12

WESTERN PLANTING

WITH GILBERT LOST, what would become of his patent?

The sorry news of Sir Humphrey’s demise catalyzed a flurry of activity. George Peckham expressed his desire to claim the land that Gilbert had granted to his father and enlisted some big names to support him—Frobisher, Hawkins, and Drake. But his venture went nowhere.¹ Then Christopher Carleill, grandson of Sir George Barne and stepson of Walsingham, put out his own tract arguing for the development of “the hithermost parts of America.” The land, he said, was “bigger than all Europe,” and since “the larger part [bent] Northward,” the local people “shall have wonderful great use of our said English Clothes.” At first, leading merchants of the Muscovy Company, which had fallen on lean times, showed some interest. But they would only invest on one condition: he had to secure letters patent from the queen.²

As was her wont, Elizabeth took her time to reach a decision. When, in March 1584, she finally issued new letters patent, they did not go to Peckham, Carleill, or the Muscovy Company. Instead, they went to Sir Humphrey’s half-brother and Elizabeth’s new favorite at court, Walter Ralegh. Seventeen years younger than Gilbert, he was now presented with a thrilling, if daunting, opportunity: to take up his brother’s unfulfilled quest to establish an English presence in America. It caused envy at court, the latest evidence that Elizabeth was besotted with the dashing soldier.

Ralegh had first come to prominence in Ireland four years earlier, distinguishing himself with a mix of valor and violence while serving in an English force sent to quell a Spanish-backed uprising in the rebellious kingdom. Afterward, he was sent to court, where he offered himself as an adviser on Irish affairs. Within a few months, he famously caught the queen’s eye with a memorable display of chivalry. As a later chronicler recounted it, the queen was out walking one day when she came to a “plashy,” puddly place. She hesitated and Ralegh made his move. He lay “his plush new coat on the ground, whereon the queen trod gently.” She rewarded him with “many suits” as recompense for his “free and seasonable tender of so fair a footcloth.”³

It was said Elizabeth came to love Ralegh “in preference to all others.”⁴ He was just the kind of “proper” man she most admired. Bursting with energy, beautiful in his “white satin doublet, all embroidered with rich pearls,” he was adored by the ladies of the court. Ralegh, too, “loved a wench well,” noted the antiquarian John Aubrey. The young courtier, he wrote, had once squired a queen’s maid “up against a tree in a wood.”

Elizabeth came to rely on Ralegh “as a kind of oracle.”⁵ Clever and bookish, he was “an indefatigable reader, whether by sea or land.” He “carried always a trunk of books along with him.”⁶ Like Gilbert, Ralegh had attended Oxford, studying at Oriel College. He went on to the Middle Temple, where he picked up a smattering of law and where he almost certainly came into contact with Richard Hakluyt, the elder.

The queen showered Ralegh with gifts, patents, and benefits. When his military commission had come to an end in 1583—which brought him an annual salary of at least six hundred pounds—Elizabeth granted Ralegh the leases of two fine estates owned by All Souls College Oxford, which he traded for ready money.⁷ He was awarded not only a patent to license vintners and sell wine but also a license to export undyed woolen broadcloth, giving him a lucrative slice of England’s most important industry. These were generous perquisites that became the bedrock of his wealth.

As icing for this very rich cake, Elizabeth granted Ralegh a grand residence—Durham House—situated on the north bank of the Thames and distinguished by castellated walls, turrets, a water gate onto the river, and a pleasant orchard. Built in the thirteenth century, it became the London residence of the bishops of Durham before being seized by Henry VIII in the 1530s during his assault on the church. By the early 1550s, it had been handed to John Dudley, who no doubt discussed the business of the Mysterie while he lived there.⁸

At Durham House, Ralegh established a kind of corporate headquarters where, as Aubrey reported, his study, “a little turret,” looked over the Thames, providing a “prospect which is pleasant perhaps as any in the world, and which not only refreshes the eyesight but cheers the spirits” but also “enlarges an ingenious man’s thoughts.”⁹

Ralegh, following the model set by his half-brother, brought together a number of expert advisers to help him plan a colonial venture. Among them was Thomas Harriot, a twenty-three-year-old mathematician and cosmographer in the John Dee mold. Although humbly born, Harriot had been well educated at St. Mary’s Hall, an Oxford institution later affiliated to Oriel, Ralegh’s alma mater.¹⁰ Ralegh engaged the young scholar toward the end of 1583, even before he received the letters patent, and installed him in rooms at Durham House adjacent to his own.

