This is the second essay in the Lawrence F. Brewster Lectures in
History series to be published. With this publication we hope the series, which bears the name of our esteemed emeritus
professor of the Department of History, has now securely established itself both in the profession and the broader
educational community. From its inception the lecture series has had four fundamental goals: to provide students, faculty,
and members of the larger community with an opportunity to hear historians of distinction share their knowledge and mastery
of some aspect of the discipline; to stimulate an exchange of ideas and to promote a continuing dialogue about issues of
fundamental importance to man; and to illuminate the present state of human affairs through the reflective prism of the
past; and to support a critical requirement in modern times, the continuing process of education.
Arthur S. Link of Princeton University inaugurated the series in 1982 as a part of East Carolina University's seventy-fifth anniversary celebration. Professor Link lectured on "Woodrow Wilson and a Revolutionary World." The second lecture was presented by Professor Donald F. Lach, of the University of Chicago, and was entitled "Fantasy and Reality in the West's Response to Asia." Professor Hans Schmitt, of the University of Virginia, followed with "The First Year of the Nazi Era: A Schoolboy's Perspective" in 1984; his was the first lecture in the series to be published.
All of the lectures admirably fulfill the purpose of the series. We are pleased to continue this tradition of distinguished lectures with Professor David B. Quinn's "Theory and Practice: Roanoke and Jamestown."
Fred D. Ragan, Chairman
Department of History
Over the past fifty years Professor David Beers Quinn has held, and continues to hold, an impressive array of academic posts. He has served in and chaired a number of professional and intellectual societies, and by himself or in collaboration with his wife Alison has produced a prodigious number of books and articles. But Professor Quinn's standing in his field is based on more than his voluminous resume; it is the quality and coherence of his work that sets him apart. Individually, every book, every lecture glows with that rare combination of meticulous research and a disciplined imagination. Professor Quinn has spent a lifetime in the libraries and archives of Europe and America, and has come as close as anyone can to reading every extant document relevant to his field. When gaps occur in the documentary record, as they invariably do, he is not afraid to bridge them with carefully constructed arguments suggesting what might have happened. Collectively, his writings thus far constitute a true life's work. Layer by layer, David Quinn has painted a vivid portrait of Elizabethan colonization in all its breadth and richness, and has demonstrated more clearly, perhaps, than any of his contemporaries the colossal effort that went into those early expeditions.
It is this focus on the broad scope of English exploration and settlement that particularly distinguishes Professor Quinn's contribution to the early history of North Carolina. Among previous generations of historians it was all too common to dismiss Roanoke as an interesting sidelight-a dramatic tale of human tragedy that was fascinating but irrelevant to the mainstream of English colonization. David Quinn, however, has lifted Roanoke out of that subordinate role and shown its true significance. He has demonstrated convincingly that the voyages sponsored by Walter Raleigh during the 1580s were part of a single process that began in Ireland in the 1570s and continued around the world for three centuries thereafter. Through numerous links of ideology, personnel, and practice, he has demonstrated clearly that Roanoke was not an isolated event; rather it was an integral and important step in England's journey to the New World.
Daniel P. Thorp, Assistant Professor
Department of History
I am privileged tonight to give the Lawrence F. Brewster lecture in the presence of its founder. I cannot believe that he or any of you have not been affected by the widespread efforts which have been made to celebrate, in one form or another, the four hundredth anniversary of the first English colonization of any part of North America. In this state the work of America's Four Hundredth Anniversary Committee has been outstanding and I am proud to see in the audience one of its begetters, Dr. H.G. Jones, and its secretary throughout, Dr. John D. Neville. The number of informative and scholarly works which have been produced by the Committee and by the Division of Archives and History at Raleigh in close co-operation have provided a substantial historical base on which the memory of the celebrations of the years 1984 to 1987 can be consolidated. I, and my wife Alison, are honored to have had some small part to play in this task.
There has been, however, in a few times and at a few places a rather selfish attitude toward these celebrations of which as historian I cannot wholly approve, namely that these voyages and colonies and the property in them resides today solely in North Carolina, that they are peculiarly the concern of North Carolinians, and do not belong to and fit into the history of White intervention into native North America as a whole, and, in particular that they have nothing, or nothing much, to do with Virginia, North Carolina's closest neighbor in what we might, somewhat cynically perhaps, term the English colonization stakes. I think I can do nothing better than to quote from a very recent book by Robert s. Weddle, where he notes "the proclivity, especially among writers of state and local histories, for provincialism. History is no respecter of political boundaries, and historians attempting to confine themselves to such limits assume a built-in source of distortion."1 I very much agree.
