14

THE OLD EAST AND THE NEW WEST

AS HOPES OF ever resurrecting the Roanoke Colony faded, there followed a long hiatus in England’s expeditions to the New World. It was not until 1598, five years after receiving John White’s regretful letter, that Richard Hakluyt, by now in his late forties, made a renewed effort to rekindle England’s dreams of expansion. He brought out the first volume of a revised, greatly expanded, three-volume edition of his masterwork, Principal Navigations, first published almost a decade earlier.

Hakluyt believed the massive new work was necessary because England had not fulfilled the destiny that he foresaw when the original came out in 1589: to conquer land, find new markets for cloth, and spread the gospel across America. He knew that England had been distracted from pursuing that great quest, and for a number of reasons. Many of the great merchants, who were the masterminds of the earliest overseas enterprises, had switched their attention to the lucrative business of privateering. Meanwhile, the Spanish war had hindered overseas trade, dampened domestic demand for goods and services, and created widespread unemployment. Also, the weather—including the hottest summer of the century, 1593—had wreaked havoc, and bubonic plague returned to London, decimating the population in the true sense of the word: in one year alone, one-tenth of the capital’s population died from the pestilence and other diseases.¹

But the most devastating factor that brought England’s overseas expansion to a shuddering halt was the sudden loss of the first generation of New World leaders. In April 1590, just after publication of Hakluyt’s first edition of his Principal Navigations, Sir Francis Walsingham died at his London home, the former Muscovy House. This longtime champion of New World development was just fifty-eight years old. In 1591, he was followed to the grave by Thomas “Customer” Smythe, Sir Richard Grenville, and Sir Christopher Hatton. In 1594, Sir Martin Frobisher, knighted during the Armada, suffered a mortal leg wound while fighting alongside the French against the Spanish. The war then took Sir Francis Drake, who was buried at sea off the coast of Panama. And, on August 4, 1598, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the standard-bearer of the old order, died at Cecil House, his London home along the Strand.

Then, soon after Cecil’s death, came the news that proclaimed that an era had indeed come to an end: Philip II, king of Spain, at last succumbed to the terrible illness that had kept him in excruciating pain for months. Elizabeth did not mourn the passing of her former brother-in-law, onetime suitor, and longtime adversary. With his death, it was possible that peace negotiations might begin and the protracted Anglo-Spanish war might end.

FOR HAKLUYT, THIS seemed to be a time of new possibilities, an opportune moment to release the first of what would be three volumes of his expanded Principal Navigations. When all three were released, the final one appearing in 1600, the new edition constituted a monumental achievement: a two-thousand page trove of more than a hundred accounts, testimonies, and commentaries on English activities of exploration, discovery, and settlement, as well as many additional narratives on foreign initiatives.²

In the dedicatory epistle to the first volume, Hakluyt honored an old stalwart of the sea war with Spain: Charles Howard, the lord admiral who had commanded the navy against the Armada. But Hakluyt chose to dedicate the second volume to Sir Robert Cecil, son of Sir William. In doing so, he signaled his belief that England was on the cusp of a new beginning. Still only thirty-six years old, Cecil was, nevertheless, uniquely influential and, Hakluyt knew, a progressive when it came to English overseas activity. In the wake of his father’s death, people whispered about the continuation of England as “Regnum Cecilianum,” Cecil’s kingdom.³ It was striking testimony to the young man’s astonishing rise to power. Unlike Elizabeth’s other favorites at court, Cecil was physically unprepossessing: small, hunchbacked, with an awkward walk. It was said that a negligent nurse dropped him as a child, although it is more likely that he suffered from inherited scoliosis.⁴ Elizabeth called him “my pigmy,” but he had a giant intellect and she knew his value as an administrator and adviser. Not only was he clever, he was formidably conscientious. If he owed his spectacular ascent to his father—he was a privy councillor at the age of twenty-eight—he earned the queen’s affection through diligence and dedication. He had the energy and drive that was so characteristic of second sons in England at this time. His elder brother, Thomas, had inherited Lord Burghley’s title and glorious estate near Stamford in Lincolnshire, and Robert knew he would have to follow in his father’s footsteps, building his own fortune through bureaucratic brilliance.