Like Dee before him, Harriot was hired to prepare three men that Ralegh had recruited to lead the first mission of his grand venture, a reconnaissance voyage to America: Philip Amadas, a nineteen-year-old from solid Devon gentry stock; Arthur Barlowe, a seasoned sea captain; and Simão Fernandes, the skilled Azores-born pilot and shipmaster who had sailed with Gilbert on his first voyage. Harriot prepared a navigational manual (now lost) called Arciton, and he conducted classes in cosmography and other new sciences.

In late April 1584, the three men set off with two small ships in search of a suitable location for settlement while Ralegh began planning for his own version of a fully-fledged colonial enterprise in America. He realized that if he was going to mount a successful expedition, he would need royal backing that went beyond the issuing of letters patent. Although he had Elizabeth’s ear, he needed to make a complete and convincing case to win her support. To help him prepare this, he turned, at Walsingham’s suggestion, to the man who was emerging as England’s foremost authority on America and its greatest cheerleader for colonization: Richard Hakluyt, the younger.

HAKLUYT, NOW AGED about thirty-two, had enjoyed great success with Divers Voyages, which was produced to promote Gilbert’s final, disastrous voyage. After its publication, Hakluyt was sent to Paris, on Walsingham’s recommendation. There, he served as chaplain and secretary to Sir Edward Stafford, newly appointed ambassador to France.

Even though Hakluyt had spent much of his life reading the works of great travelers, this was his first visit to a foreign country, and he got a taste of the hazards of long-distance travel. The journey from London to Paris took two weeks; the rough crossing of the English Channel alone left the party “sea-beaten” and “half dead.”¹¹

Hakluyt was not simply an ambassadorial assistant. He was, in effect, an operative in Walsingham’s intelligence network, charged with gathering information about America. As Hakluyt himself put it, he was expected to make a “diligent inquiry of such things as may yield light unto our Western discovery.” In this endeavor, he was extremely energetic. He interviewed countless New World experts, writing often about them for Walsingham. He inspected the furs of “sables, beavers, otters” brought back to France from Canada, worth five thousand crowns. He made the acquaintance of André Thevet, France’s royal cosmographer, and talked with him further about the Canadian fur trade. He met with Pierre Pena, a French botanist and Henry III’s physician, probably discussing the trade in herbal remedies coming from the New World. He visited an instrument maker, André Mayer, in Rouen, where he also took the opportunity to meet the merchant-explorer Étienne Bellenger, who had recently returned from a voyage to the northeast coast of America. And with Dom Antonio, the exiled pretender to the Portuguese throne, Hakluyt examined a map of the world showing the Northwest Passage.¹²

Hakluyt passed the useful information back to Walsingham, who, it seems, was often playing a double game when it came to overseas ventures: he wanted to help the country, yes, but he also wanted to enrich himself and those close to him. He had used his influence to help his son-in-law, Philip Sidney, gain an estate of 3 million acres in Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s fiefdom. Also, he had pushed his stepson Carleill’s project. But when that enterprise foundered, he threw his support behind Ralegh’s venture, encouraging him to draw on Hakluyt’s expertise.

When summoned to London, Hakluyt did not hesitate. He wrote to Walsingham that he was ready to fly from France to England “with the wings of Pegasus.” By July 1584, after just nine months in Paris, Hakluyt was back in England, and for the next two months, he labored intensively on the report, burning the midnight oil.¹³ The result was the first great English treatise on colonization: A Particuler Discourse Concerninge the Greate Necessitie and Manifolde Commodyties That Are Like to Growe to This Realme of Englande by the Westerne Discoueries Lately Attempted, Written in the Yere 1584, by Richarde Hackluyt of Oxforde. Today, it is known as the Discourse of Western Planting.

