Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606

By Stefan Gossling

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781469611174

Stefan Gossling

Stefan Gössling has professorships in Sweden at both Linnaeus University and Lund University, and is Research Coordinator of the Research Centre for Sustainable Tourism at the Western Norway Research Institute. He has worked in sustainability and transport for more than two decades, is the author or editor of 11 Transportation books (almost exclusively with Routledge), and has published more than 100 papers in leading Transportation journals.

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PREFACE

This book intends to be a plain and relatively full story of the English voyages of exploration and colonization to North America between 1584 and 1590. Their central feature is the attempt to establish a colony of settlement on Roanoke Island, inside the Outer Banks of North Carolina and, later, on Chesapeake Bay. Roanoke Island stands very much at the center of the story, however. The colonizing activities, which provide the principal focus for the narrative, were combined with the exploration of a substantial part of the coastal region of North Carolina and extended into southern Virginia. It is possible to follow the explorers in detail while they mapped the region and described its natural resources. They also gave us for the first time a detailed view of the inhabitants, the Native Americans, Indians as for so long we have called them, and so enable us to discern something of their attitudes toward these people.

It is fortunate that the contemporary published documents are so full and so good as they are. They, themselves, make up the bulk of the narrative, but an attempt has been made to add other sources to them, to put them in the context of the England of their time, and to make clear what were the objectives of the period in attempting to colonize North America. Complete as the surviving documents are in some respects, they do not tell us everything we would like to know, or indeed need to know, in order to understand what was done and what was attempted. A writer faced with this problem has three choices. At one extreme, he can restrict himself to what is exactly, or more or less exactly, known; at the other, he can let his fancy ride free from the documents and fill the gaps with whatever theories may cross his mind in order to make a good story (that is, enter the field of historical fiction). The third alternative is more difficult; it is to stick as closely to the documents as they will permit, but to point out carefully their limitations, ambiguities, and omissions, and then attempt, cautiously, to fill them, or suggest ways of filling them, by indicating probable or possible solutions to the gaps and contradictions in the narratives. A danger here is that of stating a hypothesis and then going on to treat it as an established fact, so that further hypotheses can be built on it. In dealing with such tenuous materials as we have on the Lost Colony, this practice may not have been wholly avoided, however strenuous the attempts to do so have been. One way in which the historian can maintain his perspective is to rely on the program of archaeological research on Roanoke Island and on the Indian sites that the colonists are known, or thought, to have visited. This is still very much an ongoing study and may ultimately add more to our knowledge than can be included in this book. Apart from the chances of new material emerging (which is slight on the documentary side), any set of hypotheses may be replaced by newer and better ones as new minds and new insights emerge. Historical interpretation, like archaeology, is also an ongoing study. So this cannot, in the nature of the topic, be regarded as anything more than a conscientious interim report, but, it is hoped, not altogether an uninteresting one.

The drawings of John White form a unique graphic source of which extensive use has been made: they too will reveal more when they are closely integrated with the result of the long-term archaeological program. The most speculative section deals with the Lost Colonists, the men, women, and children from the British Isles who were never seen again after August 1587. The attempt to knit together the scraps of hard information, vague tales, and carefully judged speculation has not been an easy task, but it has been an interesting and exciting one. It remains open to subsequent writers to produce convincing alternatives. All this is not to say that the book is concerned only with problems. It has an interesting, important, and at times thrilling tale. It is not for the most part a new tale, but it is hoped that, told in the way it is told here, it may be a little fuller and somewhat different from earlier attempts to tell the story, and even a degree more challenging. The historian’s capacity to relate the story of the past and to explain it as far as possible varies from one individual to another and from one decade to another. This does not pretend to be the last word; it cannot be.

The book may be found idiosyncratic in some of its features. It gives no references to the basic documents, as they are all printed in The First Colonists, edited by D. B. and A. M. Quinn (Raleigh: Department of Cultural Resources, 1982), and frequently elsewhere (see p. 443 below). They ought to be read in full by all those who wish to understand both what happened and what were the rewards and limitations of these sources, preserved for us by Richard Hakluyt, the younger. The name of the chief entrepreneur of the enterprises is spelled Ralegh (as he did from 1587 to 1618), not Raleigh as is usual in North Carolina and elsewhere. The name of Simão Fernandes has been anglicized as Simon Fernandes, rather than Simon Fernandez, to indicate his Portuguese origin. Some Indian names are treated eclectically, as spellings in English are a matter of opinion, for example, Pomeioc instead of Pomeiooc, which has rather better authority. There may be other slight variations from common practice, but so far as possible neither too great departures from rigorous scholarship nor concessions to popular taste have been made.