When I proposed in my writings2 that the major part of the Lost Colony of 1587 met their end after nearly twenty years of peaceful living in what is now Virginia, and not in North Carolina, quite a number of North Carolinians took the view, and still do, I am sure, "We've been robbed. " That is about the most unhistorical reaction that is possible. In the first place the whole of North America between Georgia and Maine was " Virginia" between 1584 and at least 1616. There was no North Carolina in any form until long after that-even the first definition of 1663 was not a finally-determined one. It is a little ironical that the location that I proposed for the Lost Colony-admittedly a conjectural one but, I believe, a probable one, on the Southern Branch of the Elizabeth River-was part of a no-man's-land, perhaps Virginia, perhaps Carolina, between 1663 and 1728. It formally became Virginia only with the laying down of the Dividing Line in 1728 and even now is not many miles north of the modern boundary. Moreover, the first colonists at Jamestown considered that the whole Roanoke area was part of Virginia and they did what they could to look for the Lost Colonists in what to them was a southern part of the Virginia they had been granted by the English crown.
What can be said is that the Virginia colony at Jamestown in 1607 was in many respects a daughter colony of those attempted on Roanoke Island in the 1580s. Though many of the men involved had changed, not all had done so; though economic forces had altered and the political environment was different, yet the attempt to insert English settlers into a Native American environment had a direct continuity with the Roanoke ventures. Moreover, had the Lost Colonists survived until the new settlers arrived, as they very nearly did, being massacred very shortly before the arrival of Newport in April 1607 , the continuity would have been complete. Colonists with twenty years' experience could have given invaluable advice on how to live successfully in America and have led to the avoidance, or at least the mitigation, of many of the trials and tragedies which beset the Jamestown settlers. The accidents of history which fell upon the colonists of the years 1585 to 1587, also dogged the steps of the Jamestown settlers of 1607-1609. It does therefore make sense to compare the two ventures in order to see something of the limitations under which the earliest English colonies labored. I cannot expect to deal comprehensively with the whole history of the Jamestown colony, nor would you wish me to do so, but if we take the first two years, the years of the first Virginia charter, we can, I think, make some assessment of what happened. This may mean that we can see both enterprises in something of the broader setting of the settlement problems to which, perhaps, students here might wish to turn, now that the Four Hundredth Anniversary Celebrations are running towards their climax in 1987. North Carolinians might then alter some of their perceptions of their own history, see it not merely as a pioneer venture of local importance but as a staging-post toward much wider ventures, leading in the end to the emergence of the later colony and finally to the state of North Carolina itself.
If I was a modern business executive looking back on projects comparable in any respects with the Roanoke and Jamestown ventures I would be inclined to analyze the experience I had gained under several main, and probably a number of subsidiary, headings. The first, of course, would be assumptions-what did I know when I began, how far had these assumptions proved correct or incorrect, how had external conditions changed since I made these assumptions and embarked on the project? I would then, naturally proceed to performance, where I might ask if communications, leadership, supplies and production had satisfied my initial assumptions or had altered estimates made at the beginning through the intrusion of unexpected factors. Finally, I would look at results-did the project fulfill any of my objectives or none of them? If I was not on the right lines would I start over again in a different way, how far could I benefit by previous failings and anticipate better, or different, results next time?
They are indeed the kind of questions we might ask when comparing the Roanoke ventures of 1584 to 1587 with those at Jamestown in a comparable period 1607 to 1609. But if I put all the information we have on each of these subjects into a computer and asked for answers I could only expect the reply "Data insufficient" or something of that order for all of them. Nonetheless, there are comparisons to be made even if the historian has too little in the way of firm information and too few probable conjectures he may make to enable him to give precise answers or even be sure that he is on the right lines in asking what he does and answering what he can. This is true of these cases even though we have rather more information about both sets of activity than we have for many other historical situations. But it seems perhaps worth making the attempt to see how far this analysis can be taken.
It will not be possible to keep precisely to the businesslike sequence I have defined. The time factor cannot always be fitted exactly into the scheme and the amount of data we have varies very much under the sequence of headings so we may have to do some guessing as well as documented exposition as we go along.
But we cannot doubt that in the summer of 1578 the English crown, Queen Elizabeth and her ministers, Sir Francis Walsingham, her principal secretary of state, with at least the acquiescence, if not the enthusiastic support of her older minister, Lord Burghley, made a major assumption which in one way or another was to influence or even govern most English enterprise in North America for some forty years. This was the assumption that the lands in North America between 34 degrees and 45 degrees of north latitude, roughly South Carolina to Maine, all the way from the eastern shoreline to the Pacific, were English. Drake indeed, in 1579 was to declare Nova Albion, in Upper California, to be English. This preemption, even if only a paper one, was brought about by a number of factors. The English knew that the Spanish were active in the southeast and that the French had some claim to the territory between about 45 degrees and 55 degrees north centering on the St. Lawrence valley (in theory they sometimes named the whole of eastern North America as New France), while the English were busy in the area between 60 and 66 degrees north hopefully developing a gold mine on Baffin Island and controlling access to a Northwest Passage to the Pacific (even if later in the same year, the gold was found to be dross). English summer cod fishing off Newfoundland was progressing to approach, if not to equal, the scale of the French, Spanish and Portuguese fisheries in that area. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, to whom the prospecting colonizing grant was given (that same grant that was passed on to his half brother Walter Raleigh in 1584 and was to be the basis for the Roanoke Voyages and the Jamestown venture much later, among others) , did nothing effective. He sent one small vessel to New England to prospect (we do not know exactly where she went or what she did) and tracked down a single English trader with the Abenaki on the Penobscot River, adding to this only the formal annexation of Newfoundland in 1583 before he, himself, was lost in the Atlantic on his way home. His plans, elaborate paper fantasies for colonizing and ruling vast areas in eastern North America, died with him.