In the first week of October, Hakluyt presented the treatise to Elizabeth. Although only a handful of copies were made—and it was never published in Hakluyt’s lifetime—it delivered on its promise to present the case for colonization in the New World.^* In some ways, the rationale for overseas expansion—the problems facing England—had not changed since the dark days of 1549, when Sir Thomas Smith wrote his Discourse. English trade had become “beggarly” and even “dangerous,” Hakluyt wrote. In Spain, English merchants risked being seized and interrogated by the Inquisition. In the Mediterranean, pirates patrolled the North African, or Barbary, Coast. Doing business in Turkey, which controlled the western end of the Silk Road, was expensive. The Muscovy market, which had begun with so much hope, was now, after the death of Ivan in March 1584, full of uncertainty.¹⁴

Hakluyt’s proposed solution to England’s chronic problems was different than it had been in Smith’s day, when merchants had dreamed of Cathay. Now, Hakluyt argued, they should look to America. All the commodities of the Old World were available there—including fruits, wine grapes, flowers, fish, metals, furs, oil, sassafras, spices and drugs, and timber for furniture, weapons, and ships. And colonization would ease social problems. Planting colonies in America would require workers aplenty: shipbuilders, farmers, trappers, stoneworkers, fishermen, traders. Cottage industries—the knitting of woolen goods, for instance—could occupy women, children, the old, and the lame. Increased prosperity of one would benefit the commonwealth of all.

Not only would American colonization benefit England directly, it would reduce Spain’s dominance. In America, the English would be able to find good havens from which their ships could attack the Spanish treasure fleet. Given that the Indians of the region “do mortally hate the Spaniard,” they were sure to join the English in opposing the Iberian rulers. And the English would be able to get rich from mining and, as they surpassed Spain in wealth, make Philip a “laughing stock of the world.”

America was, therefore, the solution to many of England’s commercial, social, and political problems. But time was of the essence. Like Frobisher, Dee, and Gilbert before him, Hakluyt urged Elizabeth to make haste, lest England “come too late and a day after the fair.” Other nations had designs on America, and procrastination could mean England losing out to “enemies and doubtful friends.”

ON SEPTEMBER 15, just as Hakluyt was finishing up his Discourse on Western Planting, Amadas and Barlowe returned from their reconnaissance voyage. They brought home glowing reports of the land they had discovered in the New World and had claimed for England, since it was “not inhabited by any Christian Prince or Christian people.” Also, as Frobisher had done, they brought home living proof of their discovery: two Indians, Manteo and Wanchese, who could testify to the “singular great commodities” of the new land.¹⁵ But unlike the Inuits captured forcibly by Frobisher, the two native Americans seem to have been brought to England without coercion. They were presented at Elizabeth’s court, where onlookers gawped with a sense of wonder. One German aristocrat, on a tour of England, described the Indians as having a “countenance and stature like white Moors.” He marveled that, although “their usual habit was a mantle of rudely tanned skins of wild animals, no shirts, and a pelt before their privy parts,” they were “clad in brown taffeta” for the court visit.¹⁶

Barlowe presented Ralegh with a written account of the five-month expedition. After a two-month Atlantic crossing, the voyagers had sailed along the Florida coast until they came to the Outer Banks, a scattering of islands protected by natural sandbanks, and found a sheltered river entrance. They landed on Haterask, an island with “many goodly woods,” plenty of game, and “the highest, and reddest Cedars in the world.” Here, Barlowe reported, “the earth bringeth forth all things in abundance, as in the first creation, without toil or labour.” They claimed possession of the land in the name of Queen Elizabeth.¹⁷

A few days later, they had encountered some local people and, using sign language, asked them for the name of the country. “Wingandacoia,” was the word the English wrote down. Then, one of the Indians came aboard the flagship. The English “gave him a shirt, a hat, and some other things, and made him taste of our wine, and our meat, which he liked very well.” Soon enough, trading began, the English exchanging metal tools and utensils for the Indians’ deer skins and buffalo hides. With an undertone of disbelief, Barlowe reported that they traded “our tin dish for twenty skins, worth twenty Crownes, or twenty Nobles.”¹⁸ (A noble, the higher value coin, was worth about one-third of a pound.) In these dealings with the Indians, Barlowe wrote, “we found the people most gentle, loving, and faithful, void of all guile, and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the golden age.”¹⁹

After a while, Barlowe and a party of men had sailed north until they reached an island called Roanoke, just off the coast of what is now North Carolina. It looked promising as a location for a settlement, with its “fertile ground” and “goodly cedars” and other “sweet woods,” as well as grapes, flax, and other commodities.²⁰ Not only this, but it was tucked far enough inland so as to be out of view of passing Spanish ships and yet close enough to the ocean to launch raids on the Spanish treasure fleets.

