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In an era when North America was an unknown and mysterious place, it took many voyages, many explorers, the profit motive and a hefty dose of global politics to set the stage for the first Jamestown settlers. By Clint Schemmer Date published: 6/3/2006
VER HEARD of Sir Humphrey Gilbert? No? Well, you should have. For Gilbert, a gutsy if improbable adventurer, helped get the ball rolling when it came to England's colonization of the New World. If you like how America turned out, you're in his debt. The continent was then more remote from Europe, in Europeans' experience, than the moon is from humans today. The place was 3,000 miles distant, and only a handful of men from the Old World had laid eyes on the new one. The Atlantic coast on their maps bore little resemblance to the one we know today, and North America's interior was largely a big blank space. But Gilbert, ensconced in his study near London's River Thames, had dreamed of overseas projects and adventures since childhood. As an energetic man in the Elizabethan court, he persuaded the queen to license him to explore and settle all lands not already possessed by other European nations. That grant "became a template for the future Anglo-America," writes historian Walter A. McDougall. It indicated that the Atlantic coast could become English territory, said that the colonists would remain English subjects with common-law rights, and let them keep most of what their labor produced. Gilbert's first try at landing men in America, in 1578, was a bust and consumed most of his fortune. But he hit on a sure-fire gimmick, selling estates in America to the highest bidder, complete with semifeudal powers. With strokes of his quill, he subdivided America, selling off 81/2 million acres in just eight months. Unfortunately, his second expedition failed, too. His mariners reconnoitered only a small part of the Atlantic coast (Newfoundland, which he claimed for Elizabeth on Aug. 5, 1583, founding Britain's overseas empire), and his colonists rebelled at settling such a cold and rocky land. To top it off, on the way home, Gilbert and his ship the Squirrel disappeared in a storm near the Azores. That tragedy led, in time, to another vanishing act--that of North Carolina's Lost Colony. Gilbert, of course, had hardly been the only one dreaming about this distant land. You could say that began with Vikings, when they settled in Newfoundland about A.D. 1,000; or Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean 500 years later; or Hernán Cortes exploring Mexico a few years after that. More likely the last.
Date published: 6/3/2006
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