First Draft: Remove Duplicate Sections — Rewrite
Outer Ports, North American Discovery, the Irish Interlude, Adventure, Colonization, Privateering and the Spanish War, Roanoke, Raleigh, and the Virginia Company
During the 1550’s England underwent a half-century of change that looking back constituted a sort of breakout in overseas commercial trade and a serious entry into European mercantilist foreign affairs. As discussed previously, there was discernable “catch up” tone to the period. Most of the decade was Mary I’s reign, in which her husband, Phillip II of Spain co-ruled. Catholic Mary was not popular, and her husband decidedly less so. The union, however, tossed England, ready or not, into European affairs.
In 1558 she died and England did a remarkable 180 degree turn with Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn’s and Henry VII’s Protestant daughter placed on the throne for what would be a remarkably long tenure until 1603. During these two reigns England initiated a series of initiatives and went through several critical events that would set the stage for the design and development of the 1605-6 Virginia Company and the commencement of a North American-centered discovery, exploration, and colonization:
In this chapter we will discuss the core imitative, a breakaway from the cloth-based Company of Merchant Adventurers joint stock corporation first launched by the Muscovy Company in 1553, and followed up with a series of other breakaway corporations, of which we will consider the Levant Company, and the crowning achievement, the East India Company in 1601. While all this was going one, we can trace a bimodal path of London and the English Outer [i.e. non-London] Ports, paths that competed with each other, overlapped, but also went off in noticeably distinctive approaches and foci.
Interwoven into each path was the 1585-1604 War against Spain, the war of the Spanish Armada invasion, and a dramatic departure from the Company of Merchant Adventures wool/cloth focused continental export trade—replacing that with an import biased multi-product domestic focused comprehensive commercial trade and exploration and discovery expeditions that carried England across the globe. Despite this greatly enlarged perspective, the standout initiative was an on-again, off-again non stop invasion of Ireland, which, in effect was England’s first attempt at colonization.
By the 1580’s, however, adventurers from the Outer Ports commenced a series of voyages that involved North America, through they were mostly trying to find a Northwest Passage to Asia. Several famous names, Sir Walter Raleigh, one we will discuss, a colony, Roanoke, which got misplaced; finally by the end of the decade a decision to launch expeditions first to Asia, the East India Company, and by the end of Elizabeth’s reign, a corresponding initiative to colonize North America, a mission to be entrusted to the Virginia Company.
If we pause for this paragraph and reflect on the preceding four, there is a lot that went on in this half-century—and there is more that has been left out. Starting with ending deadhead voyages to serious importing of commercial products to England, and winding up with setting up a colony, “somewhere” in North America. While I remain unconvinced England “caught up”, it certainly engaged itself into the mercantilist Atlantic world, and launched an initiative to take on the Dutch on the other side of the world, the East Indies. And, lets not forget, engage in a near twenty year war with the behemoth of the era, Spain, resulting in a stalemate, and for better or worse, pretty much bringing Ireland under her suasion. Having conceded the obvious, however, I am unconvinced England was ready to start a permanent colony.
In 1553-5 with the formation and incorporation of the Muscovy Company, the first in a sustained series of geographically focused overseas joint stock corporations, that trade pattern shifted noticeably—with tensions and expectations being generated as a result. The formation and incorporation of the Virginia Company was an part of, an element in, this shift in England-Britain’s overseas trade—and colonization-shift of this period. These changes did enter into the Company organization, leadership, and Virginia’s business-settlement plan.
The first post 1550 grouping of consequence, the Joint Stock and Regulated companies, was the Muscovy Company. Being the path-breaker and truly involved in new markets, the Muscovy Company, along with Russia, ventured into the Guinea trade, the slave trade, the northwest passage, and a sustained interest in the Levant, northern Africa, Barbary coast and Venice. Meddlesome busybodies, they also jealously asserted their rights and position against non member trading corporations and discovery adventurers. That had its implications for the future Virginia Company.
As Robert Ashton observes both export and import generated opportunities for the merchant to “farm” his taxes and distribution of imports out to others who paid for their concession. In this sense, both import and export trade produced small opportunistic clusters of wealth accumulating entrepreneurs who live off of the trade, and who, if one is wont, in effect were a cluster of businesses in London and the other port cities. Networks created by trade extended in ways that we cannot trace nor fathom today–but were extensive and intruded into every nook and carry of
Phillip Stern closes his commentary regarding joint stock corporations of this time period with the observation that “English overseas companies by their very nature were transitional institutions, whose rights and responsibilities were increasingly intertwined across jurisdictional and political boundaries. Companies shifted constantly, both at home and abroad between their roles as [representatives of sovereigns] and suppliant subjects. As traders, fellowships, landlords, and diplomats sixteenth century overseas corporations were by necessity political chameleons whose survival and success depended on their ability to blend into systems of sovereignty in multiple places at once … These cobbled together forms of jurisdictional power were highly tenuous and vulnerable, requiring much supervision, vigilant defense and .. [in regard to] English charters ‘negotiation and interpretation” [99] Stern, Empire Incorporated, p.48
“Most joint stock corporations would come to usher in a revolution in European global expansion [but] in the early seventeenth century many were still quite bad at it. Most projects were underfunded and disorganized, their leadership often seemingly persuaded by their own promotional materials to overestimate their capacities and underestimate the resistance they faced at home and abroad”. [99] Stern, Empire Incorporated, p.50
I offer that corporate leadership in overseas commercial trade in this period had serious military background, as captains or expedition leaders they were close to dictatorial, and had more than their share of rashness they called courage or a sense of honor to which they had to respond. Wealth and well-placed connections secured conformity or deference but did not in anyway convey quality or correctness in their decision-making. This is the environment in which the Virginia Company operated and the inheritance it received from English experience and expectations of those associated with it.
Our initial discussion on the cloth Merchant Adventurer Company ended by arguing the organizational structure led to control of its board and leadership over its own membership, and how it further made changes that restricted greatly future membership except as it would approve. The oligarchy it created profited greatly, and their exports grew, but the industry itself stagnated, nor did they innovate by adding imports to their returning ships. The regulated trading companies discussed in this section suffered each their own version of monopolies creating economic oligopolies which in their turn redistributed wealth, status and even power.
