1586.]

CAPTURE OF ST. AUGUSTINE.

223

them) in a little boate, playing on his Phiph the tune of the Prince of Orenge his song." Of the companions of Ribault whom Menendez

spared from the second massacre at Matanzas Inlet, because he had need of them, one was a fifer, and he it was, probably, who gave this shrill welcome to the English invader.

1 Sir Francis Drake's West Indian Voyage of 1585. Hakluyt, vol. iii., 1600.

CHAPTER X.

ENGLISH VOYAGES AND ATTEMPTS AT SETTLEMENT.

FIRST IMPULSE IN ENGLAND TOWARD AMERICAN COLONIZATION. - UNSUCCESSFUL VOYAGES. - THEORIES OF A NORTHEAST PASSAGE. - VOYAGE OF SIR HUGH WILLOUGHBY AND RICHARD CHANCELLOR. FROBISHER AND DAVIS IN THE NORTHWEST. -SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT'S PLAN FOR AMERICAN SETTLEMENTS. HIS DEPARTURE FROM ENGLAND AND ARRIVAL AT NEWFOUNDLAND. Loss OF SIR HUMPHREY ON HIS RETURN. WALTER RALEIGH SENDS TWO SHIPS TO EXPLORE IN AMERICA.HIS FIRST COLONY REACHES THE COAST OF NORTH CAROLINA. TOBACCO INTRODUCED INTO ENGLAND. - NEW PLANTATION BEGUN UNDER GOVERNOR JOHN WHITE. - MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF THE SETTLERS. - UNSUCCESSFUL SEARCH FOR THE LOST COLONY. - RALEIGH'S ATTEMPT AT COLONIZATION ENDED BY IMPRISON

MENT.

It is not always unprofitable, and it is often interesting, to reflect what might have been the course of human events but for the intervention of some slight action, seeming at the moment to be of trifling importance. Had Columbus, for example, refused to deviate on his first voyage from that directly westward course which he had laid down as the only true one, his first land-fall would probably have been the coast of Florida. The history of the world would have flowed in another channel, and the progress of the human race been arrested for centuries if the order had not been given on board the Santa Maria to put the helm up and stand southwest for a night, in pursuit of a cloud-bank which one of the Pinzons mistook for land. We may venture upon almost any latitude of conjecture as to what might have been, had the Spanish march of conquest and possession been directed to the territory now occupied by the United States rather than to that of the rich and semi-civilized peoples of Mexico and Peru. In the providence of God it was not to be.

Besides, the disasters and disappointments attending all the expeditions of the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the French in North America, in the course of the sixteenth century, were alleviated and atoned for by none of that dazzling acquisition of wealth that came from the spoiling of the semi-civilized nations of the South. The North American Indians, unlike the natives of softer climates whom the Spanish subdued so easily, would fight to the death with the fierceness of wild beasts rather than quietly submit to the white men, or if re

1527.]

AWAKING OF ENGLISH INTEREST.

225

duced to slavery would die in obstinate despair. There were no slaves and no gold in this inhospitable region; people and country were proved to be alike valueless in the estimate of the Spanish conquerors, the one feeble colony at St. Augustine alone being an exception, and that owed its origin to a cruel fanaticism and was held together by the spirit of religious propagandism. It was happy for the world that it was so. If the history of South America had been repeated in the north it would have been better that the Atlantic had still been held to be a sea of darkness into which no ship manned by mortals could penetrate and live. At length it was plain that not the Spanish but a people of another blood, another faith, and another destiny were to possess the land, though more than a century passed from the time that the Cabots looked upon their terram primûm visam of the New World before an English colony was planted upon its shores.

terest in

The idea of the real value the new-found regions were to be to the English people, was of slow growth in the English mind. A short way to India was the main purpose of the voyages of the Cabots. If other voyages were projected or made under commissions from Henry VII. early in the sixteenth century, as was probably the case, they had no other object. Robert Thorne, an eminent merchant of London, whose father is supposed to have been upon a voy- Awaking of age to Newfoundland, urged Henry VIII. in 1527, to send English inout fresh expeditions to discover new lands and kingdoms America. whereby the king would win perpetual glory, and his subjects infinite profit. "To which places," he said, "there is left one way to discover, which is into the north, for that of the foure partes of the worlde, it seemeth three partes are discovered by other princes. For out of Spaine they have discovered all the Indies and Seas Occidentall, and out of Portingall all the Indies and Seas Orientall; so that by this part of the Orient and Occident they have compassed the world.

.. So that now rest to be discovered the sayd northe parts, the which it seemeth to mee, is onely your charge and duety. Because the situation of this your Realme is thereunto neerest and aptist of all others." 1 And in another letter on the same subject and written with the same purpose, he says: "It appeareth plainely that the Newfoundland that we discovered, is all a maine land with the Indies Occidentall, from whence the Emperor hath all the gold and pearles: and so continueth of coast more than 5000 leagues of length. So that to the Indies it would seem we have some title. . . . Now then if from the sayd New found lands the Sea be navigable, there is no doubt but sayling northward and passing the Pole, descending to the Equinoctial line, we shall hit these Islands [of India,] and it should 1 Letter of Robert Thorne to Henry VIII., Hakluyt, vol. i.,

p. 212.