Reading this encouraging reconnaissance report, Ralegh was moved to act quickly in order to protect his claim, and so, as he had recently been elected as an MP for Devonshire, he decided to try to garner parliamentary support for his enterprise. In December 1584, a bill was read in the House of Commons to confirm Ralegh’s letters patent to colonize America. This—the first piece of legislation regarding America to appear in Parliament—was reviewed by a committee of MPs that included some of the most experienced advocates of overseas expansion in England: Francis Walsingham, Christopher Hatton, Philip Sidney, Richard Grenville, and Francis Drake. They approved it without altering a single word.²¹ In the end, however, the bill was not put before the House of Lords—because it was unlikely to win support there—and so Ralegh’s rights were not enshrined in an Act of Parliament. But the bill nevertheless served to mobilize the support of England’s ruling elite behind a colony in America.

AS RALEGH SOUGHT to win the support of Elizabeth and his fellow parliamentarians—we don’t know if she read Hakluyt’s elaborate Discourse—he set about organizing the practical business of a transatlantic voyage. For the Amadas and Barlowe reconnaissance voyage, he had come to rely on Thomas Harriot as a kind of project manager, whose responsibilities included not only tutoring the mariners but also maintaining the accounts, developing maps, and advising on shipping.

Now he asked Harriot to take on an altogether more complex task. If Ralegh’s venture was to succeed, it was imperative for his colonists to be able to communicate with the local people. So Harriot’s assignment was to learn Algonquian, the Indians’ native tongue and the language spoken by tribes inhabiting America’s eastern seaboard from modern-day South Carolina all the way to Massachusetts. At the same time, he was to instruct Manteo and Wanchese in English, so that the two men could eventually serve as interpreters.²²

In this endeavor, Harriot meticulously studied the mechanics of Manteo’s and Wanchese’s speech—the sounds their vocal cords produced, the shapes their lips formed, the ways their tongues moved. He then devised an orthography—a “universal alphabet”—composed of thirty-six symbols representing sounds common to the English and Algonquian languages. These symbols formed a strange-looking cursive script that drew on cossic, or algebraic, numerals.²³

While Harriot closeted himself with the Indians in the sumptuous surroundings of Durham House, Ralegh undertook to raise the substantial funds needed to supply the voyage and the plantation. He did so with the help of William Sanderson, a rich merchant and leading member of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers who had recently married Ralegh’s niece.²⁴ The MPs who had supported Ralegh’s bill, who were among the enthusiastic backers of overseas enterprise, seemed the likeliest investors. For them, it was not just about anti-Spanish patriotism—it was also about profit.

Walsingham, for example, held the position of Secretary of State, which brought him an annual income of one hundred pounds. To build out his fortune, he relied on other remunerative douceurs, activities, and investments. From 1574 to 1582, he was granted exclusive licenses to export more than 200,000 pieces of broadcloth, or kerseys. In effect, he controlled nearly half of England’s export trade in unfinished cloth of the finer quality. Also, he seems to have inherited a stake in the Muscovy Company held by his wife’s deceased first husband, Alexander Carleill, father of Christopher: by 1568, he was one of the company’s most eminent members, becoming an “assistant,” or director. And he profited handsomely from Drake’s voyage round the world.²⁵

Not all of his business dealings were successful, however. As a director of the Spanish Company, he suffered, not least because of his own political machinations, putting the crown’s interests before his own. And his investments in Frobisher’s and Gilbert’s voyages turned sour. But Walsingham accepted the risks and rewards involved and invested in the Ralegh Colony. As George Peckham noted in his True Report, which he dedicated to Sir Francis: “Nothing ventured, nothing have.”²⁶

AS THE DAY of departure approached for Ralegh’s fleet, the queen, too, upped her stake in the colonial venture. She had already invested in him indirectly—granting him monopoly rights over portions of England’s cloth and wine industries, the profits from which went to help fund his American enterprise. Now she lent him one of her royal ships, the Tiger, and ordered the Master of Ordnance of the Tower of London—Ambrose Dudley, Frobisher’s great champion—to release an allotment of gunpowder worth four hundred pounds, a valuable commodity often in short supply.

