V
England Moves to Extend Her Realm
ENGLAND came of age in the sixteenth century. Labor troubles helped to bring this about.
When the tenants on demesne land asserted their right to sell their labor to the best advantage, the lords in turn claimed their right to use their lands to the best advantage. Since profitable sheep farming required fewer laborers than ploughing and reaping, less and less acres were kept in cultivation by the lords. Frustrated and starving, the tenants were forced to abandon their homes and seek precarious employment in the towns and cities.
But feudalism retreated before this shift to community life and a nation of five million restless people emerged from its former agricultural isolation. Although the sheep farmers and wool merchants improved their capital fortunes at the expense of the poor laborers, they had notwithstanding built up a great national industry. England at last had something to sell!
In 1553 an expedition carrying woolens for trade with the Tartars attempted unsuccessfully to reach Cathay by a northeast polar passage. Defeated by ice and death, a surviving remnant did nevertheless manage to reach the White Sea and to journey south into Russia to Moscow. There they made a trade agreement of sorts with Ivan IV, called “the Terrible.”
The merchant adventurers of England promptly set up the Muscovy Company to handle what looked like a promising commerce with Russia and through that country with the caravans of Persia. But the English never found the Russians rewarding as either customers or middlemen. While their czar was willing to sell furs, felts and naval stores, or wax and honey, he wasn’t particularly interested in buying coarse woolens. His subjects wore fur.
The subjects of the czar did indeed indulge themselves in both the beauty and warmth of fur.
Except for the summer months Russians of quality went about in all manner of furred luxury. From bearskin, lynx, squirrel, beaver, fox and marten were fashioned their capes and bonnets, as well as their fine tailored coats sporting decorative braid loops and toggles. Women wore handsomely brocaded velvet coats lined and trimmed with expensive fur. Nowhere in the western world did royalty make such extravagant use of precious pelts. The nobility of Russia affected enveloping gowns and pelisses of sable, ermine and vair. Esteemed above all other pelts for certain wear was black fox. Nobles used this rare fur to make up their distinctive wide caps enclosing tall felted bonnets in the fashion of Babylonian hats.
Millions of lesser folk in Russia, wearing caps and buskins, and shedding cloth tunics for long waistcoats of fur in the winter, consumed vast quantities of muskrat, wolf, lamb skin and reindeer hide.
Still, there were plenty of pelts for export. They were in fact the country’s chief commodity. Caravans from Siberia brought their cargoes of fine pelts to the great market towns of Novgorod and Moscow. Ivan the Terrible personally enforced a tribute of thousands of sables each year from the western Tartars across the Urals. The value of Russia’s fur exports to Turkey, Persia and the countries of Christendom reached into millions of rubles yearly.
Trade with the Russians, however, was very unsatisfactory to the English. For one thing Dutch competition bid up the prices of Russian fur. Some pelts “cost more there with you than we can sell them for here” the London merchants wrote ruefully to their factors in Russia. Then there was the fickleness and downright trickiness of the Russians who being “very mistrustful ... doe not alwaies speake the trueth, and think other men to bee like them.” To these woes were added the enormous difficulties of the icy northern route. They were almost insuperable; yet the taxes imposed on cargoes through the Baltic by the King of Denmark were unbearably high. It was all very frustrating.
In the end proclamations were published in England against the use of foreign furs—and these laws were not entirely sumptuary.
True, the Renaissance had brought fashion consciousness to the middle class Englishman to such an extent that it was often difficult to distinguish between a noble and a well-furred commoner. There was urgent need for proclamations to stop that. Often in the past such proclamations had been necessary when the craze for furs mounted inordinately. “Sabyls be for great estates” had been one historic royal edict. Henry VIII, who decked himself lavishly with furs plundered from the monasteries and indulged in cozily “furred nightgowns” for his evening escapades, issued many a decree limiting the use of precious pelts to the chosen few. Other monarchs had done the same thing.
Over and above this need for class distinction however, it irked the relatively poor English royalty to be gouged in the market place for one of its regal necessities.
From earliest Norman times imported furs had been used in England to designate royal rank. Even before that, in the ninth and tenth centuries, nobility and ranking clergy trimmed their garments with beaver and fox. In the fourteenth century Edward III issued a decree specifying ermine, symmetrically spotted with astrakan or other bits of black, to be a royal fur. A whole set of heraldic tinctures was based on fur. Ermine was represented by white flecked with black, variant patterns and colors being termed ermines, erminois, pean and so forth. Vair was shown as blue and white alternating in the manner of small skins sewn together, some of its variants being counter-vair, potent and counter-potent. Feudal lords of England had been inclined to treat their equipage of furs as heirlooms, handing them down from generation to generation.