Walter Raleigh, who took over from him and was granted a comparable patent, was by 1584 a rising star at the Queen's Court and a shrewder man. He was willing to try out his grandiose inheritance in America to see whether it could be exploited and he was anxious to do so having taken what he considered to be reasonable precautions against total failure. His intelligence and foresight are not in doubt though he was swayed by what he knew and did not know. The fact was that most of the assumptions Englishmen made between 1578 and 1584 added up to very little indeed: they were based on almost total ignorance of what this vast stretch of America was like. This was marginally improved by the experience of 1584-87 but was not fundamentally changed by the time of the new enterprise of 1607.
Richard Hakluyt, the Younger (to distinguish him from his lawyer cousin of the same name), took up his pen in the summer of 1584 to map out for the queen a program for an English initiative in North American colonization. His treatise was called " A particuler discourse concerninge the great necessitie and manifolde comodyties that are like to growe to this Realme of England by the Westerne discoveries lately attempted," a mouthful of a title now mercifully contracted to "Discourse of Western Planting." In it he was making use of some ten years' research on the prospects of North America for Englishmen. This was an excellent prospectus but, as in today's business world, the contents of such a document are not necessarily confirmed by the hard facts of experience. This treatise codified the assumptions made on the part of the sponsors of the Roanoke voyages and also to a large extent those of the Virginia Company as established in 1606, even though its circulation in manuscript was confined to very few persons indeed. Hakluyt is the main personal link between the ventures, being named in the charter of April, 1606, and the probable author or inspirer of "The Instructions by Way of Advice" which Christopher Newport brought to the James River in April 1607.
We need not be concerned about Hakluyt's rather airy claims to English "rights" to North American sovereignty going back to a probably mythical Welsh Prince Madoc in the twelfth century, but with the more realistic possibility that Spain or perhaps France might establish an effective hold over this vast, if scarcely known, territory across the Atlantic. These were real, if not urgent, in 1584. In 1606 they were more positive: France in 1603 had made claims extending down approximately to the Hudson. Spain had refused to surrender any theoretical rights to American territories when the Treaty of London brought war to an end in 1604 after nearly twenty years, and might well proceed to expand her Florida colony northward, as indeed she could already have done in the period between 1584 and 1604 had not war excluded experiments of this sort. There could very well have been a clash between sponsors of the Roanoke settlements and Spanish competitors in the interim had it not been for the war. Assumptions, then, tempting England to assert herself in an area where colonization had not been attempted, were not entirely unrealistic, provided, of course, that it was incumbent on her to attempt overseas colonization and exploration in the western Atlantic at all.
What was unrealistic and was to remain so long after 1609, was to expect to implant any substantial colonies of Englishmen into a North American indigenous society without subverting that society or destroying it. The long-term outcome that the arrival of Europeans in any numbers spread disease among the Native Americans, clearing the way for colonies, took some time to become apparent. What was to happen to begin with was that Native Americans were just as anxious to exploit European intruders as the colonists were to exploit the Indians, and this remained true both in the Roanoke colony of 1585-6 and in the Virginia colony of 1607-9. Only when the colonists came in overwhelming strength, or brought disease, did this unanticipated competition alter, even if we may consider the Lost Colonists intended a middle way, which might or might not have succeeded.
There was a prevailing fallacy in 1584 about the climate of eastern North America. Because the English were interested primarily in the area between 34 degrees and 38 degrees north latitude both in 1584-7 and in 1607-9 it was thought that the climate must parallel that of the Old World zone between Morocco and southwest France. In ignorance of the nature of a continental climate, the assumption was that products common to this part of the Old World would grow and flourish in the New. Nor was this assumption dead by 1607: it was to persist, in some degree, even after settlement had commenced. But it was to vitiate many plans for agricultural production in the early colonies.
There was, too, a major cartographical assumption which was to keep cropping up for the next seventy years at least. This was that the North American mainland was narrow-waisted. Verrazzano in 1524 had started the canard on his maps (and those of his brother), being deluded by the Carolina Outer Banks (they have a lot to answer for!) that the Pacific was just across the way, so that a narrow isthmus appeared on many maps of North America-even on John White's map of 1586. Or there was a variant of this, which was that the St. Lawrence River ran on until it reached a mountain range, just across which was easy access to the Pacific. We find this with Lane, we find it with Newport. They had only to find the divide and then access to the closed sea from which all spices came, and much else, would be easy. This was the assumption which relied on using North America, not just for its merits or defects but mainly as a means of access to the forbidden ocean, the Pacific, which Spain and Portugal had divided amongst themselves.