Elizabeth expressed her support in symbolic ways as well. She knighted Ralegh and granted him permission to bestow her name, or at least her epithet, the Virgin Queen, to his claimed territories: Virginia. Soon enough, Sir Walter was referring to himself as lord and governor of Virginia. This drew the scorn of many envious courtiers who derided Ralegh as a jumped-up paragon of the nouveaux riche. As one of them put it, Ralegh was “the hated man of the world, in Court, city and country.”²⁷

So Elizabeth had given Ralegh a flagship, a knighthood, gunpowder, and a rich stream of revenues. But there was one thing she was not prepared to grant her favorite: permission to leave the country and lead the expedition. With his brother, Sir Humphrey, she had allowed herself to be persuaded to change her mind, letting the headstrong adventurer lead the ultimately fatal voyage to Newfoundland, against her better judgment. But with Ralegh, she was not ready to do this. She simply could not bear to be without her “Water” or to risk losing him, as she had lost Gilbert.

Ralegh acquiesced. What choice did he have? To act in his stead as commander, he turned to Sir Richard Grenville, a kinsman and keen colonialist, who had considerable experience in Ireland and extensive knowledge—albeit through books—of the New World. He had been one of the MPs who had so enthusiastically supported Ralegh’s attempt to get parliamentary ratification of his letters patent. Grenville’s family had deep roots in the military affairs of England. His grandfather, also Sir Richard, had been Marshal of Calais, responsible for the colony’s defense, in the 1530s and early 1540s. His father had been master of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s flagship and the Titanic of its day, which sank spectacularly before the king’s eyes as it departed Portsmouth to wage battle against French warships. In the early 1570s, Grenville collaborated with Humphrey Gilbert in one of his many unrealized schemes, a project to colonize the great southern continent—Terra Australis—beyond the Magellan Straits. So when Ralegh approached him about leading the Roanoke venture, Grenville pounced on the offer.²⁸

On April 9, 1585, Grenville’s fleet, led by the flagship Tiger, weighed anchor at Plymouth. The four vessels carried six hundred men—three hundred soldiers and three hundred other passengers with a variety of skills deemed necessary to establish a colony in the strange and foreign land of Virginia. One of these was a gentleman artist named John White. It was Richard Hakluyt, the elder, who had suggested that “a skillful painter” be sent to America to produce a visual record of the new land. The Spanish were known to do this “in all their discoveries,” he said, in order to provide “descriptions of all beasts, birds, fishes, trees, towns” and other features of the New World.²⁹ Ralegh selected White, a watercolorist who had gained recognition nearly a decade earlier for his depiction of scenes of the Frobisher voyages. These included a drawing of a violent skirmish between Frobisher’s men and Inuit archers and a finely detailed sketch of a woman and her baby—the child riding on the mother’s back, peeking out from within the hood of her fur parka.³⁰

Thomas Harriot was also among the passengers, with a commission to write a report on the commercial potential of the American settlement. He was accompanied by the two Indians he had tutored (and been tutored by), Manteo and Wanchese. Harriot had made good progress in mastering Algonquian. Much to Ralegh’s amusement, he had even learned that Wingandacoia was not the Indian name for the land they hoped to inhabit, it was actually a phrase meaning “What fine clothes you’re wearing!”³¹

It was a good omen, perhaps. The thing the native people noticed, above all, was the voyagers’ fine garments of cloth—the very commodity for which England’s merchants hoped America would prove a new market.

AFTER A STORMY but successful voyage across the Atlantic, Grenville suffered a serious setback as the fleet approached Roanoke. The Tiger, sailing through the shallow sandbanks, struck bottom. For two hours, Simão Fernandes, the pilot, fought desperately to save the ship. The mariners frantically off-loaded some of the vessel’s stores into the sea to lighten its load. As one colonist later reminisced in a letter to Walsingham, “we were all in extreme hazard of being cast away.”³² The action worked and they finally managed to beach the hulking vessel, but there was a price to pay: a significant proportion of their provisions was spoiled by the salt water. This meant there would not be sufficient food and other supplies to establish a colony with all the prospective settlers. As a result, most of them were sent back to England—just 107 men were left behind to establish a settlement. Grenville stayed for two months to help Ralph Lane, a soldier with extensive experience in Ireland, who had been appointed governor of the colony.