To put this book into perspective, some account of an autobiographical character may prove useful. I have been interested in early English colonial expansion ever since I graduated B.A. from the Queen’s University of Belfast in 1931, and though I wrote on early Tudor Ireland for my graduate dissertation in the University of London, I did so under the supervision of a colonial historian, A. P. Newton of King’s College, London, who fostered my interest, first stirred by J. E. Todd in Belfast, in those men who attempted to found colonies in the early modern period either in Ireland or America or both. I taught British colonial history at Southampton for six years, and by the end of that period I had collected the documents on and sketched the life of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Ralegh’s half brother, who was the pioneer in English colonial ventures in North America after the experience that he gained in Ireland. The Hakluyt Society published this material in 1940.

I moved to Belfast in 1939 and at my old university developed there some specialist teaching on the earliest colonizing efforts of Tudor England in both Ireland and America. During 1943 I was for a time working in London and was invited by A. L. Rowse to contribute a small volume to a new series called Teach Yourself History on Sir Walter Ralegh and the British Empire. I was fortunate while I was considering this to see the original John White drawings of Algonquian Indians at the British Museum. Archibald MacLeish, at the time assistant secretary of state, wished to consider the publication of the drawings to commemorate the early cultural links between the United Kingdom and America. For his sake the drawings were brought from their wartime security home, but were soon returned there for several years when the project fell through. I had fallen in love with them, however, and decided that the popular book on Ralegh would give me a chance to work on them.

The Ralegh book did not finally come out until 1947 (1949 in New York); in the meantime I had moved to the University College of Swansea (a campus of the University of Wales) and had been spending all the time I could on the background of the Roanoke voyages and other early American ventures. By the summer of 1948, having written two articles on the Roanoke voyages, one on the preparations for the 1585 expedition and another on the reasons why I thought the ventures failed, I was fortunate enough to obtain from the Leverhulme Fellowships Committee enough dollars (very scarce in England at that time) to enable me to spend three months in the United States. My plan at that time was to lay foundations for the documentation of all the English expeditions and colonies down to 1620, without realizing the size of this task.

I worked in the New York Public Library and in a few New England institutions, but made little progress with the Roanoke material, which I aimed to annotate fully, until I came to the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, with whose director, Carl Bridenbaugh, I had already been closely in touch. His interest in my project led him to arrange with John Gordon, then a graduate student at the institute, the sponsorship of the Coast Guard for a visit to the Carolina Outer Banks. The three of us sailed from Elizabeth City to Ocracoke Island and so obtained some idea of the great extent of the sounds. The hospitality of the Coast Guard enabled us to work our way north to Kitty Hawk by stages and to see the beaches from jeeps, then the only form of transport. The view of the numerous wrecks then lining the shore gave me an enduring impression of the dangers of the coast (even if many wrecks were the work of German enemies, not the weather). We were also able to coast by sea from Oregon Inlet almost to Cape Henry and so see the land as the early explorers had viewed it. A brief visit to the fort site at Roanoke Island followed. The National Park Service had begun its excavation program, but the site still contained unsightly reconstructed log cabins.

Raleigh was the next stop. The State Library was a useful starting point, but I got the most help on the natural history side from Harry T. Davis, at the Museum of Natural History, and from Christopher Crittenden, at the Department of Archives and History. My real education, though, began in Chapel Hill. Mary Thornton in the North Carolina Collection gave me a thorough grounding on what North Carolinians had done on the subject of my researches, and Charles Rush, then university librarian, was most helpful with introductions. W. C. Coker and H. R. Totten, famous names now, took me through the botanical identifications needed to understand Thomas Harriot’s work. Moreover, Rush took me to Davidson to meet W. P. Gumming, already a leading authority on maps of the Southeast, beginning a long-lasting friendship and occasional collaboration.

Before I returned to England, I had also sampled the Library of Congress’s exceptional collection of Spanish materials on North America and I had the good fortune to work briefly with James A. Geary of Catholic University, the leading authority on Algonquian languages, who was to provide invaluable material for my work. I was also in correspondence with J. C. Harrington and, through his kindness, was later able to summarize the archaeological data acquired by him at Fort Raleigh down to the end of 1953.

