Invading America. David Childs
suggested, make England self-sufficient in essential commodities such as furs and timber. In other words, Hakluyt laid out the very arguments for colonization that would appeal to a hard-up and threatened monarchy.
The Crown and Council, however, needed not only to be convinced that the ideas of settlement were sound but also that they would be recognized internationally as legitimate when held up against the powerful papal authority of the Treaty of Tordesillas. The campaign to convince the sceptics was waged with flattery and the force of law.
The flattery was applied by Richard Hakluyt the younger (to distinguish him from his older cousin, also Richard, who enthused and inspired him), who in 1582 published Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America, following this up in 1589 with the book that would make him famous, The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation. The second, much larger edition, published in three volumes between 1598 and 1600, included the additional significant word, Traffiques, in the title after Voyages, for Hakluyt had appreciated that trade was going to be the mainsail that would power discovery forward, as without the hope of gain there would be no viable voyages. The first edition of this work was dedicated to Sir Francis Walsingham, ‘Principal Secretary to Her Majesty, and one of Her Majesty’s most honourable Privy Council’. The second volume of the second edition, published in 1599, was dedicated to Sir Robert Cecil, ‘Principal Secretary to Her Majesty’. The dates of publication are important. Ralegh’s Virginia adventure had ended ignominiously, giving the Queen’s advisors ample opportunity to deflect her from supporting further such ventures. Hakluyt counterblasted this potential threat by stating, ‘There is under our noses the great and ample country of Virginia; the inland whereof is found of late to be so sweet and wholesome a climate, so rich and abundant in silver mines, so apt and capable of all commodities . . . [and] acknowledged inland to be a better and richer country than Mexico.’ With such an enthusiastic description of Virginia, Hakluyt’s nose stretched, Pinocchio-like, across the Atlantic. When the later editions of his book were being printed, England was at war with Spain, so Hakluyt, in addition to emphasizing the desire to establish a woollen trade with Cathay, made it very clear that he had included within the volumes detailed descriptions of every Spanish port in the West Indies to ease the task of would-be raiders. However, to encourage the peacemakers as well as the warmongers at Court, Hakluyt wrote:
If upon a good and godly peace obtained, it shall please the almighty to stir up Her Majesty’s heart to continue with transporting one or two thousand of her people, and such others as upon mine own knowledge will most willingly at their own charges become adventurers in good numbers with their bodies and goods; she shall by God’s assistance, in short space, work many great and unlooked for effects, increase her dominions, enrich her coffers, and reduce many pagans to the faith of Christ.
LEGITIMIZING CONQUEST
The legal issues were handled by the polymath John Dee, who set out to challenge the belief that the unknown world had been divided up between Spain and Portugal, using a mixture of historical myth, geographic guesswork and incisive, incontestable, well-reasoned legalistic opinion.
To provide the proof to support the historical right of England to the lands between Florida and the Arctic, Dee turned to the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who had woven into his History of the Kings of Britain, finished in 1136, sufficient myth to demonstrate the pre-existence of a sizeable British Empire which, through King Arthur’s conquests, included Ireland and the island chain that stretched to the Americas via the Shetlands, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and Labrador, establishing a prior claim that was reinforced by the Welshman Madoc in 1170 as far south as Florida. This ancient right of ownership over these lands was later strengthened, so Dee suggested, by the voyages of the Cabots and Frobisher, which were made while most of North America was still terra incognita to the Spanish.
Dee based his argument for the legitimacy of English settlement in America on Roman law, which proclaimed that rights of sovereignty over any land depended on both a demonstrable historical intent to occupy and a corporate presence being established in the territory. In other words, a ruler, or their representative, needed to be present both in body and in soul, which the Spanish evidently, were not. Furthermore, the Emperor Justinian, in the sixth century AD, had stated that, ‘what presently belongs to no one becomes by natural reason the property of the first taker’. Dee expanded on this decree by demonstrating that it was insufficient to claim ownership merely by discovery; that legal title to territory depended on taking physical possession as well as putting the land to productive use. Cleverly, by the use of legal and scriptural argument drawn from irrefutable sources acceptable to both Catholic and Protestant alike, Dee ensured that his rationale could not be dismissed as heretical. Even more cannily, Dee used the same argument to support the Spanish colonization of the lands to the south of Virginia, including Florida, despite his suggestion of a prior English interest in this region.
John Dee, an influential polymath with interests in exploration, cartography, mathematics, astrology and the dark arts, occasionally mixed his enthusiasms to prove that a navigable northwest route to Cathay existed.
He then moved from mere clever discourse to genius in the way he managed to support the implications of the Treaty of Tordesillas, and the linked papal bull, Inter Caetera, while dismissing its application. The trouble lay, said Dee, not with the intention of the bull, but in the way the Spanish and Portuguese had implemented and interpreted it in their favour. The two states had not, for example, drawn an eastern longitudinal line to complement that in the Atlantic Ocean and thus had singularly failed to divide the world into equal spheres of influence. Even the Atlantic line, drawn 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, only stretched between 45º North and 54º South, proving, so Dee evinced, that they knew nothing of the lands that lay beyond those latitudes. What is more, the bull only granted to the Iberians those lands that had not either been ‘discovered earlier by others’ and those seas ‘which have not hitherto been navigated’. For both these reasons they could not lay claim to those northern lands to which the British Crown had ancient title. Indeed, far from being a generous donative global gift of all hitherto unoccupied lands, Dee explained that the Pope’s main purpose was to establish limits to the competitive Iberian states and thus reduce the causes of tension.
Emboldened by his own logic, Dee ventured to play with fire by claiming that the English would be breaking the law themselves if they failed to convert the heathen in the lands to which they laid claim, just as the Catholics claimed to be doing in their newfound lands. The justification for this obligation was seen by his equating Elizabeth’s position as an emperor entitled to issue charters, to that of the similarly endowed Pope.
Dee’s detailed, forensic, legalistic arguments were never going to command a wide readership, so the popular proselytizing was left to Hakluyt, who demonstrated his more robust and populist view by declaring, in Discourse of Western Planting, that the Treaty of Tordesillas was invalid because ‘no Pope had any lawful authority to give any such donation’. That was a language that the English could understand.
PUBLIC SUPPORT
The ambivalence of the Privy Council was mirrored by the public at large, who were subjected to conflicting reports as to the virtues of the American enterprise. The battle for the hearts and minds of both investors and settlers began early and created a rhythmic rise and fall in popular support. Buoyed up on a tide of paper propaganda, settlers sailed westwards only for evidence of the wreckage of their hopes to return as scraps of scribbled flotsam scrawled by those whose optimism had not survived the reality of life abroad. Naturally, the death of both Cabot and Gilbert while they were deployed, with nothing achieved, won no converts, neither did the farce of Frobisher’s worthless aggregate. To counter this condemnatory current, something good had to come out of America.
The good news was provided by Ralegh, who, falling prey to his own propaganda, ‘sexed up’ both Arthur Barlowe’s report on his reconnaissance, and Thomas Harriot’s account of his stay at Roanoke to better suit his purpose and to discredit the doubters. Indeed, the first few pages of Harriot’s A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, as printed