Ralph Lane's hopes of a divide were to dominate his thinking-"a passage to the South Sea" he said in 1586, would assure the success of the Roanoke colonies. Christopher Newport's search of the navigable waters of the James River in 1607, and his expectations of what might lie beyond the Piedmont, which he penetrated a short way, continued the same line of thought, as did Captain John Smith's journey up the Potomac in 1608, until he was confronted with the rapids above modern Washington. The Farrar map of Virginia as late as 1650 continued to perpetuate the myth.
A large part of Hakluyt's "Discourse" was taken up in one way or another, by the question of relations with the Indians. Hakluyt and many of his successors (naively we now know) believed that most North American Indians already knew about the treatment the Spanish, in the more sanguinary episodes of their conquest, had meted out to native peoples. Seeing England was at the time on such bad terms with Spain it is not surprising that "atrocities" were stressed. It was assumed therefore that the native peoples would be more responsive to humane treatment by the English and would, if necessary, ally with them against any Spanish intervention. It did not appear from this reading that the Indians were considered to have any exclusive rights to their own settlements and hunting grounds. For the sake of an alliance with the English they would surely cooperate and surrender the large amount of land it was assumed they were not using in any way. When Arthur Barlowe in September 1584 brought news of the first reconnaissance of the Outer Banks and Roanoke Island this seemed to be confirmed-the Indians were both few and very friendly. This was to lead to a long period of basic misunderstanding. Ceremonial gift-exchanges and friendly association with visitors were normal Indian customs, as much to test potential enemies as to create new friends. They were not an earnest of continued close cooperation. This was to be Lane's experience in 1585-6. Friendship, indifference and hostility succeeded each other inexplicably in his dealings with them. The same was true in a much exaggerated degree on the James in 1607-9, only here the relations were, in the last resort, master-minded by the policy and whims of the despotic ruler Powhatan, a position in the Roanoke area that Wingina appears to have aspired to but never attained.
In Hakluyt's view, however, Indians were not merely to act as friendly introducers of Englishmen to American resources and be their allies against all comers. They were to be vital elements in commerce with the settlers. English cloth and its disposal were a primary economic preoccupation of Elizabethan and Jacobean Englishmen. But the Indians whom Lane met and whom the Jamestown settlers encountered had little use for it. We have very little evidence in practice that either in the Roanoke or Jamestown episodes a market for cloth occupied the settlers to any appreciable degree, but the urge that they should try to exploit it continued to be made. Furs, especially dressed deerskins, dyes and a few supposed medicinal products came with Barlowe in 1584 but the storekeeper on Roanoke Island in 1585-86 found himself unable to develop this commerce. The reason was that the Indians were neither (in most cases) accumulators of goods, nor willing to work to accumulate them for exchange with the settlers. To produce the thousands of dressed deerskins that Harriot suggested in 1587-88 might be available, Indian women in the Roanoke area would need to have been employed almost continually. There is no evidence whatever that they had any conception of turning to mass production. This is only a single instance of what was to leave colonists in what to many of them seemed like an economic desert. A few exchanges, mainly of corn for metal objects and beads, was about the limit of effective trade in the case of both the Roanoke and Jamestown colonies. Nor did the Indians show any desire to work for the colonists in dragging out sassafras roots or those of the spiny smilaxes, desired for their medicinal value. Lane, it is true, did get Wingina's men to show him how to plant corn in 1586 and to assist in some degree and it may appear that the Jamestown colonists, though never assisted by Indian labor, did get information on growing corn in "hills" or ridges from their Indian neighbors. There was not much more than that, except for the exchange of corn for metals, conducted both in Roanoke and on the James sometimes amicably, sometimes under pressure which might or might not produce hostility. On the James River we may remember that most tribal units did collect tribute for Powhatan and were not wholly unfamiliar with non-subsistence exchanges, though they were wary enough of involving themselves in the same kind of thing with the English, in order to avoid Powhatan's displeasure since he thought all exchanges should go through his hands. But Indian corn and other vegetable products such as beans, sunflowers and tobacco, as well as fish, did provide vital subsistence without which the Roanoke settlement would have done more badly and the Jamestown colonists might, several times, have come to grief unless corn, especially, could be had. None of this was or could be known in 1584: something was known of it in 1607, since the colonists were told from the outset to purchase corn from the Indians, though nothing could yet be known of the complexities of living inside the confines of the Powhatan Confederacy.
