YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

The Enghsh Voyages of the
Sixteenth Century

POBLISHED BY
JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS, GLASGOW.
publishers to the SlmbersxtB.
MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD., LONDON.
New York, The Macmillan Co.
London^ - - Simpkin, Hatnilton and Co.
Cantbridge, - Macmillan and Bowes.
Edinburgh, Douglas and Foulis.
Sydney, - Angus and Robertson.

ELIZABETA D. G. ANGLIVS..rRANCIA..HIBERNIA,ET VERGINI/L
REGINA CHRISTIANAE FIDEI VNICVM PROPVGNACVXVM
Jmmortalii hrrui Ttf^um , eta run tulit atat Ouns wia tantum fuperant reliqm, omnia rwna ,
TyUa prii'r, vrmenr nee Jerrt vUaparem , ^^ ,^i^mtum tu niaujr "Reqthus es reUquis ,
S^^ite ^uo mamutm terrat habitarc !prilamuu nue prearr Jelix tanci m mederamme retfrd ,
t-n..!-.. A — i-Lj..^ lufhHa attpie^EJci, ^Dum ttbi "Rat "R^^um cahai rtmAvtoTt.

The English Voyages
of the
Sixteenth Century

By
Walter Raleigh
¦ Professor of Englishi-'Literature in the University of Oxford

Glasgow
James MacLehose and Sons
Publishers to the University
1906

£c .TOO

y^

rv\\

GLASGOW : PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.

XI J

Contents

PAGE

The Voyagers, ....... i
Richard Hakluyt, . . . . . .119
The Influence of the Voyages on Poetry and
Imagination, . . . . . . • 1 5 1
Index  . . • '95

First printed as introduction to Messrs. MacLehos^s
Edition of Uakluyfs Voyages, April, 1905.
N010 revised and reissued separately, 1906.

I
THE VOYAGERS

The English Voyages of the
Sixteenth Century

' T^HE great prose epic of the modern The Epic
English nation ' is itself but an incident Voyages.
or episode in a greater and wider world-drama.
The discovery and settlement of America by the
western peoples of Europe is the last act in a
play which began in the cradle of the Aryans
and which unrolls its vast theme leisurely,
observing none of the unities. In this histori
cal pageant the hero is often changed ; one
nation after another presses to the front and
draws to itself the eyes of all spectators ; one
after another falls from its pre-eminence and
yields its place to a new-comer. For many ages
the light which permits us to follow the for-

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
tunes of humanity is focussed on the Mediter
ranean ; we witness the struggle of conflicting
civilisations, the rise and fall of the monarchies
of the East, the passionate and lyrical intrusion
of the Greek on the slowly unfolding plot, the
rivalry of Roman and Phosnician, and the
grouping of the actors under the spell of Rome
in a towering world-polity. But the group falls
asunder almost before it is completed ; the
interest of the action shifts from the centre of
the stage, and a new purpose declares itself.
There is confused fighting of Saracen with
Christian, the decorum of place and time is no
longer observed, alarums and excursions and
the breathless tales of messengers disturb the
even development of the story, until, as on the
stage which vexed the soul of Sir Philip Sidney,
' you shall have Asia of the one side, and
AfFrick of the other, and so many other under-
kingdoms, that the Player, when he cometh in,
must ever begin with telling where he is ; or
else the tale will not be conceived.' When the
Island race makes its late appearance among the
heroes of this romantic drama, the tale it has

THE VOYAGERS
to tell is the diffused and exciting tale em
bodied in The Principal Navigations, Voyages,
Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English
Nation, compiled by Richard Hakluyt.
Like the drama to which it belongs, the com
pilation of Hakluyt has seemed to some critics^
to be lacking in form and unity. Here are The
voyages and travels to all parts of the world, the^Far
prosecuted through many ages, undertaken by ^*^'-
all kinds of adventurers, and animated by the
most divers purposes. Men have travelled, as
they have lived, for religion, for wealth, for
knowledge, for pleasure, for power and the
overthrow of rivals. Yet no very profound
acquaintance with Hakluyt's book is needed to
discern, as he clearly discerned, the single thread
of interest running through all these pilgrim
ages. The discovery of the new Western
World followed, as an incidental consequence,
from the long struggle of the nations of Europe
for commercial supremacy and the control of
the traffic with the East. In all the dreams of
the politicians and merchants, sailors and geo
graphers, who pushed back the limits of the
3