Back in Wales I returned to work on microfilm and photostats of Spanish materials so that I was able to publish a paper on Spanish reactions to the Roanoke voyages, a subject hitherto unresearched, in 1951. The collection of materials on the Roanoke voyages was greatly helped by R. A. Skelton, superintendent of the Map Room of the British Museum and secretary-editor for the Hakluyt Society. The two-volume work The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–1590 eventually emerged in the Hakluyt Society series in 1955, causing some surprise that it ran to just over 1,000 pages. It included extensive indexes by Alison Quinn, whose help in other ways made the completion of the task possible. She had been working with me on Spanish paleography and in 1955 we were able to spend time in Spain, working at the Museo Naval and the Biblioteca Nacional, both in Madrid, in the Archivo General at Simancas, and in the Archivo General de Indias at Seville. We made some interesting discoveries but only one or two that referred to the Roanoke voyages.

Before the publication of The Roanoke Voyages I had made contacts which were to be of great value later. One was through the arrival of Paul Hulton in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. I had begun to collect and list the drawings of John White, with whatever identification and texts I could, and included this material in my collection, but only with the active cooperation of Paul Hulton. The other contact was with William C. Sturtevant of the Smithsonian Institution, who was to make it possible to annotate the White drawings with effective ethnographic and ethnological identifications. This inspired us to begin work on a definitive edition of The American Drawings of John White, which was to be a major preoccupation of both of us for nearly a decade.

Visits to the United States in 1957 and 1959 helped me forward my work on the White drawings and to extend the range of my knowledge, especially at the Folger Library, of the English literature of expansion. I was able to discuss problems of comparative colonial expansion at the Lisbon Conference (the five hundredth anniversary of Prince Henry the Navigator) in 1960 and read a paper on Simon Fernandes, which was afterward published. The long ordeal of preparing and seeing the White drawings through the press effectively employed Hulton and Quinn in the years following. In 1964 we had the satisfaction of seeing the drawings appear in two fine volumes, published jointly by the British Museum and the University of North Carolina Press. A sabbatical year working in the John Carter Brown, Folger, and Huntington libraries in 1963–64 enabled Alison and myself to accompany Sir Frank Francis to the White House in March 1964 when a specially bound copy was presented to Ladybird Johnson, who showed that she had some real appreciation of the value of the drawings. During this period we both developed our knowledge of European expansion in the Americas, but the only book that came out of it was sponsored by the Folger on The Elizabethans and the Irish (1966), which was not entirely irrelevant to the American colonizing ventures.

R. A. Skelton and I had already formed the project of publishing in facsimile the neglected first edition of Hakluyt’s Principall navigations (1589), which contained the first accounts of the Roanoke volumes and contained two documents, on White’s 1588 voyage and the agreement of 1589 by a syndicate formed to assist the 1587 colony, which were not afterward reprinted. We undertook to provide a substantial introduction, while Alison prepared an extensive index of names and subjects which has proved invaluable for later comparative study of Elizabethan enterprises. This appeared in two volumes in 1965 under the auspices of the Hakluyt Society. Following this Nico Isreal, the Dutch publisher, invited me to introduce facsimiles of Hakluyt’s earliest work, Divers voyages touching the discoverie of America (1582) and A journal of several voyages into New France (1580), which Hakluyt had earlier induced Florio to translate. These were important steps toward the launching of the Roanoke voyages. They appeared in 1967, along with a separately bound volume by me, Richard Hakluyt, Editor.

In the late 1960s I was able to make a few minor discoveries, namely that Thomas Harriot had helped Ralegh prepare an abortive expedition in search of the Lost Colonists in 1602 and that there were Virginians, Indians perhaps from the Chesapeake, in London in 1603. These were published in 1970 while I was Harrison Visiting Professor at the College of William and Mary. By that time I had been asked by Harper and Row to contribute a volume on the early voyages and colonies in North America for the New American Nation series. I warned them that it would be some time before I could complete this, and it did not in fact come out until 1977. In the meantime a collection of my papers and studies had been published by Alfred Knopf, England and the Discovery of America, 1481–1620 (1974). This contained reprints of earlier papers on the Roanoke voyages together with a new study of the exiguous materials on the Lost Colony. Another project that was brought to completion, after the death of R. A. Skelton in a car accident in 1970, was The Hakluyt Handbook (2 vols., 1974), which was primarily a bibliographical guide but which contained a study of what Hakluyt had done and not done with regard to the Roanoke voyages that I contributed myself. Skelton had planned with W. P. Gumming a fine illustrated book The Discovery of North America, which I helped to complete after his death, and which includes excellent examples of John White’s work. Over the years 1971–74 it found a wide market in North America, Europe (in French and German), and England. It was the best publicity the White drawings and the Roanoke voyages could have had. This volume was followed by a further volume, masterminded by W. P. Gumming, on the exploration of North America, 1634–1776, but the North Carolina element was provided by W. P. Gumming and my contribution was a general introduction only.

