A Note to the Reader

There are a number of particular issues involved in writing and reading about the people, events, and ideas of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century that we have made decisions about and that the reader should know about.

Spelling, Writing, and Printing. There was little consistency of spelling, capitalization, grammar, or printing during this period. English was only gradually becoming the standard written language of England, where educated people had long preferred to write and publish in Latin. In 1516, Sir Thomas More chose to write Utopia in Latin. It was not until 1551 that it was translated into English. By 1582, Richard Mulcaster, who memorably described Elizabeth I’s coronation procession, was calling for an English dictionary, noting that “I do not think that any language… is better able to utter all arguments, either with more pith, or greater plainness, than our English tongue is.” By way of emphasis, he stated: “I honor the Latin, but I worship the English.”¹ It was not until 1604, however, that the first English dictionary was compiled. This tracked many of the new words flooding into the language—not least because of the exploits of the merchant adventurers and their colonial commanders. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the “number of words ‘available’ to speakers of English more than doubled between 1550 and 1650.”²

William Shakespeare, who was born and died during this period, introduced many new words—precisely 1,489, according to the OED.³ Richard Eden introduced words such as “China” and “colony.” Several of the English visitors to North America made a point of collecting Indian words. John Smith, for example, was responsible for introducing “tomahawk,” “moccasin,” and “raccoon,” while others introduced “caribou,” “moose,” “papoose,” “powwow,” “squaw,” “terrapin,” and “wigwam.”⁴ Given the rapid growth of the number of words, it is little wonder that there was inconsistency and complication in the usage and capturing of the English language.

There were other contributing factors. People spelled words phonetically and pronounced them as their particular dialect or regional accent propelled them to; publishers and printers followed their own rules of spelling and punctuation. The result was often a lexical shambles on the page that can be both astonishing and sometimes amusing to read—or try to read. Martin Frobisher’s last name was spelled in at least a dozen different ways, many of them by Frobisher himself, and often within the same text: we find Martyne Furbisher, for example, and Ffurbisher and Captayne Frobysher.⁵ Walter Ralegh was another famous man whose name was spelled in various ways. We have chosen to spell the great courtier’s name with the spelling that he tended to use: Ralegh, not the more standard modern spelling, Raleigh.

In one text, the word “miner” is spelled “moyener” and the word “ore” as “ewr,” probably manifesting the vowels of a West Countryman.⁶ Also, the skills of the editors, publishers, and printers (often one and the same person) are thrown into high relief on the page. In Daniel Tucker’s account of the 1606 voyage of Richard Challons, there is the phrase “we a Rived at a niland” for “we arrived at an island,” which could easily have been corrected in the editing process.⁷

Writers and printers of the day also used a number of marks and shortcuts that are unfamiliar today, such as shortening the word “which” into the space-saving w^ch or indicating a double consonant with a dash: . The letter “s” is often printed with a character that looks to the modern reader like an “f”; a “u” often is printed as a “v”; an “i” indicates a “j.” So the word “subject” might be printed “fubie.” “Ing” endings often gain an “e,” as in “promisinge.” Publishers, especially in the earlier years of this period, might print an entire page of text with no indentations or paragraph breaks, and rarely a comma or period. One likely reason that Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, first published in 1589, gained popularity was that the spelling was reasonably consistent and the printing and layout made the accounts relatively easy to read. By this time, printing—introduced into England in 1476 by William Caxton, a cloth merchant and governor of the Merchant Adventurers in Bruges (before the staple moved to Antwerp)—was a well-established technology.

Some of the materials for this book were produced by non-native speakers, such as Bernardino de Mendoza, Spain’s ambassador to England for many years, and one of his successors, Pedro de Zúñiga—and they, too, sometimes offer revealing hints about pronunciation and spelling conventions. Zúñiga, for example, wrote to Philip III with news about an English gentleman he referred to as “Vatarrales,” meaning—of course—Walter Ralegh.⁸

Given all this, we have generally modernized the original language. In some cases, however, we have retained the original spelling where it was comprehensible and added some meaning or color to the phrase—for example, Dee’s “ilandish” empire or Christopher Newport’s arm, which was “strooken off” in a sea battle.