One aspect of colonization that Hakluyt stressed was the need to bring the Indians from paganism to acceptance of the variety of Protestantism established in England in 1559. The Church of England had sought from the beginning to claim that it was not a sect but part of the universal Christian Church. To English churchmen-like Hakluyt-it was the Roman Catholics who had made themselves dubious members of that scattered world-wide community . It seemed important to him, both as a clergyman and as an Englishman, that the Indians of North America should become good Anglicans as rapidly as possible. It should, he considered, not be too difficult since the Spaniards claimed to have converted millions of Mexicans and other Indians to their debased Roman Catholic faith. Harriot, indeed, with his knowledge of spoken Algonquian, though he was not necessarily in full command of its complexities, attempted to teach something from the Bible to the Indians of the areas around Roanoke Island which he traversed. He found the Indians willing to respond to "the God in the Book," even if they regarded the book as in some manner containing the God-for had the English not come in great vessels from another life, some thought, or from a powerful distant land, and were not their gods beings to be reckoned with and incorporated in their own animistic hierarchy? And was not Manteo, after two visits to England, willing to be baptized on Roanoke Island in 1587 and to act, in theory at least, as the standard bearer for English Christianity on Roanoke Island and its surroundings? We do not hear anything further of English religious influence in this area. But when the new Virginia was being canvassed in 1606, Hakluyt himself, at the age of fifty-four rather old for such a commitment, offered to go as chaplain to the first colony to start a mission. But he retracted before the expedition sailed, and the Reverend Robert Hunt took his place, who, though he ministered to the colonists as well as he could, conducted no missionary work whatever among the Indians. Nor did his successor, the Reverend William Mease, who was in Virginia from 1609 to 1620, undertake any either, though some other ministers and laymen were to attempt unsuccessfully to break the hold of the indigenous priests on their people before Mease returned to England.
Hakluyt paid a great deal of attention to the necessity to grow in North America Mediterranean and subtropical products. This was partly based on a desire to make England less dependent on foreign trade. More specifically, trade with Spain and Portugal was becoming difficult and dangerous in 1584 while the belief that North America could grow sugar, olives, vines, oranges, lemons and such like was very clear in his mind, if qualified by the lack of information he had about climate. We find Grenville's expedition in 1585 collecting in the Caribbean roots of sugar cane, pineapples, plantains (bananas), and mammee apples, most of which they expected to grow on Roanoke Island. But many of their specimens were damaged by seawater when the Tiger struck at Wococon in July .A few plants may have survived but none of them flourished, or ever would. Though we have not got precise instructions in this respect for the 1606 colony, there seems little doubt that the Jamestown settlers labored under rather similar illusions. Gabriel Archer, after having spent a mere six weeks on the James River, mostly at Jamestown, could write: "The thing we crave is some skillful men to husband, set and plant and dress vines, sugar canes, olives, grapes, hemp, flax, licorice, prunes, currants, raisins and all such things as the North Tropic of the world affords, also saffron, woad, hops and the like." Though there is a wide range in the Old World for these commodities and though some could be grown in Virginia and indeed in England, it is remarkable how he almost reiterates the very words of Hakluyt's discourse in 1584, which specified nearly all these commodities and listed experts who should be brought in to cultivate them efficiently in the Roanoke colony. Archer was giving a totally wrong impression of the potentialities of the James River valley, even if he also suggested that "Tobacco after a year or two [worth] £5,000 a year" could be produced even if the native tobacco was to prove unsaleable in England as too harsh, and never became a potential winner until replaced by a more palatable variety: the culture of French vines too was later to be attempted, as was that of silkworms, if with no success for much labor. Indeed, the horticultural potential of both Roanoke and Virginia was to be wholly misread by such statements. However, we hear nothing from Captain John Smith of such fanciful projections, though, like Thomas Harriot, he was able to give an account of what the Indians actually grew for food and what were the useful plants which could be of value to settlers for their own use or for possible export.
One thing that was known about North America, or at least correctly surmised, was that it contained plenty of timber. Shortage of oak and other hardwoods was causing some apprehension in England as iron-working and ship-building developed and native resources declined. The Baltic was the natural source of timber products, including pitch, tar, and potash, as well as materials for ropes and sails like hemp and flax. Harriot was to stress the abundance of hardwoods in the Roanoke area, but all we know is that some cedar (white cedar and cypress) was sent home from there. More emphasis was placed on timber and its products in the Jamestown settlement. It was obvious that if land had to be cleared for crops that timber would be available. Thus Newport was able to bring back clapboard as the result of felling some great oaks in May and June 1607, semi-finished timber being a possibly profitable cargo. Archer said of "clapboard and wainscot, if ships will fetch it, we may take as much as England can vent" and, sure enough, clapboard and wainscot were sent back with Newport early in 1608 as well, though Smith, as keeper of the store, sent back in June the more valuable red and white cedar, sweet-smelling wood for fine joinery work. But he had, again, clapboard and wainscot piled for the expected 1609 supply to take back.
But if Jamestown could indeed produce timber which had some saleable value, there was no great profit to be made from it as transport costs remained relatively high. More valuable might be pitch and tar, and soap ashes, as their bulk was much less. The eight Poles and Germans sent out late in 1608 were to attempt to manufacture glass (again of course wood- consuming) and were able to send specimens back with Newport, but that was all. Rather more in way of pitch and tar, and probably soap ash as well, continued to be produced, except that the exports were not, to say the least, too reliable. Smith considered that this project was unrealistic. Suitable pines had to be searched for pitch and tar as there were not too many to be found near at hand, so production was bound to be on a small and unprofitable scale. It would, he said in November 1608, be far better to go on buying these things from the Baltic rather than waste resources by attempting to attain an impossible self-sufficiency in them from Virginia. A little later masts were to be brought from the James River, and some iron was to be smelted from bog iron, which Harriot had also reported from the Roanoke region but it, too, was to lead nowhere.