Alison Quinn and I were asked to contribute a volume, Virginia Voyages from Hakluyt (effectively, the voyages to Roanoke Island), to the Oxford University Press Series of Memoirs and Travels. This appeared in 1973 and was the basis for The First Colonists, already referred to. My Raleigh and the British Empire had been revised several times (London, 1960; New York, 1962) and last appeared, as Ralegh and the British Empire, in Penguin Books in 1973. By this time I was near retirement from Liverpool, but completed my textbook for Harper and Row before I did so. North America from Earliest Discovery to First Settlements appeared in 1977 and has been invaluable to me in teaching the early colonial period at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor during subsequent postretirement visits to the United States, as there the Roanoke voyages have been placed fully in the general pattern of European activity in North America down to 1612.

In the late 1960s a Thomas Harriot seminar was instituted at Oxford by the efforts of Rosalind Tanner and A. C. Crombie. Through the efforts of John W. Shirley this was held at the University of Delaware in 1971, out of which emerged Shirley’s edition of the papers read there, Thomas Harriot, Renaissance Scientist, which included a new survey by me of Harriot’s influence in America. His great store of unpublished papers, almost wholly scientific, has been the focus of subsequent annual seminars at Oxford and at Durham University. New materials on his navigation and astronomy have relevance to North Carolina, but unfortunately only a few scraps have any direct reference to America; his major studies on the Indians of North Carolina were lost, some apparently in the Fire of London in 1666. One survival is his so-called Secret Language; this now proves to be a phonetic scheme worked out to record the sounds of the Algonquian language, but was used by him only to experiment with its use and to sign a few surviving documents and maps.

From 1973 onward, Alison Quinn, Susan Hillier (a former graduate student at Liverpool), and I were engaged on the mammoth project of compiling a documentary history of North America to 1612. This eventually appeared as New American World in five volumes, in 1979. It included two new documents on the Roanoke voyages, one recording something of a conversation with Ralph Lane after his return in 1586 and the other narrating (not too accurately) voyages from 1584 to 1587 in which Richard Butler, then a prisoner in Spain, had taken part. The relevant maps and a generous selection of other Roanoke voyage documents were also included, together with the first full collection of the colonizing plans made by the Elizabethans for America.

Since the planning for the four hundredth anniversary of the Roanoke voyages and colonies began in 1980, my wife and I have both been frequently in North Carolina, discussing plans for pamphlets and books with the four hundredth anniversary committee, under the early chairmanship of H. G. Jones and later with the editor in chief, William S. Powell. We have also been brought to Fort Raleigh to consult with others about possible lines of archaeological research on Roanoke Island, where Phillip Evans has been the guiding spirit. It was a very pleasant surprise, in the middle of this, to be awarded an honorary degree of LL.D. by the University of North Carolina in 1981, and especially to be presented for it by Gillian T. Cell, a former student of mine at Liverpool, then a professor of history at Chapel Hill and subsequently chairman of the Department of History there. She herself is a distinguished writer on early English expansion, specializing on Newfoundland. In the later discussions on publications for the anniversary it became evident that a narrative by me and a further edition of the John White drawings by Paul Hulton would be desirable. America’s Four Hundredth Anniversary Committee eventually commissioned us to write those books. This, of mine, was aided by the award of a fellowship at the National Humanities Center for the second semester of the year 1982–83. Kent Mullikin, the associate director (with the new director, Charles Blitzer); Alan W. Tuttle, librarian; Rebecca Sutton, assistant librarian; Margaret Bocting, Karen Carroll, Madeline Moyer, and Ineke Hutchison, manuscript typing staff; together with my fellow Fellows, have made this a most enjoyable and profitable experience and enabled me to complete the writing in six months.