Hakluyt may have first met Cecil in Paris in the early 1580s, when the future royal adviser studied at the Sorbonne, as part of a broad education that included time at Cambridge and Gray’s Inn, his father’s beloved institutions. There, Cecil was hosted by Sir Edward Stafford, the ambassador and Hakluyt’s employer at the time. Later, Hakluyt expressed “no small joy” that Cecil knew so much about “Indian Navigations,” referring to America as well as Asia.⁵ In his dedicatory epistle in Principal Navigations, Hakluyt acknowledged Cecil’s role in the book’s publication—a sure sign that the young courtier, like his father before him, was eager to lead a second generation of English expansionists.

As always, the search for new cloth markets remained one of Hakluyt’s chief concerns. “Because our chief desire is to find out ample vent of our woollen cloth, the natural commodity of this our Realm,” Hakluyt argued, “the fittest places, which in all my readings and observations I find for that purpose, are the manifold Islands of Japan, & the Northern parts of China, & the regions of the Tartars.” In winter, he reported, these lands were “as cold as Flanders,” the capital of Europe’s clothmaking industry.⁶

Given his great knowledge of England’s efforts to establish trade in Asia, Hakluyt was called to advise the Privy Council on “why the English Merchants may trade into the East Indies, especially to such rich kingdoms and dominions as are not subject to the king of Spain & Portugal.” He noted that although some lands were off-limits under the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas, most of the world was open to English mercantile development: in particular, “the most mighty & wealthy Empire of China” and “the rich and & innumerable islands of Malucos and the Spicerie.”⁷ The longing for Cathay had not subsided.

There were complications, however. Philip’s death, while promising to the cause of peace, had unleashed a new disruptive force for the English: the Dutch. In the mid-1580s, they had turned for help to Elizabeth, inviting her to become queen of their dominions. She had rejected their appeals, although she lent them military support.⁸ Now, the Dutch, still waging a long war of independence against Spain, saw an opportunity to assert themselves on the global stage. Sensing Spain’s waning interest in fighting them, they launched the first of a series of voyages to the Spice Islands. They sent some forty ships to trade in Asian ports in the last five years of the century.⁹ In 1598 alone, they dispatched twenty-two ships. When, in July 1599, one of those ships returned with a particularly spectacular haul of spices, the English merchants sat up and took notice.¹⁰ It seemed that just as the Spanish threat was abating the Dutch were making a bid to supplant Spain as the major commercial power.

Two months later, sixty English merchants met urgently to discuss the idea of a direct venture to the distant market they had long coveted: the Spice Islands of the East Indies. It was twenty-five years since Sir Francis Drake had cut a deal with the local ruler of Ternate, one of the Moluccas, but there had been no successful follow-up. Now, belatedly, London’s merchants were looking to capitalize on that earlier success. Before long, more than one hundred investors had pledged around £30,000 in support of the proposed East India venture. Even though the English economy was in the doldrums, this was the largest sum ever invested in a single English expedition, and it showed not only the enthusiasm for the venture but also the sheer quantity of liquid capital available for high-risk investment, which largely came from the spoils of war.¹¹ More than a quarter of the capital came from merchants who had made their fortune from privateering, when profits soared as high as £200,000 per year.¹²

These London merchants drafted a petition to Elizabeth that sought royal support for a voyage “for the honour of our native Country and for the advancement of the trade of merchandise within this Realm of England.”¹³ The petition stated that “divers merchants” of England, “being informed that the Dutchmen prepare a new voyage… were stirred up with no less affection to advance the trade of their native country than the Dutch merchants were to benefit their commonwealth.” They requested to be “incorporated into a company,” since the East India trade, “being so far remote from hence, cannot be traded but in a joint and a united stock.”¹⁴

But no sooner had these merchants put together plans for a new overseas trading company than they had to put them on hold because peace negotiations with Spain had reached a sensitive stage and the Privy Council was reluctant to do anything that might cause the Spanish to walk away from the table. The merchants agreed to postpone their preparations “for this year.”¹⁵

As good as their word, the adventurers reconvened on September 23, 1600, after a hiatus that had lasted a year and did not produce a peace agreement. The directors were, for the most part, members of the new generation of venturers—men like Robert Cecil. The star of this new generation was a scion of the Judde-Smythe family: Thomas Smythe. Ten years earlier, he had led the syndicate—which included Richard Hakluyt—that acquired the rights to the City of Raleigh in Virginia. After the debacle of John White’s voyage to rescue the Roanoke colonists, Smythe occupied himself in other ways. Following the death of his father, Customer Smythe, he inherited the lucrative tax-collecting contract for the Port of London, the foundation of his wealth. Also, he joined the Levant Company—the entity formed by the merger of the Turkey Company, which his father had cofounded, and the Venice Company.