The marine industries were “hollowed out” into have and have-nots, the latter who were driven to create their own legally chartered monopolies of some sort, or to engage in other activities that included privateering and smuggling. It also led as Peck states to “rent-seeking” which incorporates into normal business activities and contracts such as bribes, selling of licenses, modification of customs regulations, and even “circumnavigation of the penal laws”. As part of this the Crown would sell the enforcement of penal laws to private individuals in the form of a monopoly. This is a lot more than bounty-hunting. Corruption in overseas trade, commerce, and colonization, was an example of a bureaucratic-driven policy system that had institutionalized corruption into its normal policy-making..
As one might expect rivalries, competition and simple opposition along with demand for reforms will result. Elizabeth put these farming, customs and otherwise, plus monopolies on steroids during the 1580’s and “amazingly” by 1601 a normally accommodative parliament competed with her to terminate a number of these practices. As we shall see James I had his own version of this and so we can assume the system as amended continued through what will be the Virginia Company period. It serves no useful purpose to suggest students and readers need be reminded that today’s ethics, laws, standards, and conflicts of interests, not to put aside the purchase of offices and contracts as normal business, simply cannot be applied to this period.
But what we can suggest is these folk, and historians as well, can see how overseas trade, colonization and whatever, is necessarily going to be an important element of frustrated reform demands that will erupt and become part of what I refer to as the “drift to civil war”. Monopolies and joint stock corporations are a floating target of reformers—who are outraged at all this. That the CEO or COO of the Virginia Company would be, the leading parliamentary reformer of monopolies is going to play a role in the affairs of that corporation and its administration of Virginia colony. Again Peck asserts:
Because it lacked a paid … bureaucracy, the Crown was forced to rely on informal agents to enforce its laws. Corrupt practices are [therefore] carried out by the agents of the state and those with whom they interact … Some agents were members of the central [Court] and local administration, others were informal agents of the Court who served as middlemen in transactions … Put another way, the parties in these transactions ranged from courtiers and great merchants on the highest level to under officials [and others]. [99] Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption (Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 142; also, see p. 153-158; also for a reform proposal see Stern, Empire Incorporated, p.38, and Osgood, the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, Vol 1, p.25 both asserting that Edward Hayes, the author of a petition to the Crown asking for the use of royal funds and management of colonization rather than ‘an Atlantic settlement founded NOT by a’prynce [prince] of wealth & power’ … but rather by ‘Only a boddy pollitike & incorporate’ [that] could raise the capital needed for such a venture, but perhaps more importantly, it would serve as the ‘most indifferent and requuysit above other fourmes of government to the erection & advancement of thys new state & common weal’.
Introducing the Outer Ports
A distinct grouping that developed in the course of this half-century were those from the outer ports. Smaller in population than London (imagine that), they too were growing in this period, and, by virtue of their geography, were oriented to overseas trade that ventured across the Atlantic rather than the English channel and the continent. To their overall detriment outer port elites got trapped in the various Irish ventures and colonization schemes that flowed in the decades of this period. “Provincial merchants had little to do with the main drive for eastern trade, via Muscovy, the Levant and , finally the Cape of Good Hope [the East India Company], but they had much to do with the Atlantic enterprise [ K. R., p. 21]. Their involvement with Ireland never completely disappeared, and many of the regional elite drew their military skills from this warfare, and the landholding Irish plantations they put together provided resources for their endeavors.
England’s initial trading base was “with the Peninsula”, Spain and Portugal, which they shared with others in the Outer Port grouping. Plymouth, Southampton,, Weymouth and Bristol were leaders, and from their regional elites would come many of those adventurers who organized and led the expeditions of discovery (the Gilberts, Raleigh, Hawkins, Cabot’s). They too fell into shipbuilding and ship ownership and also got caught up in the war with Spain, becoming some of the boldest, anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish among the English elites.
As to their ventures, they also heavily participated in the slave trade, Newfoundland fishing and fisheries, Gulf of St Lawrence, New England—and as expected were also privateers.[pp. 21-2]. As one would expect, the outer ports did not generate sufficient wealth to compete with that accumulated by London-based merchants and adventurers, and if the considered wisdom of “watch the money” has application in this period, the Outer Port, to their disgust, were dependent on both crown and/or London for financing.
From these Outer Ports metro areas a disproportionate number of adventurers pursued both discovery expeditions also to Asia by means of a northwest passage primarily, or after Drake by the Cape of Magellan (tip of South America), to India and Asia. These voyages, somewhat by intention, discovered a good deal of the North American coastline. Several of these adventurers became “favorites” of Queen Elizabeth, and almost all Outer Port adventurers joined with her in the war against Catholic Spain.
Through these more militaristic avenues, the Outer Ports enjoyed some access to the Court, and that led to their propensity to use privateering as a supplement business strategy to finance their voyages and initiatives—to the considerable irritation of the London-based corporations that specialized on trade primarily, taking advantage of their geographic monopoly. Privateering thus became a yet another wedge between these competing trading corporations..
This tension-filled uneven rivalry, rooted in the metropolitan port cities of England took a new and even more intense form in 1601 when primarily London-based merchant adventurers came together to incorporate yet a new joint stock corporate, intended to compete with the Dutch in the East Indies (India, Southeast Asis primarily). This new corporation was not just another geographic monopoly, but also a national partnership with the Crown,
We then introduce the reader to the Outer Ports. In that discussion we take a Deep Dive into the Exploration and Discovery of North America by explorers, merchant adventurers, and Court favoritea, especially Sir Walter Raleigh who harken from the Outer Ports. Raleigh will be in jail by the time the Virginia Company was incorporated; a substitute grouping of Outer Port elites will take over. They will present the petition to James I in 1605 that will lead not only to the (Plymouth) Virginia Company, but to James endorsing the larger conglomerate Company to manage his (not England’s) first colonial settlement. That last discussion will be in another module. In this module we will describe the Outer Port experience that led to its later petition.