The use of fur was so firmly embedded in English tradition that it was not in the nature of things that the new restrictive laws now promulgated would be accepted without protest. One English merchant put it tellingly when describing presents of fur that had previously been brought to Queen Elizabeth by a Russian ambassador.
“The Presents sent unto her Majesty were Sables, both in paires for tippets, and two timbars, to wit, two times fortie, with Luzerns and other rich furres. For at that time that princely ancient ornament of furres was yet in use. And great pitie but that it might be renewed especiall in Court, and among Magistrates, not only for the restoring of an olde worshipful Art and Companie, but also because they be for our Climate wholesome, delicate, grave and comely; expressing dignitie, comforting age, and of longer continuance, and better with small cost to be preserved, then these new silks, shagges and ragges, wherein a great part of the wealth of the land is hastily consumed.”
Whether or not the merchant’s protest was heeded, it was in fact prophetic in its suggestiveness.
The recent proclamations had decreed “that no furres shall be worn here, but such as the like is growing here within this our Realme.” Well, the “Realme” was about to be vastly extended.
Now that England was no longer in a state of complete commercial dependence upon the continent, ingenuity at home and pluckiness abroad were rising to meet the challenge. Participation in world affairs was eagerly sought. While adventurers of purse formed companies to trade overseas, venturers of person took a sudden interest in such things as ship design and ordnance. With an eye on plunder as well as legitimate commerce shipwrights were trained to turn out swift and manageable craft of small burden, well gunned for oceanic warfare and easy to maintain.
Of course Mary Tudor, the Catholic Queen of England who succeeded her father Henry VIII, had prohibited her countrymen from sailing west to America. It wouldn’t have pleased Philip II of Spain. He married her to extend his empire, not to share it.
But Englishmen had tasted salt water and they liked it. They liked it even more after seeing the American silver, fifty thousand pounds of it, that Philip sent to London as a wedding present. When Mary died in 1558 after a short but bloody reign and her Protestant sister, Elizabeth, ascended the throne, there was no holding those who wanted to sail west.
Elizabeth, herself, applied no restraints. Like the French king, Francis I, she winked broadly enough when her own newly toughened mariners pirated Spain’s shipping and disputed that country’s ascendancy even on the Spanish main. The destiny of empire was beckoning the English. John Hawkins, the slaver, and Francis Drake, the privateer, were only the forerunners of captains of their stripe who were to make their country the mistress of the seas.
In the beginning it was envy of Spain, a thirst for silver and gold, and the quest for a trade passage to Cathay that drove the English westward, just as it had the French before them. Colonization, except as an eventual means to an end, had no part in the French scheme—nor in the English. The primary objects other than the harassment of Spain were the discovery of mines and a northwest passage.
Colonization was visualized, when at all, only as occupation—to hold the route to the mines or to Cathay against the possibility of foreign claims.
Not until an English venturer in America by the name of John Smith challenged the wasteful search for gold and demanded the development of the country’s more obvious resources did it begin to dawn on the merchant adventurers of England that colonization might be a commercially desirable end in itself.
And it was this same John Smith who demonstrated how trade with the natives could be employed to get the country planted with Englishmen. Along with the usual trade for pelts he bartered successfully for Indian corn and other food stuffs. This kept the colonists alive until they were “seasoned” to the new land; then came the profits from organized fur trading to maintain them until agricultural settlement could be effected with some degree of economic success.
Prior to the coming of John Smith the English ventures in America had been one costly failure after another.
Among the earliest of these were the expeditions led by that enigmatic Yorkshireman, Martin Frobisher. Reputedly a successful privateer, it was also said that he knew how to hold his tongue. Maybe what he did tell gained in importance thereby. It might account for the otherwise unaccountable backing he obtained for three successive voyages to America. Many thousands of pounds sterling were wasted on these ventures by a usually hard-headed merchant named Michael Lok. A large part of the expenditure was underwritten by the queen, herself, and Elizabeth was not normally one to squander her silver.
