Set Fair for Roanoke

Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606

David Beers Quinn

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807841235, 9780807816066
• eBook ISBN: 9781469611174
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Quinn's study brings together the results of his nearly fifty years of research on the voyages outfitted by Sir Walter Raleigh and the efforts to colonize Roanoke Island. It is a fascinating book, rich in details of the colonists' experiences in the New World. Quinn "solves" the mystery of the Lost Colony with the controversial conclusion that many of the colonists lived with the Powhatans until the first decade of the seventeenth century when they were massacred.

PART 1

Voyages and Colonies, 1584–1586

CHAPTER 1

Ralegh’s Involvement in the North American Enterprise

Master Water Rawley is in very high favour with the Queen’s Majesty; neither my Lord of Leicester nor master Vice-Chamberlain [Sir Francis Knollys] in so short time ever was in the like, which special favour hath been within this two months [March 1583]. I have heard it credibly reported that Master Rawley hath spent within this half year above 3000 pounds. He is very sumptuous in his apparel, and I take it he hath his diet out of the Privy Kitchen, but all the vessels with which he is served at his table, is silver with his own arms on the same. He hath attending on him at least thirty men whose liveries are chargeable, of which number half be gentlemen, very brave fellows, divers having chains of gold. The whole Court doth follow him. . . . His lodging is very bravely furnished with arras, the chamber wherein himself doth he hath a field bed all covered with green velvet, laid with broad silver lace, and upon every corner and on the top set with plumes of white feathers with spangles. He hath all other delights and pleasure abundantly and above all he behaveth himself to the good liking of every man.¹

This word picture of Queen Elizabeth I’s newly risen favorite was given us at the beginning of May 1583 by a young Londoner who had recently encountered him. Ralegh is the man who was to be associated most closely with the Roanoke colonies; even though he never visited North America, his power, influence, and ideas dominate any consideration of what happened there from 1584 to 1590 and after.

Walter Ralegh was a younger son of a family of minor gentry in south Devon.² His mother had been married before to a somewhat richer gentleman, Otho Gilbert of Greenway and Compton. With him she had given birth to three boys who would be of some importance in later life: John Gilbert, who succeeded to his father’s estates in 1547 and became vice-admiral of Devon; Humphrey Gilbert, who was to live a varied life in and out of the Queen’s Court and who really initiated the planning of English colonies in North America into which he drew his half brother Walter; and Adrian Gilbert, who planned voyages himself, practiced medicine, and received patronage in high quarters. Walter’s own elder brother, Carew Ralegh, who was to outlive him, eventually married an heiress and became a prominent figure in Wiltshire. Walter Ralegh, senior, made money from piracy and privateering and settled in Exeter in the 1560s.

About 1568, Walter accompanied a band of Devonshire men who went as volunteers to fight on the Huguenot side in the French religious wars. He saw some heavy fighting and learned the trade of a soldier. He returned, we suspect, with some spoil, which enabled him to pursue his education as a gentleman. He is next found at Oxford University, where he was a member of Oriel College between 1572 and 1574, though perhaps he did not stay there continuously, and he left, as most of his contemporaries did, without taking a degree. He migrated to London to follow the traditional course of learning a little law and the rules of social intercourse and personal advancement at Lyons Inn, one of the Inns of Chancery, in 1575 and at the prestigious Middle Temple in 1576. By 1578 he was in attendance at Court, introduced there, we suspect, by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who had been knighted for military service in Ireland, but we do not know precisely how he supported himself.

In the Middle Temple he would have come to know Richard Hakluyt, the elder, a lawyer whose primary interest was in the economics of the new geography and who had both a growing correspondence with Spanish Mexico and Portuguese India and consulted with merchants about the chances of English overseas voyaging as a new area of speculative investment. By 1578 he was coming around to the view that North America was the most promising field for English intervention, because by the reports he had read it was fertile, occupied by people who might accept European trade, and empty of European settlements and so could provide land for English occupation. Sir Humphrey Gilbert had also reached the same conclusion.