Alison and I would like to think we have made all the contributions we can to the study of the Roanoke voyages (they include a pamphlet on the Lost Colonists). We would like to see the pioneer work of William S. Powell, done in 1956 in London using mainly printed sources, on the elusive origins and identification of the colonists of 1585 and 1587 continued by him. This work so far has yielded only a few positive and a number of very tentative identifications. We ourselves feel we have one more task to complete, namely a facsimile edition, with a full commentary, of Hakluyt’s Particuler discourse (known as the Discourse on Western Planting). This is the key document on the background to the Roanoke voyages, even if it failed in 1584, when it was presented as a confidential report to the Queen (it was not published until 1877), to induce her to take direct responsibility for American colonies. Its advice can be traced as dominant in Ralegh’s concern with the colonial ventures of subsequent years.

Very many recognitions for help are necessary, though some will be found in the notes and bibliography and credits for the illustrations. H. G. Jones and William S. Powell have been our standbys in Chapel Hill. The help of Thomas L. Hartman and Phillip Evans at Fort Raleigh, and David S. Phelps at East Carolina University has proven invaluable. J. C. Harrington too has remained a helpful friend throughout, as has William C. Sturtevant. The advice of Professor J. Frederick Fausz at St. Mary’s College of Maryland has been most valuable throughout. In England, Helen Wallis and Paul Hulton have been our main supports. Many others have answered queries and offered advice; we thank them all for making this task easier. Alison Quinn has borne with the typing and checking, as well as acting as my severest critic throughout, and it is she who has made the index. I am deeply indebted to the University of North Carolina Press for its courtesy and help—to the director, the editor, and the copyeditor— and to America’s Four Hundredth Anniversary Committee and the National Humanities Center for enabling me to write it.

David B. Quinn

March 1984    

PART 1

Voyages and Colonies, 1584–1586

CHAPTER 1

Ralegh’s Involvement in the North American Enterprise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gilbert had set great store on such archaic rights and privileges. Ralegh was more pragmatic. We know of no commitments he made during the years 1584–90 that tied his colonists to a particular form of proceeding. He was free to make very different arrangements with different groups. He was prepared to experiment and see what experiments would produce. Yet, in theory, according to his patent, he had supreme power under the Queen to organize and rule the colonies as he saw fit. If a single individual, and not the state, was to have the authority to create and govern colonies across the ocean, the patent of 1584 and the way that Ralegh subsequently acted under it offered a sensible and practical basis for the initiation of a colonizing venture, if indeed it could be done by private interests. Much depended, of course, on the quality of the agents who would carry out his plans, as his commitments at Court and in office would not allow him to stay in his colonies himself. It depended on the wise choice of colonists and their behavior in the new lands. Above all, it demanded the continued attention to his colonies by Ralegh himself. If he were diverted by too many other commitments, they would suffer, and indeed were to do so.

1. Sir Walter Ralegh and His Son Wat.

Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

All these arrangements were made on the apparent assumption that the English would be free to act in their colonies, to seize and occupy land, and to create new societies of their own as though the land were unoccupied. The non-Christian inhabitants were ignored, their rights to lands implicitly denied, their own organization of their societies not even considered to be worth mention. The legal framework affected English subjects alone: the native inhabitants were left to the colonists’ mercy, good or bad, even though in practice policies had to be evolved to meet the actual circumstances of a land already occupied for millennia by peoples who had very different societies of their own and to whom Europeans were not only strange but were inevitably regarded as intruders, with whom it might or might not prove possible to live.

Behind the Roanoke colonies, though they were the first to be attempted in North America, there lay a long period of English overseas enterprise.¹⁰ Englishmen may have sighted Newfoundland as early as the 1480s, and John Cabot clearly delineated eastern Newfoundland, which he thought was Asia, in 1497. His successors did sufficient exploration to become convinced that this great landmass stood between them and Asia; Sebastian Cabot’s attempt in 1508–9 to get around it by a northwesterly route to reach Asia failed, but this was confirmation of the continental character of the landmass. Apart from beginning the cod fishery at Newfoundland in 1502, in which the English were followed by other European nations, they left much of the exploration of southeastern North America to the Spanish. In 1527 an English ship sailed along the coast from Labrador to Florida and the West Indies, but nothing followed. North America was a disappointment. Few Indians were seen, and they did not impress, as they had no golden ornaments or precious stones to exhibit.