While lodgings were constructed, John White and Thomas Harriot got down to work, travelling with the colonial leaders on an exploratory mission to the mainland across Pamlico Sound. Not far inland, they came to the native village of Pomeiooc, and there White began painting. He employed a watercolor technique that was then in vogue among gentleman-artists, known as limning—“a kind of gentle painting,” as one contemporary called it. Generally, he began by sketching his subject on paper in black lead. Then, having mixed his colors in mussel shells, using rare pigments from apothecaries, he applied the paint with brushes made from the finest squirrel hair, starting with wide brushes for the background colors and graduating to finer brushes and deeper colors as he built up the scene. For added effect, he created a powder by grinding gold into a dust, thickening it with honey, and then applying it sparingly for highlights.³³

At Pomeiooc, White found a well-kept village containing eighteen buildings arranged in a circular formation, with a communal fire roaring at its heart. It was encompassed by a palisade formed of tree branches ten or twelve feet high, embedded in the ground and sharpened at the tip—obviously prepared for protection against attack. Farther along, the Grenville party encountered another village, Secotan, with a wide boulevard running through its center. Seemingly more agricultural, it was bounded by fields of corn, or maize, one patch with plants ripe and ready for harvesting, another with green corn, and a third with corn just “newly sprung.”

In addition to landscapes, White produced several portraits, including one of Wingina, a local chief, or werowance—meaning “he who is rich.” The chief looks benign, with his graying hair tied in a knot and adorned with feathers. He wears a swatch of fringed cloth around his waist, a necklace, and an impressive status symbol—a large square copper plate hanging from his neck. Other images depicted a mother and daughter, the child holding an Elizabethan doll, evidently a gift from one of the colonists; a medicine man identified as “the flyer,” who is shown hovering above the ground; and a squatting man and woman sharing a meal of hulled corn, which looks like popcorn, laid out neatly on a wooden platter. Also, White captured family gatherings, religious ceremonies, burial rituals, fishing, and farming.³⁴

White’s paintings were not intended as works of art, although that is what they have become. They were visual marketing designed to stimulate interest from prospective investors and settlers. It was hoped that they would reassure would-be English colonists and quell their fears about making a life in America. White went to great lengths to portray the Indian culture as friendly, charming, and even familiar. Indeed, some of the Indians are presented in poses similar to those found in the costume books then popular in Europe.³⁵ The chief crooks his elbow to rest the back of his wrist on his hip, looking almost like a gentleman waiting for his carriage. One of the chief’s wives hooks her left foot around her right and lays her palms upon her shoulders, covering her breasts, as a shy teenager might. All in all, White presents an idyllic image of Virginia. The people are well-fed and even-tempered—they appear as if they would be delighted to welcome English settlers into their communities, offer them a home-cooked meal, and support them in their battle against the Spanish empire.

While White painted his exquisite watercolors, Thomas Harriot prepared his report on the commercial potential of the new land.³⁶ He searched for what he called “merchantable commodities,” and he found many: “grass silk,” sassafras, deer skins, otter fur, iron ore, copper, some silver, pearls, medicinal plants, and dyes for the clothmaking industry. Also, he looked for staple goods that could sustain a colony, year after year, and found maize, beans, peas, pumpkins, and a variety of wild animals for meat: rabbits, squirrels, bears, “wolfish dogs,” and “lions,” by which he meant panthers, pumas, and cougars.

Above all, Harriot embarked on an ethnographical study of the Algonquian peoples. Were they people that Ralegh, his fellow investors, and Englishmen could do business with? The answer was, in a word, yes. “They, in respect of troubling our inhabiting and planting, are not to be feared,” he reported. “They shall have cause both to fear and love us that shall inhabit with them.” They dressed simply and were naked but for “loose mantles” and skirts or “aprons” made from deer skin. They lived in small villages, of typically about ten houses—although Harriot did see one with thirty. So scattered were the communities that the most powerful ruler controlled no more than eighteen villages and could amass an army of around eight hundred warriors. For all their apparent simplicity, Harriot noticed that “in those things they do, they show excellence of wit,” and he believed they could become good neighbors and trading partners.