It is possible to see, therefore, that while in 1584 all things in the way of growing crops and exploiting natural resources seemed possible, yet the experiments in both the Roanoke colonies and at Jamestown, each on very much the same lines, but with more commercial pressures in the case of Jamestown, came to nothing. North America was not to prove at this point the storehouse for either exotic products or timber that had been anticipated.
Then of course there were minerals and jewels. Hakluyt was cautious about recommending North America as a source for gold and silver, since the Baffin Island fiasco was too recent, but he did commend the search for minerals and valuable stones and pearls as something worthwhile. Raleigh was more optimistic in that he sent at least one metallurgist to Roanoke Island and clearly gave instructions to have any mineral deposits tested. Harriot did indeed report the presence of alum (incorrectly) and of iron (with some credibility), but it was native copper which attracted the majority of settlers. News of plentiful supplies of copper among tribes up the Roanoke River led Lane, late in the day, with the river in spate from melting snow, to attempt to reach the mineral-bearing area which sounded as if it might contain gold as well as copper. But his attempts came to nothing. But, just as he felt that "a passage to the South Sea" was one of the few ways of justifying future colonization, so "a good mine" would be the other. The plentiful pearls in Indian hands (mainly from freshwater mussels, though this was not fully realized) led to attempts to collect them, but the Indians obtained them from roasted shellfish and so they were, for European purposes, spoiled. Many were collected in 1585-86, though few survived the departure of the first colony. They crop up frequently again in Jamestown, but with little impact.
Though it is not stressed in most accounts of the Jamestown colony, the search for minerals virtually dominated the first year's attempts to exploit the resources of the James River valley. True, the "Instructions" provided that men be provided with pickaxes "to try if they can find any mineral" and a colonist, recalling the first expedition beyond the Fall Line, wrote that there were rocks and mountains that "promiseth infinate treasures." But in the camp at Jamestown there was a man who saw gold everywhere, Captain John Martin. He came from a goldsmith's family and indeed his father was a master of the mint in London. It seems to have been he who led Newport to bring to England in August 1607 a cask of inorganic matter which it was alleged to contain gold. One of the principal backers of the colony, Sir Walter Cope, received this and reports of the first tests on it in a ludicrously optimistic manner. "There is but a barrel full of the earth, but there seems a kingdom full of the ore," he told Lord Salisbury .He talked about it in terms of future shiploads. He gathered that "in all their fortifications, after two turfs of earth, this sperm [mineral particles] or ore appeareth on every part as a solid body, a treasure endlessly proportioned by God" (regarded as usual as a good Englishmen): "I could wish your Lordship was at the trial." His first mineral expert (who had come with Newport) told him that the ore would run out at £1,100 sterling to the ton, and that "there is more in the pot." The south side of the river was, he said, even more promising than the north. But these hopes crashed. Within twenty-four hours Cope had to swallow his words-"This other day we sent you news of gold, and this day we cannot return you so much as copper. Our new discovery is more like to prove the land of Canaan than the land of Ophir. " Four trials, by the most experienced men in London, showed this-"in the end all turned to vapour." He blamed Captain John Martin for this fiasco, who had, he said, raised the whole matter to the state it had reached in order to mislead his father.
One might think that this would have ended the futile project. But by no means. Newport evidently thought there was something in it. When he returned to Jamestown, finding incidentally that disease and Indian attacks had reduced the colonists to a mere handful (38 of 105 had survived from June to January), his chief purpose in the fourteen weeks he stayed was to combine with Martin to find more "gold." Captain John Smith did not believe a word of it and scorned their activity-to "dig gold, wash gold, load gold" was, he said, their main objective. When a second ship (Nelson's) arrived after Newport's had gone Martin established the same hold on the shipmaster, attempting to fill her "with his fantastical gold," although Smith, now Cape merchant, insisted the main cargo be cedar. But Martin sailed back on the ship to gain credit, Smith said, for "his supposed Art of finding the golden mine." We hear nothing at all about how the futile 1608 cargoes were received in England, but silence at least indicates they contained no gold.
All this activity diverted the colonists from adjusting to their new and hostile environment and made the establishment of any stable and viable society the more difficult. If Lane's colony had not returned to England in the summer of 1586, it is probable it would have consumed its remaining energies in a comparable search for minerals.