It was left to the French to penetrate the interior by way of the St. Lawrence, but they expected too much and were disappointed. When the French developed an interest in Florida in the 1560s, the English did plan a colony in what is now South Carolina in 1563 but did not proceed with it, and English ships called at the St. Johns River in 1565 to see how French settlers were doing there, shortly before the Spanish killed off all the colonists and declared that their sphere of influence extended up the whole eastern coast of North America. In 1566 a Spanish expedition formally annexed the Outer Banks, and thereby North Carolina, to Spain; in 1570 another attempted to found a mission on Chesapeake Bay, but their ships returned only to kill the Powhatan Indians, who had themselves massacred the Spanish missionaries.

From mid-century onward the English were more interested in trying to colonize parts of Ireland, in order to bring that country more fully under English control, than in planning colonies in America. Soldier colonists were introduced and some garrisons established, but little civilian settlement developed, even after Sir Thomas Smith in 1571 planned a great city, Elizabetha, not far from modern Belfast and published propaganda about how attractive Ireland was for settlement. (Promotion literature directed in the 1580s toward North American settlement would take much the same line.) Even in the 1580s, when the Roanoke voyages were taking place, the major English colonizing enterprise, involving thousands of people, was that being undertaken in Munster. In one area of America only did the English intervene spectacularly, the far northwest.

The revival of the concept of a Northwest Passage led to an expedition under Martin Frobisher in 1576 which showed some prospect, though it was ill-founded, of a passage. Samples of minerals brought back giving promise of gold led to two great follow-up expeditions in 1577 and 1578 to bring hundreds of tons of rock from Baffin Island, but in the end the ore was found to contain no precious metals. Although it was the occasion for the first wave of major publicity for English overseas enterprises, this failure led to some disillusionment about the chances of exploiting any part of the Americas not preempted, as Florida had been in 1565, by the Spanish. It was at this point that Sir Humphrey Gilbert turned from dreams of gold to visions of free land and embarked on the course that led to his death at sea and the passage of his projects and rights to Walter Ralegh.

England at this time was in many ways a small and weak country. She had control of only parts, and fluctuating parts at that, of Ireland, of which Elizabeth I was also queen. Scotland was a separate kingdom, still subject to French influence, even though the English had invested much diplomacy and money to keep that country friendly. Relations with France fluctuated widely: when the French felt especially threatened by Philip II of Spain, they tended to draw nearer England, and England, when it felt threatened by Spain, responded. The French Protestants, Huguenot Calvinists, had been pro-English, but they had been greatly weakened by a Catholic massacre in 1572. Queen Elizabeth, whose sister Mary had been married to Philip while she was Queen of England, was careful after her accession to assert her continued friendship toward Spain. If Philip deeply resented her failure to maintain the Roman Catholic worship, reinstituted by Mary, and her creation of a somewhat ambiguously Protestant church in England, he was not free to interfere there. He was having trouble with the rich Netherlands provinces over his attempted supression of their Protestant minority and their traditional rights of autonomous rule because Philip could conceive of no satisfactory system of government that was not both authoritarian and Catholic. Massacres and coercion of the Netherlands by Philip’s armies in the late 1560s alarmed England and her Queen, because they considered that if the Netherlands were finally subdued, England’s turn would come.

By 1572, Queen Elizabeth was allowing her subjects to volunteer to fight for the Protestant Netherlanders and protecting their warships, so that she became involved to some extent in the struggles in the Low Countries. Moreover, her own subjects were beginning to infiltrate the territories and waters in the western ocean that Spain regarded as its own. John Hawkins’s attempt at trading in slaves and merchandise between 1562 and 1568 in the Caribbean brought about fighting, Spanish repression, English reprisals, and a state close to war. After some years of tension, however, Philip and Elizabeth concluded that their mutual commercial interests and Spain’s desire to keep the English out of the Netherlands wars were a primary consideration. This led to a truce in 1573 and a formal treaty of peace between them in 1574, which lasted, nominally, though increasingly in name only, until 1585. Well before that time the northern provinces of the Netherlands had joined together as the United Provinces against Spain and were creating a new state dominated by the province of Holland. Meanwhile, Philip was gradually mastering by diplomacy as well as force the provinces that make up modern Belgium by killing off or expelling many Protestants and giving a small amount of autonomy to the Catholics. Against this background of unrest in the Low Countries, Englishmen were making an ever more vigorous display of aggression and antagonism against Spanish and Portuguese domination of the oceanic world outside European waters, Portugal and its African and Oriental empire, together with Brazil, having been absorbed by Spain in 1580.