Outer Ports: Ireland, Exploration, Privateering and Discovery
Off to the sides England’s other ports, the outer ports, played catch up with rapidly growing London, the capital for some piece of the economic growth through “commercial trade and raid” strategy. Along the way, hey fell into an exploratory and discovery niche that initially sought a northwest passage to provide direct access to the Asian markets under the influence of Spain, Portugal and late to that area, Holland. Their focus was on the Americas and the vast Atlantic that separated England from them. Unknown and undiscovered, the Americas needed to be discovered and understood much more—and since that is where Spain and Portugal had garnered their wealth, the Americas had to be contested if Spain in particular was to be checked. From the outer ports, ships dribble out to clear up the black box of America’s discovery.
It was only slowly that active concern and engagement in extra-European enterprise [commerce] developed over the fifteen decades [between 1480 and 1630]. The movement may appear to have gathered momentum gradually, but closer analysis suggests rather a series of spurts and relatively sluggish intervals. National interest was first awakened by the flurry of activity associated with the discovery of America in the years around 1500 [Spanish and Portuguese].
The blaze of great European discoveries thus lit up new vistas for English venturers, but for the next fifty years [until early 1550’s] their efforts … were remarkably tentative, intermittent and feeble …It was only until the later seventies that the movement picked up again under the spur of nationalistic hostility to Spain. The fourth spurt occurred in the [very early] 1600’s. It began with the creation of the East India Company in 1600, the stimulus to which came not so much from within as without, in the sense that the Dutch merchants set the pace and the Londoners could not afford to be left behind. [99] K. R. Andrews, Trade Plunder and Settlement, p. 358]
The first decades of exploration/discovery produced some success, such as Drake’s circumnavigation, but for the most part exploration and discovery produced small scale discovery, and no northwest passage. Because of Elizabeth’s adventure to establish an Irish-Ulster plantation-colony, if only because of their location, the outer ports got caught up in the Tudor aspirational Irish plantation-conquest. In the mid-1580’s that got caught up with Spain and a twenty year war commenced. Discovery and the Americas was pushed off to the margins, privateering, raids, and even piracy the hot buttons that consumed most attention–until 1600 when events offered an opportunity.
Outer Ports
Thus far we understand that English discovery, exploration, and colonial settlement was not national policy thrust issued from above by the Crown or court, but rather the result of individual, private, charismatic movement launched from support drawn mostly from the port cities of England, including London. This bottoms-up policy initiative garnered what legitimacy and support it could from the Queen, and her court officials, but it went out to sea on its own intending to accomplish its own ends and priorities, which to some extent mirrored those of the English state and her Crown. The resources of the state were quite limited, and the costs of the Crown, especially one waging war, stressed its ability to support what was a risky, time-consuming, expertise-heavy, and very expensive policy.
In this section we delve into what these local and regional adventurers hoped to gain, beyond adventure, and celebrity status. That they wanted to make money to support their private lives and aspirations is without question. That wealth could be obtained through many strategies combined in a single voyage, and “profit” was only profit after the debt incurred and expenses of the voyaged were paid off. These shipowners, investors and most of all the expedition organizer and commander conducted their voyages mostly in reaction to the forces of nature, and the realities of what they found when they landed. When they left port they were looking for the northwest passage, they wound up bouncing of the coastline, reacting to their chance meetings with the Natives, and returning when they had to by the realities they faced.
Of course none of this matters if one operates out of an ideological viewpoint, but one way to best understand how and why things happened in this period, or any period of history, is to have as few preconceptions built into one’s observations, and to resist the impulse to force one’s research into a preordained end point.
What is most clear to me is England did not follow any systemized or conceptual plan to establish a colony in North America, or anywhere except Ireland. Motivated by aspirational goals, competitive instincts, a feudal sense of honor, and a rough vision so wide and embracive of many goals and aspirations in and of themselves, such as provided by the Hakluyts, off they went. This is why in the end I am attracted, but not absolutely committed to, an intepretation of England’s initial North American discovery and colonization effort provided by K. R. Andrews and summarized in the first paragraph or his last chapter, “Reflections” in Trade, Plunder and Settlement:
In the course of overseas expansion [English] trade, plunder and settlement were closely interwoven. Often indistinguishable in practice, they may be seen historically as aspects of the same process … The English put colonization well below trade and plunder in their priorities. Their primary objective from about 1508 down to 1630 was oriental trade. It was the northeast voyage of 1553 [by the Muscovy Company] which finally launched the country’s overseas expansion …. Moreover the Muscovy and East India companies, or their leading members were responsible for most of the work of northern exploration which constituted England’s main contribution to discovery in this period and which was undertaken to promote eastern trade.
Second only to this commercial [trade] campaign was the predatory drive of armed traders and marauders to win by fair means or foul a share of the Atlantic wealth of the Iberian nations. Plunder and the pursuit of treasure loomed large in this western [Atlantic and North American] offensive … In these and other ways the seeds of colonies were sown in the course of trade, plundering or harvesting [fishing] the sea. Both Gilbert and the elder Hakluyt envisioned colonial way-stations in northern passages and the younger Hakluyt conceived of a colony of pirates, ex-convicts, and liberated black slaves strategically place in Magellan’s Strait. Such bases they hoped would develop as centers of trade and settlement, and so in fact did the Cape stations later … while out of the East India company’s factories did eventually grow an empire. But those factories existed in the first place only to serve trade—they were no more colonies than were … English rope-walks. The line is hard to trace between such trading stations and the transient so-called colonies [previous to the Virginia Company] …
Sagadahoc was only one step further up the latter of colonial evolution, as were the West Indian plantations: artificial creations of merchant syndicates, maintained with labour capital, and everything else necessary for the sole purpose of producing a marketable commodity. Virginia came to have much in common with the Caribbean plantations, though it also had from the start the character of a full-scale settlement. Indeed, the troubles of Virginia arose partly from its hybrid nature and the tendency of its founders to confuse the strictly commercial function of a colony of exploitation with the broader purposes of a colony of settlement. Such was the upshot of the collaboration of London merchants and landed gentry. [99] K. R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement, pp. 356-7
It is in this sense I assert the English were not ready for prime time if their primary and consensual goal was to start a permanent settlement. Virginia was intended as her first true attempt to found a permanent settlement, not a way station, a base for military operations, or a trading factory to produce exportable goods and commodities. Still, while much is made of the Hakluyts, their vision of such a colony was just that, a hazy vision, hopelessly aspirational, mostly a laundry list of good things for England and Christianity. To its settlers the opportunity a colony opened up was no more fleshed out than was the Holy Grail to the knights of Camelot. To make matters worse, they entrusted the venture to a regulated joint stock corporation, without funds of its own other than investors in the form of share and debt holders.