In the 1590s, Smythe became a civic figure, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, who had served as Lord Mayor. He was elected to the House of Commons in 1597, representing Aylesbury, a market town north of London, and two years later he joined the ranks of London’s governing elite, becoming an alderman in London and master of one of his livery companies, the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers.¹⁶ As the new century dawned, he was elected governor of both the Muscovy Company and the Levant Company.¹⁷ It was a stellar ascent. And there was yet another honor to come his way. In October 1600, when the general court of the new East India Company met at Founders Hall, “a proper house” along Lothbury, not far from the Guildhall, the shareholders elected Smythe as their first governor.¹⁸

Even with all this capital and commercial know-how, the merchants still faced one major obstacle: the aging queen. They needed her to sign the letters patent that would give them permission to conduct England’s business in the Far East. Eventually, on December 31, 1600, the queen duly completed the paperwork, and the East India Company, under the governorship of Thomas Smythe, came into being. The merchants were granted the right to “set forth one, or more voyages, with a convenient number of ships and pinnaces, by way of traffic and merchandise to the East-Indies.” They promised to do so “at their own adventures, costs and charges” and “for the honour of this our realm of England,” the “increase of our navigation,” and the “advancement of trade of merchandise” from England.¹⁹

Now that they had royal approval, Smythe and his fellow directors moved quickly to launch the first voyage. Hakluyt was hired to brief the senior commanders of the voyage on the best places to find pepper, cloves, and a host of other spices.²⁰ Thus prepared, five ships, loaded with five hundred men and victuals for twenty months, and led by James Lancaster, a renowned English captain, set sail for the East Indies in February 1601.²¹

TWO HUNDRED AND thirteen people subscribed to the East India Company venture in 1600. But one man was notable by his absence: Sir Walter Ralegh. This was strange because, like many of the other backers, he had reaped rich rewards from his bold enterprises beyond England’s shores. In 1592, he and his associates hit the jackpot when their privateering fleet captured a Portuguese vessel, Madre de Dios, which carried jewels, spices, silks, calicoes (cotton cloth), ivory, porcelain, and other luxury commodities worth around half a million pounds, the single biggest prize of that privateering era.²²

But Ralegh had also suffered his share of failures. In the mid-1590s, he sailed to South America in search of El Dorado, a fabled kingdom of gold that was said to be located deep in the Amazon jungle. He did not find it. It may have been this setback, together with the gradual ending of the privateering war, that caused Ralegh to ignore the East India venture and revive his interest in the Roanoke settlement. Under the terms of his letters patent, he could still lay claim to his title as lord and governor of Virginia.

Ralegh’s patent gave him enormous power and scope in the New World. He had the right to hold and occupy the lands he discovered and to dispose of them as he saw fit. Also, he could “expulse, repel and resist” any person or group who tried to trespass on his territory in America. In other words, without his say-so, no one could settle within two hundred leagues—about six hundred miles—of any colony that he founded in the first six years of holding the patent. In effect, that gave him a huge, twelve-hundred-mile holding along the American coast from Florida in the south to modern-day Maine in the north, as well as across to what is now Kentucky to the west.