Francis Drake disappeared on an overseas voyage in 1577 and reappeared in 1580 with a vast treasure stolen from the Spanish on the Pacific coast of South America. He had also in rather light-hearted fashion formally annexed Upper California to England, as New Albion, and made the first direct contacts with the Portuguese-dominated Spice Islands before completing the second circumnavigation of the globe. Earlier, Drake had been one of a number of English pirates who had raided and robbed Central America and the Caribbean Islands, and such actions were continuing at the time the first Roanoke venture was launched under Ralegh’s auspices in 1584.

Philip II had been amazingly tolerant of English intrusions— though of course he killed as many English and French pirates as his naval officers could catch. His preoccupation with the Netherlands and repeated

Reviews for Set Fair for Roanoke

[haroldtitus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Set Fair for Roanoke" by David Beers Quinn is not a book that would appeal to the general reading public. There are other secondary source books about the attempted English settlements at Roanoke (inside the Outer Banks of North Carolina) that are faster-moving and more entertaining reads. What the reader gets from Quinn’s book that elevates it is detailed, insightful speculation.Primary sources do not explain sufficiently what happened at Roanoke. Historians have available to them five reports sent to Walter Raleigh that narrate the 1584 expedition and the settlements of 1585-1586 and 1587. The reports inadvertently and intentionally omit needed information. They are also biased. Our knowledge of the local Algonquians is limited to what those who wrote the reports chose to declare. Given these limitations, what can a credible historian do? Narrate what was reported, question its objectivity, seize upon bits and pieces of information made available, and speculate. Of the four Roanoke historians that I have read, David Quinn does this best.Here is much of what Quinn addresses.Just how much influence did the Roanoke chief Wingina have over native villages along the banks of Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds? Not very much? A lot? Historians don’t know. Identifying the native warriors that wounded him in early 1584 is important, given Governor Lane’s assertion that Wingina was plotting to have warriors from distant villages assist him in destroying the 1585-1586 colony. The two Englishmen who provided the best information about the native population were the scientist Thomas Harriot and the artist John White. They may have been members of the first voyage to Roanoke in 1584, but historians are not certain. Both were indispensable members of the 1585-1586 settlement. One of their important achievements was their survey of the waterways and villages of Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds. Yet we don’t know all of the villages they visited. Near the end of 1585 Governor Lane sent a party of about 20 men to the Chesapeake Bay to scout suitable land for a possible future settlement. We have no report of their experiences. All we know is what Lane scarcely mentions. It is assumed that Harriot, who had some knowledge of the Algonquian language, participated. Nobody knows whether White accompanied him. He may very well have returned to England several months earlier. Reasonable arguments can be made to support or refute each conclusion. How much White knew about the Chesapeake land and the local natives residing there is germane to what in 1587 he must have advised his settlers to do if, feeling threatened, they decided to relocate. Most historians agree that Governor Lane’s account of the events of 1586 that culminated with Wingina’s murder is suspect. Lane was convinced that Wingina had plotted to annihilate his settlers using friendly warriors from villages fifty miles or farther away. It had been Wingina, Lane reported, that in the early spring had caused distant villages to deny his men food during their exploration of the Chowan and Roanoke Rivers. We have Lane’s point of view only. Was he paranoid? Why did Simon Fernandes, the pilot of John White’s 1587 voyage to Roanoke, force White’s settlers to disembark on the Island? Why didn’t he take them to the Chesapeake Bay as White and Sir Walter Raleigh had planned? Was it to provide himself enough time to privateer? Was he following the orders of Walter Raleigh’s enemies in England that White’s venture must fail, a theory proposed by one imaginative historian? White believed that Fernandes did intend to privateer. The pilot’s actions during the Atlantic crossing and passage through the Caribbean suggest another motive.Finally, what happened to White’s settlers after they forced White to return to England to try to persuade investors to send ships to Roanoke to take them to the Chesapeake? When White returned to Roanoke in 1590, he found not one Algonquian or settler to question. Historians give us theories of where they believe the settlers might have settled and what afterward might have happened to them – speculation based on sketchy information provided by descendants of Croatoan natives, John Smith of Jamestown, and an exploratory party sent south from Jamestown. I appreciated the extent to which David Beers Quinn analyzed source information and the alternative theories he imparted to expand our understanding of England’s failed attempt in the 1580s to establish a North American colony.