Frobisher went out first in 1576 in search of a northwest passage. He succeeded only in discovering the bay, or “strait” as he called it, that bears his name before coming on “gold ore” in the form of bright, black rocks. Since the samples must have proved worthless on his return to England, his promise of a strait to Cathay was probably very impressive. Certainly the fur-clad Eskimo he brought back from the north side of the “strait” was accepted as an Asiatic. In any event, back he went to America the next year with three ships and the financial blessings of Lok’s newly formed Company of Cathay.
Martin Frobisher did some further exploring on this voyage, but not enough it appears to learn that his strait was only a bay. It is all very strange. An abundance of spiders in the region was taken as convincing evidence that gold-bearing ore was close at hand. In the end Frobisher loaded his ships with worthless black earth and returned to England. What he said, or didn’t say, must have been doubly impressive this time for the merchants evidently were not one whit discouraged. They backed him with a fine fleet, fifteen ships, for a third voyage in 1578.
A large band of miners was sent along this time by the company, and two hundred twenty men were provided for the purpose of planting a settlement on the “strait” that would protect both the mines and the route to Cathay. But, so anxious was everyone to dig for gold, the necessary buildings never did get erected. Again it is not clear what happened, but apparently all thought of settlement was abandoned.
Before the ice began to close in, Martin Frobisher set sail for home with all his company and another three hundred tons of fool’s gold, bankrupting the Company of Cathay.
Next there was Sir Humphrey Gilbert. He and his half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, were the queen’s two favorite gallants among her soldiers of fortune. Both were brave men and both were intensely nationalistic. Sir Humphrey said that a man is “not worthy to live at all, that for feare, or danger of death, shunneth his country service, and his owne honour.”
Like other gentlemen marauders of England at the time Gilbert and Raleigh practiced piracy abroad because it was considered both patriotic and sportingly profitable to do so. They were particularly jealous of Spain’s sea commerce and lent support to raids on that country’s shipping with lucrative results. But when they personally led forays against the silver fleet they were none too successful. Humiliatingly enough, they were beaten off with severe losses.
Sir Humphrey, however, was good at drawing maps. Using a globe he showed the queen how interminably long were the southern routes to the Indian Ocean as compared with a great circle route to the northwest. This was true enough in theory—only there was land and ice to block the northern way. But Humphrey Gilbert didn’t let that bother him. He drew in a convenient strait, and once a thing is drawn in detail on a map it has a way of looking real, even to the artist who conceived it.
So the queen gave Gilbert a patent to “discover and inhabit” all the land in the west not occupied by another Christian prince. In the language of the time this meant to explore and occupy such land. And as an incentive the patentee was given absolute title to all the country he occupied, except of course for precious metals. One-fifth of that went to the crown.
Sir Humphrey planned to occupy Newfoundland as a starter. It was conveniently situated off the entrance to his strait—the Gulf of St. Lawrence!
Newfoundland had natural advantages for colonization. Englishmen were in fact already living there at some seasons—fishermen comfortably occupying their well-lardered huts alongside their drying frames. Domination of the fishing banks would surely prove profitable, Gilbert thought. Naval stores were plenteous too, according to all reports.
And everyone knew that Newfoundland was as rich in furs as Muscovy. Only a year or so earlier an English sea-captain, Richard Whitbourne, bound for the Gulf of St. Lawrence to kill whales, had put in at Trinity Harbor in Newfoundland. There he took so great a store of bears, beaver, otter and seal that after killing a few fish he returned forthwith to Southampton to sell his more profitable cargo. There were few of the difficulties in taking these furs that impeded trade with Russia.
However, when Gilbert took possession of Newfoundland at St. John’s in 1583, he showed small interest in fish, naval stores or furs.
Certainly, he was not much concerned with the potentials of the fur trade. That there were “foxes, which to the Northward a little further are black, whose furre is esteemed in some Countries of Europe very rich: Otters, bevers and marternes,” he seems to have acknowledged. And an American pine marten appears to have arrested his attention at least fleetingly. “The Generall had brought unto him a Sable alive, which he sent unto his brother Sir John Gilbert, knight of Devonshire.” But that was all.
From the first hour of his arrival at Newfoundland, Humphrey Gilbert showed deep interest only in metals. He commanded his miners to be diligent, and they obediently discovered what he took to be copper and silver. Excitedly loading one of his ships with a treasure trove of this ore, Sir Humphrey postponed the planting of Newfoundland. He sailed to discover other mines to the south under his patent.