This had the potential to become an enormous imperial domain; but, to claim it, Ralegh had to prove that the Roanoke Colony was still thriving. If, on the other hand, the colonists were dead, his patent would have no value. As it happens, there were plenty of experts who believed the Roanoke colonists were alive and well, even if White had not found them at their original location. In 1597, John Gerard, the herbalist and Roanoke investor, maintained that there was every reason to think that English people were still living in Virginia unless “untimely death by murdering, or pestilence, corrupt air, bloody fluxes, or some other mortal sickness” had finished them off.²³

Hakluyt, Ralegh’s old friend, also asserted that the Roanoke settlers were still alive “for ought we know.”²⁴ And he again expressed his great enthusiasm for America. “There is under our noses the great & ample country of Virginia,” he wrote, “the inland whereof is found of late to be so sweet and wholesome a clime, so rich and abundant in silver mines, so apt and capable of all commodities, which Italy, Spain, and France can afford.” Hakluyt expressed the hope that Elizabeth would, after securing “a good & godly peace,” transport “one or two thousand people” to Virginia, since he knew others who would “willingly at their own charges become Adventurers in good numbers with their bodies and goods.” If Elizabeth did this, she would “by God’s assistance, in short space, work many great and unlooked for effects, increase her dominions, enrich her coffers, and reduce many Pagans to the faith of Christ.”²⁵

With such widespread belief in the survival of the Roanoke colonists, Ralegh revived his interest in America. Starting in 1600, he dispatched three expeditions to Virginia in as many years in an effort to make contact with them. In the final expedition, undertaken in 1602, Ralegh’s men saw nothing of the settlers, although they had been prevented from landing at Roanoke by stormy weather. All they brought home was a cargo of herbs and flora, including the leaves and bark of the tree that was becoming extremely fashionable throughout Europe: sassafras.²⁶

IN MARCH 1602, as Ralegh contemplated the fate of his colonists, a young, enterprising man emerged whose goal—implicit if not explicit—seems to have been to test Ralegh’s claim to Virginia. Bartholomew Gosnold, aged about thirty, came from an old Suffolk family of well-to-do landed gentry with connections to some of the pioneers of the New World ventures. His father, a lawyer, had been an adviser to Lady Dorothy Stafford, a friend to the queen and mother of Edward Stafford, who had been Hakluyt’s employer in Paris.

Educated at Cambridge and, like Ralegh, at the Middle Temple, Gosnold turned his hand to privateering, and made £1,625—a significant sum—on one adventure in the late 1590s. Also, he gained further wealth from his marriage to Mary Golding, a granddaughter of Sir Andrew Judde, of Mysterie fame. Through marriage, Gosnold was related to George Barne, another Mysterie investor and former Lord Mayor of London, and thus to Barne’s nephew, Christopher Carleill, who had tried unsuccessfully to secure Humphrey Gilbert’s patent.²⁷

The organizational structure and financial backing of Gosnold’s enterprise remain murky. No joint stock company was established for the voyage, nor did the queen involve herself. It is likely that Gosnold attracted support from his remarkable network of influential friends and relations and invested some of the money he had won in prizes during the privateering war. Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton and Shakespeare’s sponsor, may have been a contributor to, or at least an important inspiration for, Gosnold. A later chronicler wrote that “he largely contributed to the furnishing out of a ship to be commanded by Captain Bartholomew Gosnold.”²⁸

The venture, undertaken without Ralegh’s knowledge, seems to have been an all-purpose reconnaissance, settlement, and commercial mission: to explore the largely unknown northern coast, look for a passage to China, evaluate the commercial prospects, find a suitable location for a trading post, leave some settlers behind there, and collect a variety of commodities to bring back to England—in particular, the sassafras tree, whose leaves and bark were becoming renowned throughout Europe for their medicinal properties.

Gosnold set his sights on the area well north of Ralegh’s Roanoke—a region then known as Norumbega, essentially what is now New England. In choosing this destination, almost completely unexplored by the English at this time, Gosnold may have been following the star of Giovanni de Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer who led the first comprehensive investigation of the northern American coast in 1524.

Verrazzano was not only an accomplished mariner, he was also a skilled chronicler. Nearly eighty years after his voyage, his celebrated account remained the only substantive report on the north stretch of American coast, from what is now Cape Fear in North Carolina all the way north to New York harbor (the Verrazano Narrows and the bridge that spans them are named after him) and beyond to the great bays of the Gulf of Maine. He reached as far north as the “land that in times past was discovered by the Britons, which is in fifty degrees”—a reference to John Cabot and his claim to Newfoundland, whose northern extent falls along 51 degrees north latitude.