A permanent settlement in the wilds of North America required a lot more than romantic dreams, images of wealth, and whatever it did require there were scant of these on board the three ships headed for Jamestown in 1606. If England was to acquire a colony from this, the front door to colonization was locked to these amateurs; the only hope for that goal was to try it from the back door, settler-self-government.
Discovery and exploration of North American had started in the 1480’s but we spare the reader by starting it in the 1570’s with the explorer Martin Frobisher (son of a merchant from Yorkshire northern east coast England, with experience in trading for spices and privateering, and maybe piracy) petitioned the Privy Council for a patent to find the northwest passage. Referred to the Russia trading company, he convinced them to sail and Michael Lok its CEO became his partner. With the Queen’s verbal support (she also waved goodby when he left port) he went off on three voyages starting in 1576.
A good deal of time, years, was consumed in raising funds and contracting for ships. Each voyage took about a year or so. That expedition was somewhat successful and encouraged further interest in North American discovery by the Russia Company. Sailing from Plymouth in his last voyage ( 1578), the first two from a London port on the Thames where the Russia Company was based), much went wrong when he attempted a settlement in Greenland, having two ships wrecked, and finding little in the line of metals; he was fired upon return. The remainder of his career was caught up in the war with Spain and repulse of the Armada 1588. He died from his wounds in 1594 in Plymouth. Gilbert Humphrey inspired by him took up the challenge to voyage to North America.
The planning of English colonies in North America … really begins with Sir Humphrey Gilbert. In his abortive schemes of the years 1578 to 1583, we get the first body of significant information on the difficulties of equipping and financing an overseas venture with a colonizing objective under the limiting conditions which Tudor England afforded. Gilbert was also the first Englishman seriously to depose—if only on paper and on the basis of inadequate information—of American land to English settlers … His resources were altogether too meager and his projects at once too grandiose and too inadequate to provide any real chance of success. [99] David Beers Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481-1620 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), pp. 282-3
Humphrey Gilbert, a well-connected Devon (Plymouth) noble family (his mother was governess to Elizabeth), Eton-educated, and protégé of the rising star Henry Sidney in the 1560’s. His military career started in France and soon shifted to Ireland where Sidney was the Lord Governor and a successor governor who brutally conquered southern Ireland. Associated with Thomas with [not our Thomas Smythe, see below] in his Irish settlement adventures, their failure led him to in 1572 fight in the war of the Netherlands against Spain. Ulster. [99] Philip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated: the Corporations that build British Colonialism (Belknap Harvard University Press), 2023, pp. 24-7
He served briefly in Parliament where he vigorously spoke on behalf on behalf of the Crown’s prerogative against critiques of monopoly grants, and for his loyalty, was evidently rewarded with a seven year patent [monopoly] to enforce and collect fines for violations of the 1541 Unlawful Games Act. He also joined with three of the Queen’s most influential advisors—Burghley [the elder Cecil], the Earl of Leicester [Robert Dudley]; and the Privy Councilor, diplomat and philosopher Sir Thomas Smith [again not our Thomas Smythe]-in Smith’s quixotic alchemy and mining startup, the Society of the New Art, all the while accumulating substantial manorial holdings in England and like Smith and many others, looking for investors for his various and sometimes wildly ambitious plantation schemes in Ireland. Gilbert was hardly unique. Sixteenth century England … was a franchise government, in which offices and positions were both public service and private property, with prerogatives and perquisites meant to offer opportunities for social and financial advancement … Like other chartered offices and enterprises, overseas franchises could be bought, shred, sold, inherited, farmed out, and financed [99] Phillip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated, p. 18
Despite his early career, Gilbert had other interests and he asked for a patent in 1565 from the Privy Council to explore a “northwest passage”. The pushback he got from his northwest passage request was that the Privy Council referred his petition for patent to the Russia Company where it was unceremoniously rejected—ten years later, the same request received the same treatment from the Council and the Russia trading company headquartered in London. He published the patent nevertheless in 1576 and pivoted his interest and career to exploring and discovery. [99 https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/gilbert_humphrey_1E.html .Gilbert had joined with Richard Grenville, who with other investors proposed a [joint stock] company to discover lands along a southern passage using the Straits of Magellan. No luck.
A second expedition followed, this time to the New England coast, and it wandered up to Newfoundland in search of the Northwest Passage; Russia Company investors were on board, but more interestingly a 1000 pound investment by the Queen herself, who also contributed a navy flagship to join in the expedition distinguished it from other voyages. A settlement was founded but it came to no success. Investor interest in these voyages were a mixed bag and the expeditions that followed were largely failures.
Only the Queen’s investment was paid in full—an introduction for the reader to appreciate that investments were by successive subscriptions each year or so; they were frequently not paid in full if success was waning. Indeed, it was discovered the company had never filed for a charter, and when it folded it was 5000 pounds in debt. Gilbert died in a storm when his ship sunk on the way back. Suggestions are that Shakespeare’s’ Merchant of Venice’s Shylock was drawn from this corporation’s American adventurers. Their best legacy was a set of maps which others could utilize. [99] Philip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated: the Corporations that build British Colonialism (Belknap Harvard University Press), 2023, pp. 30-3.
His thought and intention was to attack and take over several fisheries on Newfoundland’s coast in order to set up a home base for privateering in the West Indies; in 1578 his patent for this was issued. By 1582, however, he had not found sufficient investors to launch the expedition. He formed a joint stock company to better attract investors. An interesting innovation was he offered settlers an incentive of land acreage, 1000 acres, to go and 1000 acres more to settle. This incentive will in the future be called a homestead incentive.
That didn’t do the trick either and a variety of schemes and incentives were added to Gilbert’s package of inspiration (indentures were another). Gilbert finally launched his expedition, two others followed; in mid-1583, a fourth set out, with middling success; t on the way back a storm sank Gilbert’s ship and he went down with it. His half-brother, Walter Raleigh, captain of the Golden Hind, saw Gilbert’s ship lights go out. [99] Philip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated: the Corporations that build British Colonialism (Belknap Harvard University Press), 2023, pp. 35-7. When Raleigh got back to England (1584) he transferred Gilbert’s patent to himself. David B. Quinn https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/gilbert_humphrey_1E.html .
