English merchants took part in many kinds of international activity. The Muscovy Company spent large sums searching for a passage to China around Scandinavia and dispatched six overland expeditions in an effort to reach East Asia by way of Russia and Persia. In the 1570s Martin Frobisher made three voyages across the Atlantic, hoping to discover a northwest passage to East Asia or new gold-bearing lands.
Such projects, particularly in the area of North America, received strong but concealed support from the Crown. Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603) invested heavily in Frobisher’s expeditions. England was still too weak to challenge Spain openly, but Elizabeth hoped to break the Spanish overseas monopoly just the same. She encouraged her boldest captains to plunder Spanish merchant ships on the high seas. When Captain Francis Drake was about to set sail on his fabulous round-the-world voyage in 1577, the queen said to him, “Drake. . . I would gladly be revenged on the King of Spain for divers injuries that I have received.” Drake took her at her word. He sailed through the Strait of Magellan and terrorized the west coast of South America, capturing the Spanish treasure ship Cacafuego (heavily laden with Peruvian silver). After exploring the coast of California, which he claimed for England, Drake crossed the Pacific and went on to circumnavigate the globe, returning home in triumph in 1580. Although Elizabeth took pains to deny it to the Spanish ambassador, Drake’s voyage was officially sponsored. Elizabeth being the principal shareholder in the venture, most of the ill-gotten Spanish bullion went into the Royal Treasury rather than Drake’s pocket.
When schemes to place settlers in the New World began to mature at about this time, the queen again became involved. The first English effort was led by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, an Oxford-educated soldier and courtier. Elizabeth authorized him to explore and colonize “heathen lands not actually possessed by any Christian prince.”
We know almost nothing about Gilbert’s first attempt except that it occurred in 1578 and 1579; in 1583 he set sail again with five ships and over 200 settlers. He landed them on Newfoundland, then evidently decided to seek a more congenial site farther south. However, no colony was established, and on his way back to England his ship went down in a storm off the Azores.
Gilbert’s half brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, took up the work. Handsome, ambitious, and impulsive, Raleigh was a great favorite of Elizabeth. He sent a number of expeditions to explore the east coast of North America, a land he named Virginia in honor of his unmarried sovereign. In 1585 he settled about a hundred men on Roanoke Island, off the North Carolina coast, but these settlers returned home the next year. In 1587 Raleigh sent another group to
Roanoke, including a number of women and children. Unfortunately, the supply ships sent to the colony in 1588 failed to arrive; when help did get there in 1590, not a soul could be found. The fate of the settlers has never been determined.
One reason for the delay in getting aid to the Roanoke colonists was the attack of the Spanish Armada on England in 1588. Angered by English raids on his shipping and by the assistance Elizabeth was giving to the rebels in the Netherlands, King Philip II decided to invade England. His motives were religious as well as political and economic, for England now seemed committed to Protestantism. His great fleet of some 130 ships bore huge crosses on the sails as if on another crusade. The Armada carried 30,000 men and 2,400 guns, the largest naval force ever assembled up to that time. However, the English fleet of 197 ships shattered this armada, and a series of storms completed its destruction. Thereafter, although the war continued and Spanish sea power remained formidable, Spain could no longer block English penetration of the New World.
Experience had shown that the cost of planting settlements in a wilderness 3,000 miles from England was more than any individual purse could bear. (Raleigh lost about ?40,000 in his overseas ventures; early in the game he began to advocate government support of colonization.) As early as 1584 Richard Hakluyt, England’s foremost authority on the Americas and a talented propagandist for colonization, made a convincing case for royal aid.
Queen Elizabeth's right hand rests comfortably upon the globe, while in the distance the British navy destroys the Spanish Armada. This 1588 painting said it all: Elizabeth ruled the world. Such presumption helped build an empire—and eventually lose it.
Source: George Gower (1540-96), Elizabeth I, Armada Portrait, c.1588 (oil on panel), Gower, George (1540-96) (attr. to)/Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library.
In his Discourse on Western Planting, Hakluyt stressed the military advantages of building “two or three strong fortes” along the Atlantic coast of North America. Ships operating from such bases would make life uncomfortable for “King Phillipe” by intercepting his treasure fleets—a matter, Hakluyt added coolly, “that toucheth him indeede to the quicke.” Colonies in America would also spread the Protestant religion and enrich the parent country by expanding the market for English woolens, bringing in valuable tax revenues, and providing employment for the swarms of “lustie youthes that be turned to no provitable use” at home. From the great American forests would come the timber and naval stores needed to build a bigger navy and merchant marine.
Queen Elizabeth read Hakluyt’s essay, but she was too cautious and too devious to act boldly on his suggestions. Only after her death in 1603 did full-scale efforts to found English colonies in America begin, and even then the organizing force came from merchant capitalists, not from the Crown.
World History