Verrazzano made the area sound even more alluring than Thomas Harriot had done with his portrait of Virginia. The people were “courteous and gentle,” Verrazzano wrote, adding that the place was shaded with trees as “delectable to behold as is possible to imagine,” with “good and wholesome air,” and a profusion of flowers. In the most elegiac passage of the account, Verrazzano described one of their stopping places—the bay now known as Narragansett in the state of Rhode Island. It was “very fertile and beautiful, full of tall spreading trees” and blessed with a harbor in which “any large fleet could ride safely… without fear of tempest or other dangers.” Verrazzano and his mariners took sanctuary there from the rough seas, christening the place Refugio.²⁹

Gosnold may have been alerted to Verrazzano’s travels by Richard Hakluyt, who lived in the village of Wetheringsett, not far from the Gosnold residence, and who included the Verrazzano voyage in his Principal Navigations. Certainly Gosnold knew about Verrazzano’s account. In a letter to his father, Anthony, he mentioned Verrazzano’s narrative in Hakluyt’s work, noting that it contained useful information about America.³⁰

GOSNOLD, COMMANDING A single ship, the Concord, and thirty-two men, including mariners, adventurers, and twelve who had committed to staying on as settlers, set sail from Falmouth on March 26, 1602.³¹ The Concord made land early on the morning of May 14, somewhere along the middle coast of Maine. It is not clear if Gosnold was intentionally trying to avoid infringing Ralegh’s rights, but he had in fact landed beyond the two-hundred-league perimeter of the Roanoke domain.

Gosnold was the first Englishman to reach those shores on an expedition of discovery and trade, but he was hardly the first European to do so. Soon after arriving, a group of Indians appeared in a shallop, a small, shallow-draft boat rigged with mast and sail—clearly not a native vessel. They approached the Concord, hoving themselves boldly aboard. In the shallop, the English could see an iron grapple and a large copper kettle. Even more striking, one of the Indians was dressed in European attire: a waistcoat, breeches, hose, shoes, and a hat.

The Indians could speak “divers Christian words”—some in English, some in other languages. Gosnold’s men delighted in the Indians’ ability to speak and mimic. One of them tossed out the playful sentence “How now sirrah, are you so saucy with my Tobacco?” to an Indian, who immediately shot back the entire sentence, as if he had long been a “scholar in the language.” Thanks to the Indians’ facility with language, the English were able to learn that the foreign-made goods, such as the waistcoat, had been acquired through trade with “Basks”—that is, people of the Basque region at the border between France and Spain who had long frequented the waters around Newfoundland.³² The English probably did not realize how extensive the Indian-European trading network was at the time. Indians acted as middlemen in a sophisticated trading economy that linked the American hinterland, and its great supply of furs and timber, with the coast, and its fish and stream of exotic commodities coming from Europe.³³

The Gosnold party caught so many cod, herring, and mackerel that John Brereton, the official scribe of the voyage, became “persuaded that in the months of March, April, and May, there is upon this coast, better fishing, and in as great plenty, as in Newfoundland.” Compared to the “far off” Newfoundland banks, where waters were forty or fifty fathoms, the fishing grounds lay close to shore and in waters just seven fathoms (forty-two feet) deep.³⁴

Sailing south, the Concord and her crew, always on the lookout for trading opportunities, continued engaging with Indians. They partook of tobacco, a variety they found more pleasant than that available in England, though they did not seem to consider it as a marketable commodity. In exchange for deer skins and the furs of beaver, marten, otter, and wildcat, they traded the small objects they had brought for the purpose: knives, mirrors, bells, and beads. As other Europeans had learned, the Indians prized most what they did not have—manufactured goods of glass and metal. Particularly popular were points, little tubes of tin used to finish the end of a strip of cloth or leather, like the aglet encasing the tip of a modern shoelace.³⁵ Points were cheap to buy in England and took up little space in the ship’s hold, and the differential in value between a small quantity of points and an animal pelt was substantial.

Coasting still farther southward, the Concord lost sight of land for some days until Gosnold’s men spotted a headland they first took to be an island because it was separated from the mainland by a “shole-hope”—a shallow haven—and a capacious sound. There, they caught so many fish that they named the land Cape Cod.