Gilbert, indeed, had become fanatical about it.³ In Ireland in the 1560s he had come to the conclusion that England itself offered too little scope for enterprise, especially for the younger sons of the gentry, and that there was neither land to be had nor economic activity to be engaged in which would offer them occupation, riches, and, ultimately, power. Events, and the Queen’s policies, ruled out Ireland for the time being as a field for English colonization, but North America was open for experiment. He had some influence at Court, and somehow he persuaded the Queen to give him a blank check to engage in an imperial venture in land and commerce in the West. We suspect, though we do not know, that Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s secretary of state, may have persuaded her, as he and Gilbert thought alike that Spain’s empire should be emulated as well as humbled.

Gilbert’s patent of 11 June 1578 was extraordinarily vague. He was to explore lands not actually possessed by any Christian prince or people, and occupy them in the Queen’s name. He might take Englishmen with him to settle who would remain under the Queen’s allegiance, but would have extensive rights to govern any settlements he might create, though the settlers would retain all their rights under English law and custom. He could resist challenges to his authority (we can presume challenges by the inhabitants of the lands as well as European contestants). For all these things he would owe the Queen only one-fifth of all the gold and silver ore that might be found. Although no limits were set, Gilbert construed the grant to give him monopoly rights extending from Spanish Florida to the Arctic, perhaps including even the Northwest Passage if it should be found. For a private individual this was an incredible opportunity, but could an individual, particularly a man who had wide experience but little money, do anything about it?

Yet Gilbert had struck at the right time. He appealed to many of the courtiers, to the West Country gentlemen, and, above all, to the piratical sea captains who had surreptitiously been carrying on a sea war against Spain, and stealing other ships as well. By early November he had mobilized ten ships at Plymouth, heavily armed and containing no less than 520 men. This was sufficient to carry through a major raid on the Spanish Caribbean before making any attempt to reconnoiter the shores of North America. The expedition split, however, when Henry Knollys, son of the Queen’s vice-chamberlain, Sir Francis Knollys, refused to acknowledge Gilbert’s authority. Knollys then sailed off with three ships, intending only to carry out piratical attacks off the coasts of western Europe. Gilbert’s seven ships included the tiny Squirrel of only eight tons, to which he was deeply attached. He set out on 19 November 1578.

Gilbert had deeply involved Walter Ralegh in his venture. He chartered from William Hawkins, the great Plymouth merchant, the ship Falcon, formerly an old royal vessel and said to have been newly repaired for Ralegh’s first sea venture. She was of 80 tons burden, and her pilot under Captain Walter Ralegh was the Portuguese, Simon Fernandes. The ship began to leak off the Scilly Isles and held Gilbert back so that his vessels were caught in a storm and driven to take shelter in Cork Harbour. From there only the Falcon and one other vessel appear to have been able to get away; Gilbert returned with the rest to Plymouth. The Falcon ran down the Atlantic coast to the Canaries, by which time supplies of water and wine were used up. Some supplies were obtained, and the ship may have sailed as far south as the Cape Verdes before turning back, as she was becoming increasingly unseaworthy. Fernandes was making for Puerto Rico, where he evidently hoped to refit the ship, but instead she was back in England by May. Gilbert then went off on Irish service for the Queen to recoup a little of his costs. In 1580, however, he took proceedings against William Hawkins in the Court of Chancery alleging the Falcon was ill-found for the voyage and demanding damages.⁴ Fernandes gave valuable evidence about the ship, and Ralegh, who knew the Hawkins family well, also appeared, though he was cautious about the defects of the ship and did not greatly help Gilbert’s case. By this time he was described (3 February 1580) as “one of the extraordinary Esquires of the Body of the Queen’s Majesty,” showing that he had acquired at least a nominal office on the fringe of the Court among the young men who made up the circle of attendants of Elizabeth I.

At Court, Ralegh soon got a reputation as a proud, hot-tempered, and imperious man, but one whose personality commended itself to statesmen like the earl of Leicester and Sir Francis Walsingham, as well, apparently, as the Queen. To cool his hot blood and give him experience he was sent to Ireland in 1580 as captain of a company of soldiers engaged in quenching the embers of a rising in Munster. He also took part in the siege and capture of Smerwick, where a force of Continental mercenaries sent by the Pope and supported by Philip II had arrived too late to help the Munster insurgents. Entrusted with a substantial amount of responsibility by Lord Grey of Wilton, the lord deputy, he made himself something of an authority on Irish affairs, not hesitating to criticize Grey in letters to the Queen. Returning late in 1581, he quickly caught the personal attention of Queen Elizabeth, who received him into her inner circle and heaped rewards on him.