But, unfortunately, he met with bad weather and his supply ship foundered. Even after changing his course for England, storms plagued his fleet. The “treasure” was lost, and Gilbert himself went down in the sea after having gallantly refused to abandon the men aboard his own leaking craft when he might have transferred to a safer consort ship. “We are as near to heaven by sea as by land!” he cried out above the tempest at the last.
Sir Walter Raleigh took over his half-brother’s patent. Since there was no limit placed on the land to be explored and occupied, except that it should not be already occupied by another Christian prince, Raleigh had wide latitude in choosing a theatre for his operations. Newfoundland didn’t appeal to him. It wasn’t the most favorable site for what he had in mind.
The survivors of Sir Humphrey’s ill-fated expedition had been thoroughly interrogated; obviously it wasn’t silver that had been mined in Newfoundland. After all, precious metals didn’t come from the bleak coasts of the north, but from the warmer regions of the south where the Spaniards had discovered them. And that suited Raleigh’s purpose, as much as the rising hope that a passage to the Indian Ocean might also lie in those parts where Verrazano once claimed to have actually sighted the other sea. Those southern coasts were near New Spain!
For, what Raleigh really had in mind was a site close to the route of the Spanish treasure galleons. He wanted an English outpost, a garrisoned base, within easy striking distance of the silver fleets. That was the quickest way to riches and the surest means of destroying the power of Spain. The Caribbean was the Spaniard’s Achilles’ heel.
The first step in the achievement of this purpose was to be the planting of a colony.
A reconnaissance expedition, sent out by the southern route in 1584, chose the vicinity of Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds near Hatteras for the settlement. Curiously, however, this party failed to recognize the poor harbor and stormy hazards of the location. Possibly it was just the first agreeable site they came upon as they coasted north from the borders of Spanish-held Florida. If they had gone on just a little farther they would have found Chesapeake Bay, a likely spot indeed.
In that case Virginia, as Raleigh called the new country in honor of his “virgin” queen, might have been successfully planted in the sixteenth rather than the seventeenth century.
However the reconnaissance expedition suggested Roanoke Island, near Cape Hatteras, bringing back glowing reports of the country, a few dark pearls and a good quantity of soft furs. “Chamoys, Buffe, and Deere skinnes” had been taken in trade with the friendly natives. A single bright tin dish given in barter had gained twenty skins, each worth all of a crown, and a copper kettle had gained as many as fifty. The voyagers also brought back two of the native inhabitants who were as anxious to please the white men with tales that found favor as was Chief Donnacona of Canada when he was taken to France, and probably for the same reasons.
Sir Walter Raleigh tried hard during the next three years to plant a colony at Hatteras, sending out one expedition after another. Everything failed. Storms contributed to the disasters as much as bad leadership and worsening relations with the Indians. But, mainly, the objectives were wrong.
It was the search for precious metals, the quest for a trade passage through to the Indian Ocean, the harrying of Spain, all coupled with a complete neglect of the country’s more obvious resources, that brought defeat. No one thought of growing food or trading with the Indians. The “colonists” were mostly fortune hunters, ex-soldiers and adventurers, bent on finding El Dorado in one form or another.
All except one—he was Thomas Hariot, a precise man and an observant one. Raleigh sent him out as geographer to the second expedition. Noting the resources of the country, he listed among other things wine, “medicinal” tobacco and furs as saleable exports. He made special mention of the fur trade potential.
“All along the Sea coast,” Hariot wrote, “there are great store of Otters, which being taken by weares and other engines made for the purpose, wil yeeld good profit. We hope also of Marterne furres, and make no doubt by the relation of the people, that in some places of the countrey there are store, although there were but two skinnes that came to our hands. Luzernes also we have understanding of, although for the time we saw none.”
But even Hariot, along with Ralph Lane, the governor of the colony at the time, listened gullibly to the tales of Indians who wanted to gain favor. While Sir Richard Grenville, the admiral of the Virginia fleet, raided the Spaniards in the West Indies, Lane and his men spent months of fruitless search in the interior for white pearls or mines, and followed many a river whose source might prove to be “near unto a sea.”
They explored north as far as the Chesapeake, entering the capes and looking for a channel that might be the passage, while one of their party, John White, made sketches of the region. The south side of the bay thus became well known in England about 1590 when White’s work was included in the first engraved map of Virginia published by Theodore de Bry. What the Englishmen failed to understand at the time, because they were more concerned with gold mines and channel passages, was that the Chesapeake tidewater represented a storehouse of valuable fur—muskrat, beaver, mink and otter—all in vast reserve.