They traveled on until they hailed a group of “fair isles.” They named one of these islands Martha’s Vineyard, possibly in honor of Gosnold’s mother-in-law, Martha Golding. In this area, they decided to establish their trading post and settlement, choosing another of these islands, which they named Elizabeth’s Isle (probably the modern-day Cuttyhunk). The island was uninhabited, and offered a good anchorage, a source of fresh water, easy access to the mainland, rich fishing, and plenty of crabs and shellfish.

Gosnold and his crew set about their operations, constructing a house and rudimentary fort. They planted wheat, barley, oats, and peas in the “fat and lusty soil,” and then watched, amazed, as the tendrils sprang up nine inches in two weeks. Every so often, Indians of the Micmac tribe came to visit and trade with them. They noticed that these visitors possessed seemingly large amounts of copper, which was used to create jewelry, arrowheads, and eating utensils, including drinking cups and plates. Gosnold wondered if copper mines were close to the island. The Indians seemed to confirm this, although the Englishmen did not go in search of them.³⁶

From this site, Gosnold’s men applied themselves to the gathering of sassafras. The tree—which grows to between twenty and forty feet in height, and has broad leaves and cinnamon-colored berries—was plentiful on the island. In this work, which continued over a number of days, the Indians sometimes lent a hand. They also dined with the English, drinking beer and eating dried codfish. They did not, however, fancy the strong mustard their hosts used to improve the taste of the fish. “It was a sport to behold their faces made being bitten therewith,” wrote one of Gosnold’s men.³⁷

By the middle of June, Gosnold’s crew had packed the hold of the Concord with sassafras, cedar logs, furs, and skins—the commodities they considered most valuable in the European markets. Gosnold hoped this would be the first of many consignments from his new trading post in Norumbega. But when it came to depart, the men who had signed up to stay behind to manage the trading post began to have second thoughts. Perhaps the fear that they would be left stranded, like the colonists at Roanoke, weighed on their minds. Also, as Gosnold realized, there were not sufficient supplies if the settlers were to survive the six months of winter. In the end, Gosnold’s little trading post was abandoned and the entire party sailed home, arriving in Exmouth in late July after a brisk five-week passage.³⁸

IN AUGUST, RALEGH caught wind of Gosnold’s voyage, and he was furious at what he saw as an infringement of his American rights. He had traveled to the port town of Weymouth, on the southwest coast, not far from Exmouth, where Gosnold had put in with the Concord. He was planning to meet with Samuel Mace, who had just returned from his voyage to southern Virginia in search of the Roanoke colonists and whose ship’s hold was also full of sassafras. While there, Ralegh appears to have bumped into Bartholomew Gilbert (no relation of Sir Humphrey), who was Gosnold’s second-in-command and who may have told him about the sassafras brought in from Norumbega.³⁹

Outraged by this breach of his monopoly, Ralegh had the Concord detained, tried to track down the sassafras that had already been unloaded, and fired off an urgent message to Robert Cecil asking him to secure a letter of seizure from the lord admiral because his patent stated “that all ships & goods are confiscate that shall trade” in America without his license. He contended that sassafras was selling for as much as twenty shillings a pound, and that the Gosnold shipment would flood the market, suppress prices, and reduce his profits. Before discovering Gosnold’s sassafras, Ralegh had calculated that his own sassafras would be worth up to ten times its cost—such was the demand.⁴⁰

Sassafras was the plant of the moment. There was a vast apothecary of decoctions, lineaments, and herbal admixtures made from the sassafras tree that was administered as a cure for almost everything. With the added cachet of the exotic, a New World remedy favored by Indians, it became widely accepted as a cure-all after its inclusion in a book, published in English in 1577, called Joyfull Newes out of the newe Founde Worlde wherein is declared the rare and singular vertues of diverse and sundrie hearbes, trees, oyles, plants and stones. This tome, written by Nicholas Monardes, a Spanish physician, and translated into English by John Frampton, a Bristol merchant, revealed how sassafras bark from Florida could “dissolve obstructions in the body” and thereby “engender good humors.”⁴¹ In his Discourse of Western Planting of 1584, Hakluyt mentioned sassafras as a promising commodity, while Thomas Harriot, in his Brief and True Report of the Newfound Land of Virginia, reported that the Indians called sassafras Winauk and used it “for the cure of diseases.”⁴² Over the years, people came to rely on sassafras as a cure for stomach ache, coughs and colds, diarrhea, nosebleeds, indigestion, scurvy, syphilis, and as a way to increase menstrual flow and thus encourage pregnancy.⁴³