His preoccupations were not all with wealth and show and attendance on the Queen. Soon after his return from Ireland, he was involved once more with Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who had returned from Ireland in 1580 and begun a new campaign for an American venture. This time he was selling outright lands and commercial privileges in North America, which he had never seen, though Fernandes had made a rapid visit to what we presume to have been Norumbega (modern New England) in 1580. His focus in 1578 had been the southeastern part of North America, we think, but now it was the temperate shores of Norumbega, specifically Verrazzano’s “Refugio,” Narragansett Bay, last seen, unless Fernandes found it again, in 1524, but appearing on many maps. Courtiers, idealists like Sir Philip Sidney, gentlemen mainly from the southwest, a few London merchants and the citizens of the declining port of Southampton, and, especially, Catholic gentlemen, threatened by increasing fines for nonconformity (an act raising fines to penal proportions came into force in 1581), were all gradually drawn into his net in 1582.

Of several expeditions planned in that year, though none set sail, one was Gilbert’s own. He spent the summer of 1582 putting it together in Southampton, but was unable to sail. Among the vessels brought together, the largest and finest was a new ship bought by Walter Ralegh from the Southampton merchant Henry Oughtred. This vessel of 200 tons, renamed the Bark Ralegh, was equipped at a total cost of some £2,000, a large sum for that period and proof that Ralegh now had money. Poor organization and contrary winds forced Gilbert to hold back until the end of the year, when he was unable to leave the English Channel. Poorer but determined, he eventually set sail on 11 June 1583. The Queen would not permit Ralegh to go and did not wish Gilbert to sail himself either, but to leave the reconnaissance to others. The Bark Ralegh was commanded by Michael Butler, formerly Ralegh’s lieutenant in Ireland; after two days she turned back and deserted Gilbert, fatally weakening his expedition. Gilbert was to blame the men as cowards, but there is some evidence there was sickness on board and also that food supplies were considered inadequate for the Atlantic crossing. Ralegh thus had no share in Gilbert’s last and fatal enterprise.

Gilbert’s annexation of Newfoundland in a ceremony at St. John’s Harbour was a symbolic act of possession, with just the possibility of raising rents and taxes on fish from the hundreds of vessels that visited the island’s shores in summer. His main purpose was to work down the mainland coast to allocate lands for himself and for some of the many subscribers who had bought about twenty million acres from him, sight unseen. But the wrecking of the Delight on Sable Island left him with only two vessels. One of these was the ubiquitous Squirrel, and in her he was lost at sea off the Azores. Edward Hayes returned alone in the Golden Hind on 22 September, full of the advantages of holding Newfoundland. One of Gilbert’s Catholic supporters, Sir George Peckham, made a final attempt to arouse support for a venture of his own, but early in 1584 he had to admit defeat.

During the years 1582–83 the first pamphlets advocating colonization in North America had appeared, including Richard Hakluyt, the younger’s Divers voyages touching the discoverie of America in 1582,⁵ a collection of what was then known in England; a commendatory poem on Gilbert by the Hungarian Stephen Parmenius, who was lost on the voyage;⁶ a tract by Christopher Carleill, Walsingham’s stepson, which went into several editions;⁷ and Peckham’s True reporte which came out at the end of 1583.⁸ For the first time North America had received extensive publicity in England. On that Walter Ralegh was to attempt to capitalize fully in 1584.

Ralegh must have made his fateful decision to follow up the Gilbert ventures very shortly after Sir George Peckham had abandoned in January 1584 his own hopes of succeeding where Gilbert had failed. Christopher Carleill was still in the field, however. His pamphlet, which in one edition was titled A breef and sommarie discourse upon the entended voyage to the hethermoste partes of America, proposed a commercial colony near the mouth of the St. Lawrence. The pamphlet had first appeared as early as April 1583, but he was still collecting, or trying to collect, subscriptions from corporate towns for his project between February and April 1584. There was clearly a tacit agreement that his venture would not compete with that of Gilbert, or with those of Ralegh in 1584. He eventually left England in July, but appears to have had setbacks at sea, and he was back in Ireland by early August. He next brought his vessels into the service of the Irish government and spent the greater part of the next nine years in military service there, though he was to visit the Roanoke colony very briefly in June 1586 when he was serving on Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian voyage.