Names (1): Indians. Columbus gave the name Indians to the people living in the islands when he first reached the New World in 1492, because he hoped and believed he had arrived in India or the East Indies, although he hadn’t. For Europeans, the name stuck for people living in all parts of the New World, including what were then called Peru, Brazil, the West Indies, New Spain, Florida, Virginia, and New France. English people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries referred to the people of the New World with a variety of other terms, none of which are now tolerable.

Today, a number of terms are used, including Native Americans, Amerindians, indigenous peoples or, whenever possible, the name of a specific tribe of peoples, such as Incans or Aztecs, Algonquins, Abenakis, or Inuits. Even during the period of this book, some European visitors to the New World took the trouble to understand and name the local peoples. In his Generall Historie, John Smith was careful to list some thirty different New England tribal or regional names, from the Penobscot in the north to the Massachusett in the south.⁹

We have embraced the reasoning of Charles Mann, who uses the word “Indian” in his books 1491 and 1493 for the simple and irrefutable reason that, as he puts it, “The overwhelming majority of the indigenous peoples whom I have met in both North and South America describe themselves as Indians.”¹⁰

Names (2): Aristocratic Titles. We have used family names for people with titles, while often including the title, as well. This is to avoid the problem of having to keep track of a succession of titles and remembering that William Cecil, for example, was one and the same as Lord Burghley, also known as Baron Burghley and sometimes referred to simply as Burghley, whose son was Robert Cecil, who became the first Earl of Salisbury.

Money. We have made no attempt to convert coinage, currency values, or other monetary amounts or financial data into modern-day equivalents because of the great complexity involved and the ultimate futility of the exercise. Our hope is that the reader will gradually get a relative sense of the economy and money and values, through the many examples of costs, investments, incomes, losses, and the like—such as the cost of a suit of armor (£25) or a ship (the Bark Raleigh was valued at £2,000); a meager annual income (£8 for a laborer) and a high-end annual salary (£100 for Walsingham as secretary of state); the cost of an overseas venture (£1,500 to £7,000 or so) and the value of a fortune (the £150,000 estimate of the Madre de Dios prize).

Distances. There was little standard measurement of much of anything in those days on land or at sea. Distances might be measured by “days walked” or the length of a cannonball’s travel. Measures that sound standard were not. A league, for example, was calculated differently in different cultures. One was as one-twenty-fifth of a degree of latitude, or about 2.6 miles. A mariner’s league was one-twentieth of a degree. A day’s horseback ride was typically figured as seven leagues.¹¹ Distances at sea are almost impossible to figure, because no ship traveled in a straight line between two points, so time is a better comparative measure.

Dates. Until 1582, the countries of Western Europe followed the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BC and accepted by the Christian Roman emperor Constantine I in AD 325. But then, Pope Gregory XIII introduced a new calendar, and overnight, the calendar leapt forward by ten days. The purpose was to synchronize the holy and feast days with the equinoxes and solstices—after more than one thousand years, they had drifted apart. In particular, the Pope wanted to fix the date of Easter. Spain, as a dutiful Catholic nation, introduced the so-called Gregorian calendar across its empire. France followed suit. But England, deeming this to be a Catholic plot, refused to change its calendar. John Dee was asked to devise an alternative calendar. This he did, calling it “Queen Elizabeth’s Perpetual Calendar,” fixing the meridian in London and thereby making the Protestant English master of time. But, for various reasons, Dee’s calendar was not introduced. It would not be until 1752 that England finally adopted the Gregorian calendar, by which time the calendar had to leap forward by eleven days. So, throughout this book, we use the Julian, or Old Style, dating system—with one difference: the year is assumed to have begun on January 1 rather than March 25.¹²