These medicinal properties made sassafras a reliably marketable commodity. But if there was a surfeit of sassafras for sale, then its price, and possibly its allure, would fall. It is not clear how the dispute resolved itself. Ralegh may have been able to impound some of Gosnold’s shipment and sell it on his own behalf. Also, he seems to have made arrangements with a German merchant to export an unspecified amount for sale across Europe. This was an early instance of the re-export of English New World goods to the European market.⁴⁴

In any case, Ralegh took no further punitive action against Bartholomew Gosnold. In fact, they evidently came to an amicable solution to the patent infringement, since Brereton’s published account of the voyage was subsequently dedicated to Ralegh. In capital letters, the subtitle assures the reader that the voyage to northern Virginia had been undertaken “by the permission of the honourable knight, Sir Walter Ralegh.”

As the first published narrative of an English voyage to the northern part of America since Verrazzano’s account, Brereton’s little book A Briefe and True Relation of the Discoverie of the North Part of Virginia proved a popular hit. Brereton’s prose, while not as lyrical as Verrazzano’s or as rigorous as Harriot’s, painted a pleasing picture of this virtually unknown stretch of territory, making it sound ideal for a colony: the friendly Indians, lovely trees, copious fruits and plants, abundant fish—all this, and the “goodness of the Climate,” which was neither as hot as that of the West Indies nor as cold as that of Newfoundland. “We found our health and strength all the while we remained there,” Brereton wrote. Far from suffering any disease or sickness, the adventurers returned home “much fatter and in better health than when we went out of England.”⁴⁵

GOSNOLD’S VOYAGE SPARKED new interest in the north of America, and before long, another expedition was dispatched, paid for by Bristol merchants who had been advised by Richard Hakluyt. But this venture was overshadowed by the death of Elizabeth I on March 24, 1603. The last of the Tudors, she was the first queen of America, giving her name to Virginia, claiming sovereignty over Nova Albion.

Always, she had been wary of committing herself too visibly to the cause of empire. But she had found discreet ways to fund imperial dreamers such as Walter Ralegh—diverting customs revenues from the cloth and mining industries and crown revenues from landed estates. And in the wake of the victory over the Armada, she had gladly posed with her possessive hand stretched wide over the American continent depicted on a globe.

With Elizabeth’s passing, the champions of overseas expansion lost one of their staunchest, if sometimes mercurial, supporters. Nobody knew whether her successor would continue her imperial project. But James I, the Protestant son of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, was known to be keen to strike a peace deal with Spain. And so for one person, the omens were not good: Sir Walter Ralegh.

If Ralegh had been one of Elizabeth’s greatest favorites, he was one of the new monarch’s least. Ralegh’s was the embodiment of an archaic, anti-Spanish way of doing things—the last of the old generation of merchants and courtiers who had defined themselves by their virulent opposition to the Iberian superpower. Now, the times were changing, and James did everything he could to marginalize the lord and governor of Virginia.

Ralegh stoically endured one ignominy after another. He was replaced as Captain of the Guard, stripped of his monopoly in the wine trade, and booted out of Durham House, his beloved residence of twenty years. Then, while joining James in Windsor for a hunt—in an effort to maintain his relationship with the crown—he was detained for questioning. A few days later, he was sent to the Tower, and eventually found guilty of involvement in a couple of intertwining plots against the king, including a scheme to replace him with Arbella Stuart, a great-great-granddaughter of Henry VII.⁴⁶

Ralegh had already lost almost everything. With this imprisonment, he forfeited perhaps his most valuable asset of all: his claim to America. Under the terms of the original letters patent, the king could withdraw Ralegh’s title to the lands of Virginia if he committed “any act of unjust or unlawfull hostility.”⁴⁷ His conviction for high treason meant that as long as he was in prison he would be denied the right to his lands in Virginia. Also, it meant that for the first time in more than a quarter century America was up for grabs.