Other things also had to be got out of the way before Ralegh could act. Humphrey Gilbert had assigned his rights north of 50 degrees to Dr. John Dee, but Dee had given up all plans for northern voyages when he left for an extended visit to the continent in September, passing on his rights to Adrian Gilbert, Ralegh’s half brother. Adrian had these rights confirmed by patent on 6 February 1584, though it was left to the London merchant William Sanderson and others to finance the voyages made by John Davis under this patent between 1585 and 1587. The rights, too, of Sir John Gilbert, as Sir Humphrey’s heir, had to be safeguarded, or at least the fishing interests assured so that a fresh attempt would not be made to control them. We do not know which reason operated to exclude Ralegh from any concern with Newfoundland. It may have been because it was already regarded as part of the Queen’s dominions in consequence of its annexation by Humphrey Gilbert in August 1583. When these things had been settled, the way was clear for the drafting of a patent for Ralegh, dated 16 March 1584, which was formally issued on 25 March 1584 and was to last for seven years only if he had not established a settled colony within that period.

The patent was, apart from exclusions indicated already, identical to that which Humphrey Gilbert had received in June 1578.⁹ Once again it was wholly vague as to what areas of the globe it covered— “remote heathen and barbarous lands, countries and territories not actually possessed of any Christian prince and inhabited by Christian people.” Ralegh was empowered to take with him any of the Queen’s subjects “to travel thitherward or to inhabit there with him.” He was to have power to impress ships and seamen (the permission was later limited to the counties of Devon and Cornwall and the city of Bristol) to transport his settlers. Once there he was to enjoy the widest possible powers of government under the Queen and to hold the lands forever, subject only to the payment (as in Gilbert’s case) of one-fifth of all gold and silver ore to the Queen. He was authorized to expel all those who resisted him or who attempted to settle without his license, and this was to extend to six hundred miles north and south of the area where his setdements were located. All such lands once occupied “shall be of the allegiance of us our heirs and successors,” that is, the colonists and their colonies were to remain parts of the dominions of the English crown and enjoy the privileges of this association in the same manner as residents in other territories. Ralegh could impose laws and administer them, but with the provision that “the said laws and ordinances may be as near as conveniently they may be to the form of the laws, statutes, government or policy of England.” Moreover, they must not be “against the true Christian faith or religion now professed in the Church of England, nor in any way withdraw any of the subjects or people of those lands or places from the allegiance of us, our heirs and successors, as their immediate sovereigns under God.”

This extensive constitution for the first colonies to be actually established in North America is of great interest. It set out the rights of the proprietor in some detail, but qualified them by insisting that the colonies should be governed according to English law and religion and that the setders should enjoy the full privileges they had as the subjects of the Queen. There was much left unsaid. Were the settlers to have the right to return if they did not wish to stay? Did they have any local rights of representation in lawmaking? There was nothing to determine whether these and many other considerations would be kept in mind. The patent did not, however, embody any of the plans that Humphrey Gilbert had set down on paper in 1582 for an elaborate feudal hierarchy and for the allocation of lands and rights according to the rates of subscription made to the venture. Nor was there any separate provision made for estates to be laid out for Ralegh’s personal or family use.

Gilbert had set great store on such archaic rights and privileges. Ralegh was more pragmatic. We know of no commitments he made during the years 1584–90 that tied his colonists to a particular form of proceeding. He was free to make very different arrangements with different groups. He was prepared to experiment and see what experiments would produce. Yet, in theory, according to his patent, he had supreme power under the Queen to organize and rule the colonies as he saw fit. If a single individual, and not the state, was to have the authority to create and govern colonies across the ocean, the patent of 1584 and the way that Ralegh subsequently acted under it offered a sensible and practical basis for the initiation of a colonizing venture, if indeed it could be done by private interests. Much depended, of course, on the quality of the agents ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Note on Editing
• Preface
• PART 1 Voyages and Colonies, 1584–1586
• PART 2 Surveys of Man and Beast
• PART 3 A Colony Is Formed and Lost
• PART 4 A Colony Is Lost: New Explorations Continue
• Appendix. An Archaeologist’s View of Indian Society
• Notes
• Bibliographical Note
• Index