The realization that, in fact, the English knew so little of North America that a specific survey of the area chosen for settlement should be made before any large scale colonization was attempted, did emerge from an unknown planner in 1582. He set our details of how such a topographical and resources survey could be carried out. We do not find a proposal for such a survey in Hakluyt's writings, but it may well have been supported by him and the plan was adopted by Raleigh in 1585. Thomas Harriot and John White, I need scarcely tell you, carried out the full survey of the area between Cape Lookout and the mouth of the James River, penetrating inland to the Chowan and Roanoke Rivers, and successfully mapped, as well as pictured the Indians. Though we have only Harriot's short popular survey, A briefe and true report, written in 1587 and published in 1588, this was, with its republication in 1590 with the engravings of the White drawings and map, a standard source of reference about North America thereafter. It is clear that this source was studied carefully before the 1606 expedition set sail and that Captain John Smith had been charged with organizing a comparable survey. It took some time for him to collect sufficient data from his associates, but in 1608, in only sixteen weeks' travelling, he showed that he could outdo the White-Harriot team in the area he covered, if not in the quality of his descriptive matter. He was able before the end of 1608 to send home a map and descriptions of Indian life and indigenous products which to some extent paralleled those of White and Harriot. We have in the so-called Kraus map (now in the University of Texas Library, Austin) a preliminary sketch of the river system of the Chesapeake and of the distribution of the Indian settlements, and in the so- called Zuniga map (intercepted by the Spanish) a compilation of data both on the James River and also on the Roanoke area from parties sent to look for traces of the Lost Colonists. The Virginia Company was unwilling to publish his map, which may well have led to Smith's lasting breach with them after his return in 1609, but he was able to put into print at Oxford, out of the way of Company interference, both his revised map and description in 1612. This was clearly an attempt to do for Virginia what Harriot and White did for Roanoke and the two bodies of information are indispensable today, linking the two developments together and providing data without which we should be largely in the dark about the positive achievements of the Roanoke and Jamestown settlers. The case for continuity cannot be better made than in this instance, even if there was, unfortunately, no John White to record in drawings the appearance and lifestyle of the Virginia Indians.
In 1584 Hakluyt and Raleigh made every effort to obtain some degree of support from Queen Elizabeth. But she was in no position to take on any responsibilities in North America. Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland-all presented major problems from which she could not escape. All she could, or would, do was to give a name to the area claimed by the English and specified in the charters to Gilbert and Raleigh. That name was, of course, Virginia, and it applied, as has been said, to the whole coast between 34 and 45 degrees and what lay behind. The name was important: it provided a focus for English activity just as John Smith's naming of what until then had been known as North Virginia or Norumbega as New England in 1616 focussed would-be colonists' attention to it. Between 1584 and 1603, then, Virginia was the primary concern of its potential lord and master, Sir Walter Raleigh, knighted by the queen for his willingness to take on the enterprise. Raleigh, however , could not get formal support from Parliament either. His was a private venture: only in 1589 did he involve more than a few of the major merchants in London, who held the keys to capital investment, to associate themselves in any way with it, and it was too late. Raleigh, Grenville and their friends at Court, in the City and in the country had to try to keep the enterprise going, which they did from 1584 onwards largely by successful capture of Spanish ships. But, after 1586, there was no substantial capital available for colonial enterprises. The venture made in 1587 was something different. And though it is probable that Raleigh did get one of his ships to enter Chesapeake Bay in 1603, when the war was nearly over, and bring back some Indians to London, it is ironical that by the time the Indians were brought back Raleigh's rights, control of all English enterprises along the whole length of Virginia, had passed, once the accusation of treason was made against him, into the hands of King James I.
The chances of royal participation under James were much greater than under Elizabeth. Much as he wished to cultivate Spain, he was also imperially minded. France, as we have seen, had in 1603 put in a claim for all North American lands down to 40 degrees north: Spain had refused to admit in the Treaty of London in 1604 that England had any claim to any part of North America and was still very much in the running. Thus the king was led into a degree of participation when he granted the Virginia Company charter in April 1606. A royal council was created to make rules for the whole of Virginia and supervise colonization in general. But the actual work was to be done by commercial corporations, one at Plymouth for North Virginia, one at London for South Virginia (in effect the Chesapeake Bay area), which were to undertake the actual task of settling and exploiting these areas in the name of the Crown. but with their own resources. The economic situation after the Treaty of London was very different from what it had been before. The great London merchants had already obtained their first highly profitable cargoes from the East Indies, and they were profiting also from the expansion of the Levant trade. They were in the vanguard of early English capitalist enterprise. They were thus willing to venture something appreciable in North America inside the framework of government and administration set by the Royal Council, but with a strong emphasis on quick profits. This commercial pressure was to cause grave problems in Virginia and had by no means been solved by the time the first phase came to an end in 1609. Whether Hakluyt approved the initial policy of the Crown and of the London Company is not known: he may well have seen them as the partial fulfillment of his plea to Queen Elizabeth in 1584 to associate herself formally with the earlier Virginia enterprise.
