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Westward ENTERPRISE Queen Elizabeth's sea dogs spark the beginning of overseas empire

June 3, 2006 2:19 am

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.

Cortes hit the jackpot when he toppled Moctezuma, seized all the gold he could, and started shipping it back to Spain. Those treasures fattened King Philip II's coffers and made his nation the richest and most powerful of the age. Everyone took notice, and gold fever set in.

Privateers were dispatched by France and England to plunder Spain's treasure fleets whenever they could.

Sir Francis Drake was one of them. He's best known for boldly circumnavigating the globe from 1577 to 1580. But what endeared him to Elizabeth I was his capture of a half-million pounds sterling in Spanish bullion.

European nations had started trying to divide up their discoveries even before Columbus, with an agreement between Castile and Portugal in 1479. "European imperialism was from its inception akin to a great game of Monopoly," McDougall writes. "The first to land on a square got to purchase the property and could lose claim to it only through bankruptcy. The game board proved far larger than anyone dreamed."

England started playing in 1497 and 1508, when Bristol merchants backed explorer John Cabot and his son Sebastian, who became the first Europeans since the Vikings to eyeball North America. Thanks to them, Bretons began to fish cod from the Grand Banks off Newfoundland and England claimed possession of all of North America, since Cabot had planted its flag on the continent's soil.

French king Francis I challenged Spain and Portugal for a piece of the prize, declaring, "I should like to see the clause of Adam's will which excludes me from a share of the world." France tried colonizing Florida and Canada, but Spain wouldn't hear of relaxing its hold on "the Indies."

England, a weak upstart, wanted in on the goodies, too.

Henry VIII and his successors advanced England's weaponry, inventing cast-iron cannon with greater range and mounting them on England's sailing vessels, which were lighter and more nimble than Spain's hulking galleons.

The kingdom's merchants created trading firms--beginning with the Muscovy Company in 1554, followed by many others (including the Africa, East Indies, London and Virginia companies)--to capitalize on the commodities to be found in foreign lands. Short on navigational know-how, they stole maritime intelligence from other nations, helped cartographers create more accurate maps and hired mathematicians to write texts on the science of way-finding.

This mix of science, spying and investment let England leapfrog ahead, enabling it to become one of the Renaissance's great sea power in only a few years.

When Drake returned to Plymouth in 1580 in the Golden Hind, his ships loaded with Spanish booty, Elizabeth took the gloves off. The Protestant monarch refused to recognize the pope's gift of the New World to Spain, saying: "Prescription without possession in not valid. All are at liberty to navigate since the use of the sea and the air are common to all." (We've come to know this principle as "freedom of the seas.")

America was up for grabs.

Spain had a lock on Florida, having kicked out the French in 1564. But England's entrepreneurs figured the coast well to the north--where Gilbert's hopes lay--was a safe bet.

When Gilbert went down with the ship, his half brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, stepped forward to continue the enterprise--and with even bigger and bolder plans.

A swashbuckler with experience fighting in Ireland and against French Catholics, Raleigh (which he spelled as Ralegh) gained the queen's ear at 26. The Devonshire ladder-climber's flirtatious wooing of Elizabeth is the stuff of legend.

Their close relationship enriched Raleigh, gave him titles ("vice admiral of the West" was one) and, by age 30, had set him up in a mansion on the Thames. That residence, Durham House, became what one historian has called "the first think tank."

From the top of one of the turrets, Raleigh watched traffic on the river below and summoned experts to advise him on his quest to establish the first English colony in America. Elizabeth had transferred Gilbert's American grant to him.

One of those experts was Thomas Hariot, an old friend of Raleigh's from their Oxford days. A mathematician and astronomer who rivaled Galileo, he rose to prominence in Elizabeth's court on his sheer brilliance. At Durham House he was given a chamber under the eaves, set up his telescope to watch the heavens, and trained mariners in navigation using the sun, a compass and his formulaic breakthroughs.

Another in Raleigh's circle, colonial enthusiast Richard Hakluyt (the Younger), borrowed an idea from an early French expedition--to take an Indian hostage, teach him English and pump him for details about America. Raleigh figured a tattooed Indian would make a sensation in the Elizabethan court. (Historian William R. Polk, in his new work "The Birth of America," estimates that altogether, Raleigh brought as many as 20 Indians to London to be taught English.)