Giving up on Newfoundland, Raleigh pivoted to the southern climes and began planning for what would be a Roanoke colony. In the long run, it was Gilbert, however, that alerted the English to the fishing around Newfoundland, and the possibility of a northern colony of some type. Gilbert coupled with Frobisher & Lok truly made the pivot to North American discovery, mercantilism, and embryonic colonization-settlement. Drake (non-aristocrat, Plymouth) injected himself with schemes, slavery, privateering, West Indies raids, and England’s first round-the-world expedition, Plymouth mayor and M.P., Cadiz raid, co-commander in defeat of Armada, counter-attack, and raid on Panama (and his death) 1596, but it was Raleigh that landed and settled the English in (southern) North America.
England’s voyages of discovery would continue to flirt with Newfoundland and attempted to convert he French explorer’s Jacques Cartier’s expeditions up the St Lawrence River into English settlements. These intended settlements were an offshoot of a cod fishing industry “cluster” off southern Newfoundland and they fueled a number of attempts to figure out the lay of the coasts and landscape of Canada, and a bit of Maine. This flirtation would last well into the first years of the seventeenth century as France and England sent Cartier and Champlain voyage after voyage to establish a permanent settlement. In 1602, Cartier competed with an expedition of Bartholomew Gosnold which we shall discuss a page or two below. As far as the English were concerned, however, the Newfoundland flirtation’s, if David Quinn is correct, was the “only large and lasting achievement in American waters of the sixteenth century was the development of a substantial hold of the cod fishery in one sector, southeast Newfoundland”. [99] David Beers Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481-1620, p. 313
Stern’s excellent summation of Raleigh’s discovery and North American colonization that followed Gilbert’s 1583 death is better than I can do. After his father’s death, Adrian Gilbert inherited his patents and company schemes. The son extended himself with additional investors, including the Russia Company. The business concept was to establish more a trading center in southern North America, and obliquely to find a maritime route to Asia. The plans ran afoul, betrayed by a partner, Gilbert was left with little more than his inherited patents and one he had secured (1584) solely in his name for five years to a corporation (Collegats of the Discovery of the Northwest Passages). In place of his missing partner, was Walter Raleigh:
But by then (post 1585) England had two different “camps” within court politics regarding where, and why, these voyages to North America should continue: Again Quinn explains “Raleigh’s ventures centered around Roanoke in modern North Carolina during the years 1584 5o 1590, represent primarily the policy of Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s pugnacious Secretary of State who was anxious to take the offensive against Spain and to claim English bases on the North American coast suitable for attacking ships coming from the Spanish Indies. Lord Burghey [Cecil the elder], on the other hand was anxious to keep out of the way with Spain … and was interested in a summer fishery in Newfoundland, in ship [exports] tar, hemp and timber, in the fur trade and in the possibility of [permanent] settlement in temperate lands where agricultural production would be on much the same lines as at home”. [99] David Beers Quinn, England and the Discovery of America (Alfred A. Knoff, 1974), pp. 2345-6
The Gilbert’s half-brother … Raleigh was another man of projects: soldier, Irish seigneur (which he sub-granted into proprietorships), courtier [Elizabeth’s favorite], Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall, Vice-Adniral, warden of the Cornish tin mines, patentee for enterprises from tavern licensing to domestic cloth and wine trades. He soon parted ways with Adrian’s scheme, receiving a month or two later his own royal patterns for a southerly venture that effectively took up the vast remainder of Gilbert’s grant.
After the return of the smaller initial venture, a fleet of seven ships set out under these patents, commanded by Richard Grenville, and carrying off a party of colonists with Ralph Lane as Governor. Beset by attack and food shortages the colony eventually evacuated with Drake’s fleet, but like many of his processors, Raleigh looked to recover his losses by redoubling his efforts to organize a return venture, issuing his own patterns of incorporation to a group of adventurer-settlers [using homestead incentives]. ..
In 1587, John White led a group of over one hundred settlers to Roanoke Island and then sailed back to England for more supplies. This colony famously faltered [i.e. got lost]. White found on his return that the colonists had mysteriously disappeared … Many lives, not to mention by some accounts 40,000 pounds had been lost on the enterprise. Because of such vast losses Raleigh shifted his attention to New Spain [raiding and settlement in Guiana on the edge of the Spanish territory in the New World in search of El Dorado and gold] [99] Philip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated: the Corporations that build British Colonialism (Belknap Harvard University Press), 2023, pp. 39-40
The larger picture behind English trading and discovery expeditions was that it was conducted by individuals, who formed partnerships chiefly to organize and pay for their voyages, and that the industry was growing over the decades. While the national government intermittently participated, its inconsistent leadership captured only the larger expeditions, and typically those with a relationship with the Spanish war. Clumsily put, trade, discovery, and allusions to colonial settlement had developed into a national endeavor, that lacked coordination and consistent leadership from the country’s governance.
More than one can imagine today, overseas trade and the profits that could be derived from it, were only one reason, and not the compelling one, that explains the formation of the Virginia Company and the English adventure to settle North America. A larger theme that wraps the policy issue into a blended goal dynamic of regional economic and political development. Stern captures this in his Empire Incorporated” when he describes the development of an industry cluster in the late medieval period.
The experiences of Gilbert, Drake, and Raleigh reveal that even those famous enterprises so often associated with individual exploit [“took a village”], often “many villages’, organized into companies [increasingly] sometimes corporations. The same was true of the many lesser-known predatory enterprises that littered the Atlantic in the late sixteenth century. Between 1585 and 1603 historian Kenneth Andrews estimated at least seventy-four privateering and smuggling ventures comprising 183 ships set sail from England, a figure that gets even larger when accounting for the sundry assaults at sea that were essentially side hustles to trading ventures in north Africa, the Mediterranean, or western Atlantic, intended as Grenville said of his voyage in Raleigh’s venture to ‘answer the charges [goals] of each adventurer’ when commerce alone would not’.