Lane, however, was convinced that only “the discovery of a good mine by the goodness of God, or a passage to the South Sea, or some way to it, and nothing else, can bring this country in request to be inhabited by our nation.” If only he had realized that within easy reach there was far more quick gold in fur than the English would ever take out of America in ore!
A last contingent of Raleigh’s colonists, which included some women and children, provided one of history’s most mystifying episodes when the entire colony simply vanished from Roanoke Island. Among them was the first Christian child born in English Virginia, little Virginia Dare, granddaughter of the colony’s new governor, John White, the artist. The word “Croatan,” carved in “faire Romane letters” on a post of the abandoned stockade, was the only clue to the lost colony ever found by those who came later to search for it. A tribe of Indians by that name lived on a near-by island. Even this proved futile however, and the mystery has only darkened with the passing of the centuries.
Other English ventures in America also ended in failure. Beginning in 1585 Captain John Davis, an expert navigator, went out three times in quest of a northwest passage to Cathay. He penetrated farther north than anyone before him to discover the straits that bear his name, never fully realizing that beyond lay only pack ice. Captain George Weymouth followed Davis’ track in 1593, meeting eventual defeat.
Weymouth tried again for a northern passage in 1602; so did Captain John Knight in 1606 while exploring for gold and silver mines. Ice and mutiny stopped Weymouth. Knight simply disappeared ashore one day.
Not long after the turn of the century Captain Charles Leigh led a daring expedition to South America in an attempt to establish a base of operations in what is now French Guiana. Only a remnant survived a massacre by the natives in 1605 to straggle back to England.
The coast of North America from Spanish Florida to Nova Scotia also came in for more investigation at this time. Bartholomew Gilbert, son of Sir Humphrey, was sent out by James I in 1603. He visited the Chesapeake Bay area, possibly hoping to find survivors of the Roanoke colony, only to be killed himself by Indians when he landed with a shore party.
Others explored in the vicinity of Cape Cod and northward, Bartholomew Gosnold, going out to that coast in 1602, and Martin Pring in 1603. They found no mines, but they took back to England quantities of cedar, sassafras and furs. Gosnold’s cargo of pelts obtained from the Buzzard’s Bay area included beaver, marten, otter, “Wild-cat skinnes very large and deepe furre,” seal, deer, black fox, rabbit and “other beasts skinnes to us unknowen.”
Pring was more interested in sassafras trees, but he later wrote that the furs of certain wild beasts in those parts “being hereafter purchased by exchange may yield no smal gaine to us. Since as we are certainly informed, the Frenchmen brought from Canada the value of thirtie thousand Crownes in the yeare 1604. Almost in Bevers and Otters skinnes only.”
A great deal of sassafras was cut and stowed aboard their ships by these two captains. Sassafras brought fancy prices at the time as a cure for the French pox as well as a specific for certain other diseases. But such windfall importations glutted the London and Bristol markets, seriously depressing the price.
Both Gosnold and Pring brought back the usual tales about a passage to the South Sea and the fertility of the land. So Captain George Weymouth went over in 1605, visiting the Maine coast where he explored for colonization sites. He also drove a good though hazardous trade for pelts. In one instance, “for knives, glasses, combes and other trifles to the valew of foure or five shillings, we had 40 good Beavers skins, Otters skins, Sables, and other small skins which we knewe not how to call.”
These were the interlopers who had alarmed the French traders then settled in the Bay of Fundy. Before Weymouth left Maine, Champlain was making his own exploration southward along the coast as far as Cape Cod. He learned enough to decide that all the English ventures had been failures. They had discovered no mines, no passage, and, although they had made a temporary camp or two, no colony was yet planted. Obviously, the Frenchman surmised, the English had found nothing of great value to the south or they would be trying to occupy that coast. Champlain turned back, convinced that the best prospects lay in the valley of the St. Lawrence.
But then, late in 1606, three small ships put down the Thames, bound for America. Aboard, in addition to the crews, were a hundred or more men committed to colonizing an English plantation in the vicinity of Chesapeake Bay. One of these was Captain John Smith, soldier and adventurer extraordinary—and, fortunately, a forthright man who spoke his mind.