If we stand back from Hakluyt we can see both considerable elements of continuity and of difference between the Roanoke and Jamestown ventures. Between 1584 and 1590 the English ships had to pick their way carefully through the Spanish-dominated Caribbean in the long sea route to Roanoke Island, and it is clear that no dependable system of communication was established. The lack of reliability in sailing this route played a large part in the breakdown of the first and the ruin of the second (Grenville's) colony, while the events of 1588-90 again show the English could not establish a firm line of communications with any colony on the North American mainland. On the other hand, Christopher Newport demonstrated in 1606-8 that he could convey ships through the Caribbean safely and on schedule. The first three voyages were conducted without loss, and of the first six ships only one was delayed somewhat by weather, while the return voyages were made with rapidity and success. The length of the outward passage by way of the Caribbean was, it is true, too long and expensive for a commercial venture, and Samuel Argall was to be sent in 1609 to pioneer a direct crossing which he did successfully.
Supplies were a vital matter. In 1585 the failure to hold the fleet together and the damage to the Tiger in her grounding at Wocoon meant that Lane and his men were not as well supplied as they might have been, but had the relief come as efficiently as it had at Jamestown, no hard- ships need have been suffered. On the other hand it is clear that Jamestown settlers dissipated their first supplies too rapidly (and this was partly the cause of, partly the result of, the epidemic which killed so many) .There were, however, complaints from the leaders, notably Captain John Smith, that the supplies which arrived in 1608 were too small and many of them were used up by Newport's seamen during his stay in the colony. There is a strong suggestion that the London promoters were stingy in their supply arrangements and expected the colonists to raise much more by their own efforts and from Indian trade than proved practical in the early stages. Subsequently, in late 1608 and early 1609, Smith helped to secure more or less adequate corn supplies and to cut down deaths while also enlarging the area of land cultivated by the settlers.
What was vitally different was the question of financial resources. Raleigh and Grenville had to work on capital gathered in by themselves or their friends and could not rely on having sufficient resources to maintain a colony, since this took much longer to take root than had been assumed. In 1606-9 the situation was much altered. The merchants supporting the London Company, however cautious they were about expending too much for too small a return, could if necessary find the money to keep the colony going. Even under much more favorable circumstances, it is doubtful if private enterprise in the 1580s could have firmly established an American colony, hence the theoretical emphasis on a privateering base which could well provide continuing capital and goods. White's alternative of a self-supporting settlement was not known in England to have succeeded. In 1607-09 the London Company was, as we have seen, too optimistic about the value of the materials which the colony could profitably return. Smith, in November 1608, chastised the directors of the Company (personified in the person of the Treasuree, Sir Thomas Smith) for not waiting until a small viable colony was firmly in place before launching out on profit-seeking ventures. Commercial involvement was thus to have its liabilities as well as its advantages.
In 1609 the Virginia Company was back somewhat in the position that Raleigh found himself in at the end of 1586-there was no obvious means by which a colony manned by servants of an English proprietor or company could make a success of settlement unless some unexpected benefit accrued. The White venture of 1587 was Raleigh's alternative strategy .The City of Raleigh would be an autonomous English community, not a dependent garrison. In 1609 the Virginia Company was faced with the likelihood that Virginia could not and would not pay its way under the terms so far planned and attempted. There was little if any profit, only financial loss, in attempting to continue with a settlement of one or two hundred people. But the remedy applied now was far different. It was to float colonization as a national enterprise, to send a large number of men and women to Virginia and attempt to gain profits by diversification, but with the ultimate objective of establishing a major English community in America. It was to take a long time, through many vicissitudes, before such a plan could take effect-it only began to do so in 1619, and even then the colony failed to take shape in the form that had been devised for it. E.S. Morgan uses as his chapter heading on the first phases in Virginia-"The Jamestown Fiasco."3 If we are cynical we might think too of "The Roanoke Fiasco." But the launching in 1587 of an experiment of removing a cross-section of English village society to a part of North America where there was land to spare and only friendly Indians nearby was a farsighted one that might well have succeeded. Indeed we can say that it did succeed in that the majority of those whom White left behind in 1587 managed to move to their intended location and did settle next to, and mix with, the Indians for nearly twenty years. The fact that they were destroyed, together with their hosts, on the eve of the Jamestown settlement was a tragedy, not only for themselves but for the new settlers. They knew by 1606 how to exist in North America without arousing Indian hostility, until the last days of Powhatan's unexpected attack. Had they survived, they could have taught the Jamestown settlers much and created the continuity in settlement which then and even now divides the two enterprises in the minds of students of the earliest experiments in English colonization. Yet each of these two ventures, very different in their outcome, has its own importance in the long process by which Englishmen learned to live in and profit from North America, even if it was at the cost of the Native American society which they virtually eliminated in the process, and on which we, nowadays, cannot look back on without some appreciable regret. Early modern England as an imperial colonizing power cut its teeth in these early colonial experiments in North America, not without loss and hardship to all concerned, but in the end to the material advantage of both later colonizers and colonists, if not to the Native Americans.
1. Robert S. Weddle, The Spanish Sea: Discovery in the Gulf of Mexico,
1500-16&5 (College
Station, Tex., 1985), p. 413.
2. See, for example, the author's Set Fair for Roanoke (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985).
3. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: 1975), p. 71.
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