Proprietors of predatory ventures often financed their voyages by borrowing on their own mortgaged property, but many took in partners and adventurers in cash and kind [i.e. pure speculators] from ship’ owners, provisioners, merchants, seamen, artisans, tradesmen—and sometimes administrators, courtiers, and even the Queen. Many of these failed to repay, yet the minority that succeeded nevertheless fed both the imagination and future investment [99] Philip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated, p. 40.
1600: Adventure Stirred the Blood of Mariners from the Outer Ports
With the turn of the century, the complicated events among the favorites on the Queen’s court (Essex, Raleigh, and Cecil the younger) interwove themselves until they reached a crescendo of sorts with the trial and execution of Essex in 1601. Overseas ventures and affairs were particularly affected, as the Queen’s invasion of Ireland to forge a plantation disrupted the London courtiers as well as the English maritime and trading industry. Smythe the East India CEO was thrust in the Tower, as well as Southampton, Essex’s relative and devoted follower.
Raleigh, on the other hand, a competing favorite and rival courtier, and arguably the personification of the adventurers who devoted themselves to war and raids against Spain, drawn from the outer ports, not London, was left standing free, if tainted with Essex’s death. “[Raleigh] who throughout Elizabeth’s reign had courageously defended his country, and had been a staunch and influential advocate for planting English colonies in the New World. In his writings he had declared his goals and motivation: To seek new worlds for gold, for praise, for glory …What shall we be … Travelers or tinkers; conquerors or novices” [99] Edward M. Lamont, the Forty Years That Created America: the Story of the Explorers, Promoters, Investors, and Settlers Who Founded the First English Colonies (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), p, 29.
Raleigh, of course, had founded Roanoke, lost it, and was still looking for it in 1600. It was England’s first colony, but it had not survived. But Raleigh still held the Queen’s charter for its settlement and it was inspiration for others to join with him in finding it. While they were at it, they might also be tempted to find the Northwest Passage, which had not yet been found, and hence was not lost. But it could be found, along with the China trade, and the possibility of gold mines discovered along the way. Raleigh himself was obsessed with his El Dorado, a golden city, and many an investor of overseas expeditions went to sleep with dreams of finding it themselves.
As late as 1602, Raleigh sent out Captain Samuel Mace to track down Roanoke’s settlers to not avail—returning with “idle stories and frivolous allegations”, [99] John Fiske, Old Virginia and her Neighbors (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1897), p. 54
With Elizabeth elderly and increasingly sickly, the time for new expeditions of discovery and raids seemed to have arrived. “English merchants were keenly interested in establishing trading posts and permanent settlements to profit from the rich resources in the New World … Some also harbored the lingering hope of discovering a northern river route to the Pacific Ocean, or finding gold or silver depositions” [99] Edward M. Lamont, the Forty Years That Created America, p. 31. It was the time to set sail and figure out just where a settlement could be successfully established. So while Mace was sent out by Raleigh in 1602 to find his lost colony, Bartholomew Gosnold, the sea captain son of an Ipswich county squire, graduate of Oxford, and a follower of Essex in his 1597 campaign against the Azores, inspired by Richard Hakluyt, the younger, set out to find a spot in the northern zone.
Gosnold was financed by the Earl of Southampton, who at the time sat under arrest in the Tower of London due to his arrest in the Essex affair. Joined by others associated with Bristol such as Baron Arundel, Sir John Popham (Chief Justice of the King’s Bench) and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and accompanied by the son of Gilbert, Bartholomew, the thirty-one year old left in March, 1602 on seven week voyage that made landfall in southern Maine. Thirty-two were on board, twenty of whom intended to stay behind and construct a settlement. [99] Edward M. Lamont, The Forty Years that created America (pp. 31-2; Herbert L. Osgood, the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 1, Forgotten Books, MacMillan, 1904, pp. 24-5
As they explored the coastline they encountered eight Native Americans in a ‘Biscay shallop’, i.e. a European small boat, with at least some dressed in European clothing and speaking “divers Christian words’. Moving on, Gosnold headed southwest into the Gulf of Maine and further south where they landed on today’s Cape Cod Bay. Landing there, landing a large catch of cod afterward, we understand why Gosnold named the peninsula, Cape Cod.
Heading south he found and named Martha’s Vineyard after his daughter, and because they found lots of grapevines. The landed and set up a fort on Elizabeth’s Islands and harvested a considerable amount of sassafras roots, a medicine for a variety of ailments (and the principal product for import to England to pay for the voyage. After trading furs with some natives from this point on they ran into nothing by incidents with the natives. The incidents troubled the crew and seeing they had insufficient food to leave behind they decided not to leave anybody behind to settle. The returned home by July, 1602. Upon landing, Raleigh complained they had not received his authorization to take advantage of his patent from the Queen; negotiations followed and Raleigh made his peace and joined the group to support another voyage over.
This time Captain Martin Pring, a twenty-three year old sea Captain from Devonshire (Bristol area) and with two ships headed to the northern Virginia coast, with Raleigh’s consent. He brought back some better maps, an Indian canoe, but it was the report he wrote upon returning that there was lots of fishing, even better than Newfoundland, that others were to read and set their juices flowing for a settlement. That prompted a third voyage.
Once again, Southampton, set free by James I, Lord Arundel (a wealthy Catholic and Southampton’s borther-in-law) and Sir John Popham, “described by his contemporaries as a bullying, ‘huge, heavie, ugly man’” who had just presided over and condemned Raleigh to death for treason. The prime purpose of the voyage was to locate sites for a permanent settlement, ideally for English Catholics and for Popham to relief overcrowded English prisons. The King was not ready to set up a Catholic colony, so the assigned Arundel to fight in the Netherlands. On March 31, 1605, Captain George Waymouth set off from Dartmouth with a crew of twenty-eight
They made landfall on Cape Cod, but driven by winds that took them north rather than south, they headed up to Maine. There they took on five Indians as captives, kidnapping as it were, and returned to England, arriving on July 18, 1605. Upon arrival the Indians were taken to the fort at Plymouth, under the command of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and of them two sent to Sir John Popham’s house. At both places the natives were taught some English, treated reasonable well for kidnapped people. The idea was to return them to their home, and use them as guides and translators for the hoped-for settlement. Taken on a promotional tour of London, they stirred up the juices for yet another settlement attempt. That one wound up to be in Maine. 9p. 50, Lamont).