GRENVILLE LEFT ROANOKE in August 1585, promising to return by the following Easter with fresh supplies. He got back to England in mid-October, and presented Ralegh with, among other things, an album of White’s paintings that provided the English people with their first view of America. They had read the detailed accounts of Frobisher’s voyages. They had seen the Inuits and Indians brought back from Meta Incognita and Virginia. But they had never seen the country with their own eyes. Looking at White’s watercolors would be the closest most of them would come to doing so.

It soon became apparent, however, that the Roanoke Colony did not match the idyllic environment portrayed by White. Grenville had brought with him two letters from Ralph Lane, one addressed to Walsingham, the other to Philip Sidney. They presented very different views of Roanoke: the opportunity and the challenge.

To Walsingham, Lane described “Her Majesty’s new kingdom” as a “vast and huge” territory that was “by Nature fortified” and blessed with many “rare and… singular commodities.” He pledged that he and his men would rather “lose our lives” than lose possession of so “noble a kingdom.” He showered praise on Ralegh and his “most worthy endeavor” to make a “conquest” of Virginia.³⁷ In his letter to Sidney, by contrast, Lane complained about the “unruliness” of the men and suggested that the colony was in trouble. Later, he concluded that only if England discovered “a good Mine” or a “passage to the Southsea” could her countrymen ever expect to successfully inhabit this part of the world.³⁸ The lure of gold and Cathay continued to loom large in the minds of England’s colonists.

One incident of unruliness involved Philip Amadas, the hotheaded twenty-one-year-old who co-led the reconnaissance mission with Barlowe the year before. He razed an Indian village to the ground after suspecting a native warrior of stealing a silver cup. This was not a solitary act of violence, and Wingina, the local chief who struck such a graceful pose in one of White’s paintings, started to lose patience with the English colonists—especially after they began to make ever greater demands for food.

The colonists managed to survive the winter, but the situation gradually grew desperate. As supplies dwindled, they engaged in a battle that left the inhabitants of an entire Indian village, including Wingina, dead. By now, relations between the Indians and the English had slumped to a new low. The only salvation for the settlers would be fresh supplies from England. They anxiously awaited Grenville’s return, and at the beginning of June 1586, as if in answer to their prayers, they spotted a fleet on the horizon. It was not Grenville’s, as they hoped. Nor was it Spanish, as they feared. Instead, the fleet was commanded by Sir Francis Drake.

WHILE LANE AND his fellow colonists had been busy battling to survive in the New World, England had begun battling with Spain in the first of a series of conflicts that amounted to an undeclared war. Drake was at the forefront of England’s campaign. In September 1585, he commanded a massive fleet—twenty-five ships (two supplied by the queen) and twenty-three hundred men—to wreak havoc in Spanish territories in the New World.³⁹ It was, in effect, a terror campaign, with Drake and his men, including Martin Frobisher and Christopher Carleill, burning, spoiling, and looting Spanish settlements on their way from Santo Domingo to Hispaniola, Cartagena, and Cuba.

Drake had then proceeded north and reached St. Augustine, the Spanish outpost in Florida, in May 1586. The English believed that the purpose of the fort there was to “keep all other nations from inhabiting any part of all that coast.”⁴⁰ So Drake sacked the town, destroyed the fort, and took whatever equipment he could find that might be useful to the settlers in Roanoke. He then went in search of his countrymen.

When he arrived at Roanoke, Drake found a colony that was much smaller than he had expected—and suffering great distress. He offered Lane one of his smaller ships, the Francis, as well as men, and enough supplies to tide the colonists over until Grenville returned. But when a storm hit the coast and scattered Drake’s fleet, the Francis disappeared over the horizon and with it the hopes of those colonists who wanted to stay in Virginia. At last, the entire company abandoned Roanoke and boarded Drake’s vessels to return home.

Just days after the settlers sailed for England, a small supply ship that Ralegh had organized arrived at Roanoke. Finding no English in residence, it turned around and headed home. Soon after, Grenville arrived, with his larger relief expedition. When he, too, found the settlement abandoned, he made an inexplicable decision. He did not disembark his entire company of three hundred to four hundred, nor did he take them all home again. Instead, he left behind just fifteen men provisioned for two years, a tiny squad of Englishmen settled on a scrap of island that Walter Ralegh—some four thousand miles away—dreamed would one day be the seat of a great empire.⁴¹