time traveling and
planning maritime adventures, a headstrong man with a sense of adventure and
money. He proposed the idea of a northwest passage to Japan and the oriental
coast over the north section of America in 1566. The plan was to more easily
acquire spices and silk, extremely valuable and rare commodities in Europe (The
Ottoman Empire greatly restricted travel by land with their control of Constantinople
in 14531).
A single bag of these commodities would give a sailor enough money to buy a home
with excess to spare. He believed that, “if England secured such a route, she
would establish herself as a major commercial power and eventually come to
rival Spain’s rapidly growing overseas empire.”2
This idea was not enough to convince people to invest in a voyage to discover
if the passage actually existed though.
A decade later, the mid-1570’s, he
used privateering as his new reason to voyage to America, this time to
establish a colony that would essentially serve as a base to raid and plunder
Spanish ships. Spain was a powerful nation that was gaining enormous wealth
from the West Indies and Central America. This time his proposal was taken more
seriously, partially because relations between Spain and England were
precarious and war loomed on the horizon. In 1578 Gilbert is granted an
exclusive, and temporary, patent by Queen Elizabeth to discover and colonize
American lands not yet inhabited by Spain.3
He must make a discovery and plant a new colony within six years or he would
lose his exclusive patent on the New World.
It is important to say that Sir
Humphrey was not alone in sculpting this plan; he had strong support from his
brother and two brilliant promoters of oversea ventures. Sir Walter Raleigh was
a young man at the time, about twenty four at the time, and eager to aid his
brother in this endeavor (He would even raise £2,000 for the Bark Raleigh in 15834, a swift ship for the expedition to
America). The minds they planned the voyage with were the two Richard Hakluyt’s
(they were cousins), strong proponents of oversea colonization.
Just a few months after the patent
was granted, Gilbert formed a fleet of eleven ships and 500 men to sail over
the Atlantic Ocean, their exact destination unknown. Gilbert and Raleigh headed
the expedition which began to unravel before it even left port, beginning with
three of the ships suddenly dropping out of the expedition. Through this and
the weather, the expedition was stalled two months and finally left port in
November, traveling up the coast to Ireland to take on more supplies. The
amount of time spent in Ireland is unknown, but the adverse winds and weather
eventually forced him back to England; he was not even able to leave the coast
on his first attempt. Raleigh did not return with his brother to England, he
sailed and fought Spanish ships. He returned to England in 1579, having
suffered heavy losses.5
As a result of this disaster, Sir
Humphrey Gilbert dispatched a small frigate on a reconnaissance mission led by
mariner Simon Fernandez in 1580. Fernandez was previously a Spanish trained
navigator who turned rogue and lived as a pirate, he was arrested and sentence
to the hangman’s noose in 1577, but was never hanged. He was released by Sir
Francis Walsingham (Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster), and began working for the
English crown. A year after his release he aided Gilbert on his first attempt
to reach America and became an essential cog to the American expeditions across
the Atlantic for the next decade.6
The voyage was a success, with Fernandez
traveling along the North American coast and returning before the end of
summer. This trip strengthened Gilberts resolve and he was determined to
attempt to reach America before his exclusive patent expired in 1583.7
Gilbert planned to leave in the fall of 1582, but bad weather scuttled this
voyage before he was ever able to leave port. It was not until the following
year that a fleet of five ships successfully sailed to America; the Bark Raleigh, the Delight, the Golden Hind,
the Swallow and the Squirrel. The Delight was Gilbert’s flagship and the Squirrel was the smallest in the fleet.
Only a few days passed before the Bark Raleigh turned back because of
sickness among the crew and possibly fears about its sea worthiness as well.
The rest of the fleet trekked on towards Newfoundland, an opportunity for Sir
Humphrey Gilbert to take on new supplies and possibly even raid some fishing ships.
In only a month, he arrived at St. John’s Harbor, the largest port on the island.
It was a multi-cultural town; French, Spanish, English and Portuguese vessels
traded peacefully in the area. Initially Gilbert was feared to be a marauder
and was not allowed in the harbor, but after some reassurance he was allowed
in. He erected a tent and formally annexed the region in the name of the queen
after he landed, Gilbert claimed their land was now English and under his
control as a result of the grant given to him. This disregarded the fact that
his patent prohibited him from claiming existing territory in the name of the
queen, which thus left his claim void.
After weeks of prospecting and
surveys, Gilbert planned to move on. He had a serious problem with the expedition
unraveling and with himself having little ability to stop it. Diseases and
sickness permeated the crew and others deserted, support for Gilbert was waning
and rumors of dissention trickled though the ranks. He attempted to solve this
problem by sending the Swallow loaded
with the sick and unruly sailors back to England. He then took the remaining fleet and sailed
towards Cape Breton and the American cost with his three remaining ships.8
Continuing
south, the Delight ran aground off
Nova Scotia. This sent eighty men to their deaths and ruined Gilbert’s maps and
notes of the exploration in Newfoundland. Supplies were precariously low and the men
refused to continue on as Gilbert wished, instead they sailed the dwindling
fleet back to England. Sir Humphrey Gilbert kept an optimistic spirit on the
journey home, despite the fact he lost a fortune when the Delight sunk. On his way home the ships ran through a furious
storm, with the Squirrel, the
smallest of the fleet, sinking. This ship was the very one Gilbert now resided
on, and he refused to leave when the storm was upon them. The captain of the Golden Hind, Edward Heyes, showed
horror, “For in that moment, the frigate was devoured and swallowed up of the
sea.”9
Gilbert was, as Queen Elizabeth notably said, “a man noted of not good hap
[fortune] by seas.”10
Gilbert drowned in the summer of ’83,
and during the fall the exclusive patent to colonize America was given to Sir
Walter Raleigh. Raleigh made the decision to replace his half-brother as the
forefront person in going the America and resist the growing domination by the Spanish
dominion. For the next year, Raleigh turned his quarters at Durham House into a
station for mariners, promoters and scholars. The Hakluyt’s, John White, Thomas
Hariot, Simon Fernandez and others were recruited to draft plans for sailing to
America. It was from this that the voyages for Roanoke began; navigation
routes, mathematics and support for the multiple voyages and the beginning of
English presence in the New World exploded from this.11
[1] Eversley, Lord, The
Turkish Empire from 1288 to 1914 (1924), p. 2
[2] Horn,
James, A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic
History of the Lost Colony (2010) p. 8
[3]
Hakluyt, Richard, Principall Navigations
(1600), p. 135-37
[4]
Tarbox, Increase, Sir Walter Raleigh (1884), p. 29
[5]
Quinn, David B., Voyages and Colonizing
Enterprises (1967), p. 39-48
[6]
Miller, Lee, Roanoke: Solving the Mystery
of the Lost Colony (2000), p. 171
[7]
Quinn, David B., Set Fair for Roanoke (1985),
p. 7
[8] Horn,
James, A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and
Tragic History of the Lost Colony (2010) p. 30
[9] Hakluyt,
Richard, Principall Navigations (1589), p. 296
[10]
Andrews, Kenneth, Trade, Plunder and
Settlement (1984), p. 194-97
[11] Quinn,
David B., Set Fair for Roanoke (1985),
p. 7-9, 45-46