Background Module
Private Merchant Adventurers: Voyages of Discovery, Exploration and Privateering
Discovery and exploration of North American had started in the 1480’s but we spare the reader by starting it in the 1570’s with the explorer Martin Frobisher (son of a merchant from Yorkshire northern east coast England, with experience in trading for spices and privateering, and maybe piracy) petitioned the Privy Council for a patent to find the northwest passage. Referred to the Russia trading company, he convinced them to sail and Michael Lok its CEO became his partner. With the Queen’s verbal support (she also waved goodbye when he left port) he went off on three voyages starting in 1576.
A good deal of time, years, was consumed in raising funds and contracting for ships. Each voyage took about a year or so. That expedition was somewhat successful and encouraged further interest in North American discovery by the Russia Company. Sailing from Plymouth in his last voyage ( 1578), the first two from a London port on the Thames where the Russia Company was based), much went wrong when he attempted a settlement in Greenland, having two ships wrecked, and finding little in the line of metals; he was fired upon return. The remainder of his career was caught up in the war with Spain and repulse of the Armada 1588. He died from his wounds in 1594 in Plymouth. Gilbert Humphrey inspired by him took up the challenge to voyage to North America.
The planning of English colonies in North America … really begins with Sir Humphrey Gilbert. In his abortive schemes of the years 1578 to 1583, we get the first body of significant information on the difficulties of equipping and financing an overseas venture with a colonizing objective under the limiting conditions which Tudor England afforded. Gilbert was also the first Englishman seriously to depose—if only on paper and on the basis of inadequate information—of American land to English settlers … His resources were altogether too meager and his projects at once too grandiose and too inadequate to provide any real chance of success. [99] David Beers Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481-1620 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), pp. 282-3
Humphrey Gilbert, a well-connected Devon (Plymouth) noble family (his mother was governess to Elizabeth), Eton-educated, and protégé of the rising star Henry Sidney in the 1560’s. His military career started in France and soon shifted to Ireland where Sidney was the Lord Governor and a successor governor who brutally conquered southern Ireland. Associated with Thomas Smith [not our Thomas Smythe, see below] in his Irish settlement adventures, their failure led him to in 1572 fight in the war of the Netherlands against Spain. Ulster. [99] Philip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated: the Corporations that build British Colonialism (Belknap Harvard University Press), 2023, pp. 24-7
He served briefly in Parliament where he vigorously spoke on behalf on behalf of the Crown’s prerogative against critiques of monopoly grants, and for his loyalty, was evidently rewarded with a seven year patent [monopoly] to enforce and collect fines for violations of the 1541 Unlawful Games Act. He also joined with three of the Queen’s most influential advisors—Burghley [the elder Cecil], the Earl of Leicester [Robert Dudley]; and the Privy Councilor, diplomat and philosopher Sir Thomas Smith [again not our Thomas Smythe]-in Smith’s quixotic alchemy and mining startup, the Society of the New Art, all the while accumulating substantial manorial holdings in England and like Smith and many others, looking for investors for his various and sometimes wildly ambitious plantation schemes in Ireland. Gilbert was hardly unique. Sixteenth century England … was a franchise government, in which offices and positions were both public service and private property, with prerogatives and perquisites meant to offer opportunities for social and financial advancement … Like other chartered offices and enterprises, overseas franchises could be bought, shred, sold, inherited, farmed out, and financed [99] Phillip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated, p. 18
Despite his early career, Gilbert had other interests and he asked for a patent in 1565 from the Privy Council to explore a “northwest passage”. The pushback he got from his northwest passage request was that the Privy Council referred his petition for patent to the Russia Company where it was unceremoniously rejected—ten years later, the same request received the same treatment from the Council and the Russia trading company headquartered in London. He published the patent nevertheless in 1576 and pivoted his interest and career to exploring and discovery. [99 https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/gilbert_humphrey_1E.html .Gilbert had joined with Richard Grenville, who with other investors proposed a [joint stock] company to discover lands along a southern passage using the Straits of Magellan. No luck.
A second expedition followed, this time to the New England coast, and it wandered up to Newfoundland in search of the Northwest Passage; Russia Company investors were on board, but more interestingly a 1000 pound investment by the Queen herself, who also contributed a navy flagship to join in the expedition distinguished it from other voyages. A settlement was founded but it came to no success. Investor interest in these voyages were a mixed bag and the expeditions that followed were largely failures.
Only the Queen’s investment was paid in full—an introduction for the reader to appreciate that investments were by successive subscriptions each year or so; they were frequently not paid in full if success was waning. Indeed, it was discovered the company had never filed for a charter, and when it folded it was 5000 pounds in debt. Gilbert died in a storm when his ship sunk on the way back. Suggestions are that Shakespeare’s’ Merchant of Venice’s Shylock was drawn from this corporation’s American adventurers. Their best legacy was a set of maps which others could utilize. [99] Philip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated: the Corporations that build British Colonialism (Belknap Harvard University Press), 2023, pp. 30-3.
His thought and intention was to attack and take over several fisheries on Newfoundland’s coast in order to set up a home base for privateering in the West Indies; in 1578 his patent for this was issued. By 1582, however, he had not found sufficient investors to launch the expedition. He formed a joint stock company to better attract investors. An interesting innovation was he offered settlers an incentive of land acreage, 1000 acres, to go and 1000 acres more to settle. This incentive will in the future be called a homestead incentive.
That didn’t do the trick either and a variety of schemes and incentives were added to Gilbert’s package of inspiration (indentures were another). Gilbert finally launched his expedition, two others followed; in mid-1583, a fourth set out, with middling success; t on the way back a storm sank Gilbert’s ship and he went down with it. His half-brother, Walter Raleigh, captain of the Golden Hind, saw Gilbert’s ship lights go out. [99] Philip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated: the Corporations that build British Colonialism (Belknap Harvard University Press), 2023, pp. 35-7. When Raleigh got back to England (1584) he transferred Gilbert’s patent to himself. David B. Quinn https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/gilbert_humphrey_1E.html .