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
unknown world, there is the same glitter of
gold and precious stones, the same odour of
far-fetched spices. While the main trade routes
to the East still lay overland, the maritime
Venice states of Italy, Genoa and Venice, held the keys
Genoa, of that traffic. By their rivalry navigation was
improved ; the mariner's compass came into
general use early in the Fifteenth Century ; and
although the power of Genoa was broken by
the surrender of her fleet at Chiozza in 1380,
her ancient enemy was not left for long in undis
puted possession. Beyond the gates of the
Mediterranean a new rival arose ; and during
Portugal, the whole of the Fifteenth Century, the Portu
guese, having learned their craft from the
Italians, were steadily creeping down the western
coast of Africa, rounding capes, discovering
islands, making maps and charts, always with
the same hope of finding a new and safer pass
age to the markets of the East. In the year
1 410 Prince Henry the Navigator, a younger
son of King John I. of Portugal, began his
systematic explorations. His aims and methods
were those which, in a later age, Hakluyt con-

THE VOYAGERS
stantly recommended to the government of
England. He established a naval college, and
called to his service the best science of the time.
In 141 9 Madeira was discovered. In 1439 P°""8"ese *¦ O V 3£C rs •
Cape Bojador was rounded, and, seven years
later, Cape de Verde. In 1448 settlements
were established on the Azores or Hawk
Islands. So, step by step, advance was made,
until, in i486, Bartholomew Diaz doubled the
Cape of Good Hope, and in 1498, five and a
half years after the first voyage of Columbus,
Vasco da Gama crossed the Indian Ocean and
cast anchor on the coast of Malabar. Thus the
way was opened by sea to China and Japan, and
the Portuguese, by their own labours, and by
the Papal Bull of Pope Martin V, granted in
1444, came into possession of all the lands they
had visited, as far as the Indies.
To a Spaniard of the later Fifteenth Century Spain.
the politics of Europe must have worn some
thing the same aspect that they wore for an
Englishman of the Sixteenth. The world had
been divided among rival claimants, and his
country had been left portionless. But it was
5

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
not by the genius of a Spaniard that the balance
was redressed. Christopher Columbus, a
Genoese, who had passed his youth in the com
merce and wars of the Mediterranean, settled in
Lisbon about 1470, married the daughter of
one of Prince Henry's men, and devoted him
self to map-making and the study of naviga
tion, diversified by occasional cruises to the
coast of Guinea. At Lisbon, which was the
headquarters of the best and latest school of
navigation, he was kept in touch with the pro
gress of Portuguese discovery, and must have
learned all there was to know concerning the
difficulties and dangers of the circumnavigation
of Africa, and the hopes that inspired the Por
tuguese in their unceasing efforts. He was a
dreamer, a grave and pious man, of a simple
mind, and great tenacity of imagination. To
The him there came the idea that Cathay, the ulti-
Columbus. mate goal of all Eastern travel, and Cipangu,
' the richest island in the world for gold and
spices,' might best be reached by striking
directly across the trackless Atlantic. Memo
ries of his reading, whether in boyhood at the

THE VOYAGERS
University of Pavia, or in the hours of study
stolen from an active life, confirmed him, by
the opinions of the Ancients, and the mistakes
of mediaeval geographers, in his belief that the
width of the Atlantic was easily passable, and
that on the other side, over against the coast of
Spain, lay the fabled riches of China and Japan.
He planned his voyage across the Atlantic
because he believed that no such country as
America existed ; and he died without being
undeceived. The story of Columbus has been told a hun
dred times, and need not be repeated at length.
His overtures to King John II of Portugal Offered to
came to nothing, from causes readily intelligible
and eternally operative in the affairs of this
world. A great man's ideas are too broad and
simple to be understood by the trained official
mind. The King referred the proposal of
Columbus to a council of bishops, astronomers,
and learned persons. The fame of the Portu
guese school of navigation stood high ; the
exploration of the coast of Africa and the use of
the astrolabe at sea were among its most recent
7