First, Raleigh sent Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, two captains he and Hariot had trained, across the Atlantic. These scouts found Pamlico Sound, landed, took possession for the queen, and introduced themselves to the natives. The Indians made them feel welcome, and Barlowe anchored off a small island for five weeks, using it as a base for exploration. He decided the isle, Roanoke, was the best place to plant a future colony.

Heeding Hakluyt's advice, the captains set sail for England with two new passengers--tribesmen named Wanchese and Manteo. They arrived home in September 1584 with reports of "a most Pleasant and fertile ground."

In a flash, Raleigh's circle was touting America as the new Eden. The two Indians were introduced at court. Hariot taught them some English, pumped Manteo for information, and became fairly fluent in Algonquian.

Elizabeth was pleased. She chose to give the country across the ocean a new name--Virginia, in honor of herself, the Virgin Queen; awarded Raleigh a lavish patent on the territory; and at Greenwich palace in 1585, knighted her champion of the transatlantic enterprise.

Realizing he'd need a fortune to establish a colony, Raleigh had the gifted Hakluyt write a proposal for the queen, explaining why she should fund the venture. The result, "A Discourse of Western Planting; Certain reasons to induce her majesty and the state to take in hand the western voyage and the planting therein," is a masterful pitch for colonial expansion.

But Elizabeth, worried that war with Spain was about to break out, wasn't ready to invest in the scheme. She insisted on private financing, while lending political support.

In 1585, Raleigh sent seven ships commanded by his cousin, Sir Richard Grenville, and soldier Ralph Lane--with Hariot and artist-cartographer John White also on board. Grenville dropped Lane on Roanoke in June 1585, but Lane's 108 colonists squabbled all that winter and ran low on food. They were glad to hitch a ride home with Sir Francis Drake, whose privateering fleet stopped by in June 1586.

Raleigh tried again in 1587. John White, now the colony's governor, left 120 men and women to establish the "Cittie of Raleigh" in Virginia, then headed back to get more supplies. His colonists were stranded when England requisitioned every available ship to battle the Spanish Armada.

It wasn't until three years later, after the Armada's defeat, that White was able to return to Roanoke. (In between, a Spanish ship sent to explore the Virginia coast found the abandoned English base, and assumed the English had given up.)

White found the camp looted and the word "C-R-O-A-T-O-A-N" carved on a post, leaving us all to wonder if his settlers were slaughtered by, or shacked up with, the natives.

Back in England, a lull in transatlantic efforts set in as the nation subdued Ireland, made peace with Spain, and saw the more risk-averse King James I succeed Elizabeth.

But Hariot's boosterish "A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia," illustrated with engravings based on White's watercolors, helped shore up support in London.

"Sometimes we made journeys farther into the mainland, and there we found the soil richer, the trees taller, the ground firmer, and the topsoil deeper," Hariot wrote. "We saw there more and larger fields and finer grass, as good as any in England. In some places the ground was high, rocky, and hilly, fruits grew plentifully, beasts lived in greater abundance, the country was more thickly populated, the towns and houses larger, and the communities better ruled."

Once peace with Spain came, Hakluyt, Raleigh, wealthy merchant Thomas Smyth and other investors wasted little time in reviving old projects. In 1606, they persuaded James to issue a royal charter granting their London and Plymouth companies the rights to plant colonies in New England and the Chesapeake. Raleigh turned over his royal patent to the Virginia Company of London.

Plymouth got out of the docks first, but its attempt flopped, the expedition abandoning its trading post on Maine's Kennebec River after the first frigid winter.

Some of the investors figured the Chesapeake, from the early reports, was a more hospitable place to plant a settlement--and a safe base from which to prey on Spanish shipping. Especially if their settlement was out of sight of the sea, far up some river.

The London merchants hired three ships--the 120-ton Susan Constant, the smaller Godspeed and the tiny Discovery--and a dependable seafarer, the one-armed Christopher Newport, veteran of White's Roanoke rescue mission in 1590, to lead them.

The fleet sailed from London before Christmas 1606, its 108 settlers mindful of the lost colonists but determined, this time, to succeed.

CLINT SCHEMMER is a staff writer with The Free Lance-Star.