Giving up on Newfoundland, Raleigh pivoted to the southern climes and began planning for what would be a Roanoke colony. In the long run, it was Gilbert, however, that alerted the English to the fishing around Newfoundland, and the possibility of a northern colony of some type. Gilbert coupled with Frobisher & Lok truly made the pivot to North American discovery, mercantilism, and embryonic colonization-settlement. Drake (non-aristocrat, Plymouth) injected himself with schemes, slavery, privateering, West Indies raids, and England’s first round-the-world expedition, Plymouth mayor and M.P., Cadiz raid, co-commander in defeat of Armada, counter-attack, and raid on Panama (and his death) 1596, but it was Raleigh that landed and settled the English in (southern) North America.
England’s voyages of discovery would continue to flirt with Newfoundland and attempted to convert he French explorer’s Jacques Cartier’s expeditions up the St Lawrence River into English settlements. These intended settlements were an offshoot of a cod fishing industry “cluster” off southern Newfoundland and they fueled a number of attempts to figure out the lay of the coasts and landscape of Canada, and a bit of Maine. This flirtation would last well into the first years of the seventeenth century as France and England sent Cartier and Champlain voyage after voyage to establish a permanent settlement. In 1602, Cartier competed with an expedition of Bartholomew Gosnold which we shall discuss a page or two below. As far as the English were concerned, however, the Newfoundland flirtation’s, if David Quinn is correct, was the “only large and lasting achievement in American waters of the sixteenth century was the development of a substantial hold of the cod fishery in one sector, southeast Newfoundland”. [99] David Beers Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481-1620, p. 313
Stern’s excellent summation of Raleigh’s discovery and North American colonization that followed Gilbert’s 1583 death is better than I can do. After his father’s death, Adrian Gilbert inherited his patents and company schemes. The son extended himself with additional investors, including the Russia Company. The business concept was to establish more a trading center in southern North America, and obliquely to find a maritime route to Asia. The plans ran afoul, betrayed by a partner, Gilbert was left with little more than his inherited patents and one he had secured (1584) solely in his name for five years to a corporation (Collegats of the Discovery of the Northwest Passages). In place of his missing partner, was Walter Raleigh:
But by then (post 1585) England had two different “camps” within court politics regarding where, and why, these voyages to North America should continue: Again Quinn explains “Raleigh’s ventures centered around Roanoke in modern North Carolina during the years 1584 5o 1590, represent primarily the policy of Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s pugnacious Secretary of State who was anxious to take the offensive against Spain and to claim English bases on the North American coast suitable for attacking ships coming from the Spanish Indies. Lord Burghey [Cecil the elder], on the other hand was anxious to keep out of the way with Spain … and was interested in a summer fishery in Newfoundland, in ship [exports] tar, hemp and timber, in the fur trade and in the possibility of [permanent] settlement in temperate lands where agricultural production would be on much the same lines as at home”. [99] David Beers Quinn, England and the Discovery of America (Alfred A. Knoff, 1974), pp. 2345-6
The Gilbert’s half-brother … Raleigh was another man of projects: soldier, Irish seigneur (which he sub-granted into proprietorships), courtier [Elizabeth’s favorite], Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall, Vice-Admiral, warden of the Cornish tin mines, patentee for enterprises from tavern licensing to domestic cloth and wine trades. He soon parted ways with Adrian’s scheme, receiving a month or two later his own royal patterns for a southerly venture that effectively took up the vast remainder of Gilbert’s grant.
After the return of the smaller initial venture, a fleet of seven ships set out under these patents, commanded by Richard Grenville, and carrying off a party of colonists with Ralph Lane as Governor. Beset by attack and food shortages the colony eventually evacuated with Drake’s fleet, but like many of his predecessors, Raleigh looked to recover his losses by redoubling his efforts to organize a return venture, issuing his own patterns of incorporation to a group of adventurer-settlers [using homestead incentives]. ..
In 1587, John White led a group of over one hundred settlers to Roanoke Island and then sailed back to England for more supplies. This colony famously faltered [i.e. got lost]. White found on his return that the colonists had mysteriously disappeared … Many lives, not to mention by some accounts 40,000 pounds had been lost on the enterprise. Because of such vast losses Raleigh shifted his attention to New Spain [raiding and settlement in Guiana on the edge of the Spanish territory in the New World in search of El Dorado and gold] [99] Philip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated: the Corporations that build British Colonialism (Belknap Harvard University Press), 2023, pp. 39-40
The larger picture behind English trading and discovery expeditions was that it was conducted by individuals, who formed partnerships chiefly to organize and pay for their voyages, and that the industry was growing over the decades. While the national government intermittently participated, its inconsistent leadership captured only the larger expeditions, and typically those with a relationship with the Spanish war. Clumsily put, trade, discovery, and allusions to colonial settlement had developed into a national endeavor, that lacked coordination and consistent leadership from the country’s governance.
More than one can imagine today, overseas trade and the profits that could be derived from it, were only one reason, and not the compelling one, that explains the formation of the Virginia Company and the English adventure to settle North America. A larger theme that wraps the policy issue into a blended goal dynamic of regional economic and political development. Stern captures this in his Empire Incorporated” when he describes the development of an industry cluster in the late medieval period.
The experiences of Gilbert, Drake, and Raleigh reveal that even those famous enterprises so often associated with individual exploit [“took a village”], often “many villages’, organized into companies [increasingly] sometimes corporations. The same was true of the many lesser-known predatory enterprises that littered the Atlantic in the late sixteenth century. Between 1585 and 1603 historian Kenneth Andrews estimated at least seventy-four privateering and smuggling ventures comprising 183 ships set sail from England, a figure that gets even larger when accounting for the sundry assaults at sea that were essentially side hustles to trading ventures in north Africa, the Mediterranean, or western Atlantic, intended as Grenville said of his voyage in Raleigh’s venture to ‘answer the charges [goals] of each adventurer’ when commerce alone would not’.
Proprietors of predatory ventures often financed their voyages by borrowing on their own mortgaged property, but many took in partners and adventurers in cash and kind [i.e. pure speculators] from ship’ owners, provisioners, merchants, seamen, artisans, tradesmen—and sometimes administrators, courtiers, and even the Queen. Many of these failed to repay, yet the minority that succeeded nevertheless fed both the imagination and future investment [99] Philip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated, p. 40.
Ron W. Coan 