. . . .

be a much shorter way than either the Spaniards or Portingals have." 1

Early voy

age from England, 1527.

The same year two ships, the Mary of Guilford and the Samson, sailed from London, possibly in compliance with these exhortations of Thorne's.2 At any rate the expedition was undertaken at the king's command; it went, wrote John Rut, the captain of the Mary of Guilford, as far north as the fifty-second parallel; was prevented by the ice from venturing further; and the ship then returned to England, without reporting any more interesting fact than that John Rut counted "eleven saile of Normans, and one Brittaine, and two Portugall Barkes, and all a fishing," in the harbor of St. John. The Samson parted company with the other ship before she reached St. John and was probably lost. In this expedition Cardinal Wolsey seems to have had some pecuniary interest. In 1536 an enterprise equally discouraging and certainly tragic was undertaken by one Master Hore, of London, "assisted by Master Hore, the king's favor and good countenance," Hore persuading many gentlemen of Inns of Court and of Chancery and some country gentlemen of good estate to go with him. Altogether there were one hundred and ten persons who sailed from Gravesend in April of that year in the ships Trinitie and Minion, the former of one hundred and forty tons burden. They arrived in Newfoundland after a stormy passage of two months, where they went ashore and remained for the summer. What good result was expected from such an expedition it is not easy to understand, for it was so ill provided that the men were soon in a starving condition, and forced to seek sustenance in such wild roots as they could gather. And to such extremity were they reduced that they soon murdered each other secretly and fed upon the flesh of the victims.

Voyage of

1536.

The captain, who had supposed that the loss of his men was due to wild beasts and Indians, had no other remedy, when the shocking truth became known to him, than to make a "notable Oration," in which he set forth their sin in the strongest terms as offensive to God, exhorting them to repentance and prayer. The murders probably ceased, but the famine continued, and it was not long before hunger drove them to cast lots for the choice of one who should die to save the rest. But such was the mercy of God, says the narrative, that a French ship well provisioned arrived that same night. Of this the

1 Thorne to the English Ambassador in Spain. — Hakluyt, vol. i.

2 Biddle (Memoir of Cabot, p. 279) suggests that it was on board the Mary of Guilford that Verrazano was pilot when he was captured and eaten by the savages. Her captain would hardly have omitted to mention such an incident had it occurred on board his vessel. 8 Purchas's Pilgrims, John Rut's letter to Henry VIII., vol. iii., p. 809. Hakluyt refers to the sailing of one ship in 1527, and calls her the Dominus Vobiscum, vol. iii., p. 129.

1553.]

VOYAGE OF SIR HUGH WILLOUGHBY.

227

Englishmen, either by force or by fraud, possessed themselves and put to sea, leaving the Frenchmen their empty vessel, and to starve in their stead. The Frenchmen, afterward, however, found their way to England, and were recompensed by the king for their losses, though the pirates who had overpowered them were not punished, as they should have been, in consideration of the dire distress which incited them to so base a crime.1

The want of success in these adventures had undoubtedly a discouraging influence. The belief, handed down even to a recent period as a kind of national heirloom, that British courage and perseverance would find somewhere a northwest passage to India, was, if not abandoned, at least forgotten for nearly forty years in the middle period of the sixteenth century. In place of it a conviction gained ground that the true road to Cathay was by the northeast. Sebastian Cabot was at that time in England, and he had "long had this secret in his mind;" originating, perhaps, in his own experience of half a century before, and his familiar knowledge, gained as pilot-major of Spain and England, of the abortive attempts of Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English to go, as Thorne said in his letter to Henry VIII., by way of the north into the back side of the New found land.

There was at this period great depression in the trade of England, and the growth of commercial enterprise was seeking untried channels. The merchants of London were looking for new and better markets for their "commodities and wares than could be found near home, and they sought counsel of Cabot. Trade and science struck hands at once. In 1553 Sebastian Cabot appears as first governor of "the mysterie and companie of the merchants adventurers for the discovrie of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and places unknown," and is preparing "ordinances, instructions and advertisements of and for the direction of the intended voyage for Cathay."

Sebastian

Cabot made fer chants.

governor of a company of mer

In May of that year three ships sailed from London under the command of Sir Hugh Willoughby as captain-general of the fleet. Sir Hugh Evidently great things were expected. Willoughby was "a Willoughby. most valiant gentleman and well born," chosen as the admiral above all others because he was "of goodly personage and singular skill in the service of warre; " Richard Chancellor, captain of one of the ships and pilot-major of the fleet, was of the household of Henry Sidneyafterward the father of Sir Philip Sidney - who, in a public speech, assured the merchants, not only of the value of his friend, but that he hoped "this present godly and virtuous intention would prove profitable to this nation and honourable to this our land;" an intention

1 Hakluyt, vol. iii., p. 129.