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
achievements ; and the school-bred geogra
phers and professors of navigation were in no
mind to listen patiently to the projects of a
private visionary. Nevertheless the confidence
and enthusiasm of Columbus made an impres
sion on some of his judges, and, at the instiga
tion of the bishop of Ceuta, a caravel was
surreptitiously equipped and despatched to
attempt the adventure. The seamen lost
heart ; the attempt failed ; and when this piece
of sharp practice came to the knowledge of
Columbus he left Portugal, in 1484, to offer
his services elsewhere. For years his scheme
went a-begging. It was during this time, in
1488, that he sent his brother Bartholomew
And to into England with an offer to King Henry VII.
Bartholomew fell into the hands of pirates, and
was long delayed in his journey, so that when
at last he returned to Spain to notify King
Henry's joyful acceptance of the offer, he was
too late ; the patronage of Ferdinand and Isa
bella had already been obtained, and Columbus
had set sail for the West. The pirates, in the
pursuit of their calling, were ' the occasion,' as

THE VOYAGERS
Hakluyt has it, * why the West Indies were not
discovered for England.' The time of England
was not yet come.
A striking contrast might be drawn between
the two nations, Spain, which gained the whole
credit and profit of the enterprise of Columbus,
and England, which so narrowly missed it. A
hundred years later, in the defeat of the Great The ship-
men of
Armada, the contrast was to be pointed, but England.
already it was apparent. ' The English sailors,'
wrote Ferdinand's ambassador at the Court of
King Henry VII, ' are generally savages.'
They were unchanged since the days of Chaucer,
and picked up a living, without loss of temper,
from a precarious coasting trade and adventures
not easily distinguishable from piracy. The
character of the English sailor is the most inal
terable and valuable of national assets ; while
the British Constitution has moved from prece
dent to precedent, he has remained the same.
His life is a hard one, but he takes it as it comes.
He is untouched by the formal punctilios of the
cavalier and the cankered scruples of the puri
tan. He is careless of the graces and ornaments
9

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
of life. Though he has a warm heart, he is
no humanitarian. Danger is his daily com
panion, and he has learned the lesson of Sir
Edward Howard, that a seaman is useless unless
he is resolute to the degree of madness. Above
all, he is alert and serious in what concerns his
craft. Of all professions, the sailor is habitu
ated to subordinate himself most completely to
the necessities of the work to be done. We
know little of the English sailors of the time of
King Henry VII. But we know them at an
earlier time, and we shall meet them again
later, in the day of their triumph.
When Columbus arrived at Cordova, in
i486, to lay his propositions before the allied
monarchs of Castile and Arragon, he found
there a Court and a nation little disposed to pay
attention to nautical adventure. The campaign
against the Moors for the conquest of Granada
was being inaugurated with all the pomp and
The splendour of mediaeval chivalry. Decadent
cavaliers c j ^¦
of Spain, feudalism, trained in the stately foj-malities of
Courts and the subtleties of Catholic theology,
was to have the task of conquering and settling

THE VOYAGERS
the West Indies. But the hidalgos and cava
liers who thronged with their retinues to the
camp at Cordova had no foreboding of their
destiny. Many of them were to be lost at sea,
or to die miserably in remote islands, at the
bidding of the poor man in simple apparel who
was unable to gain a hearing from them. In
the meantime Spain, with the infidel at her
gates, cared little for the sea. The marvel is
less that Columbus crossed the Atlantic, than
that by his resolute importunity he secured the
help of the Court of Spain. His scheme was
little understood ; but in Spain religion is
understood, and, by long cherishing, his belief
in his mission had acquired the intensity and the
elevation of a creed. It was this which won
him the friendship of Friar Juan Perez, at the
convent of La Rabida, and it was this which, in
the end, secured for him the whole-hearted
sympathy and support of Isabella of Castile.
In October, 1492, he landed at San Salvador in
the Bahama Islands.
By the conquest and settlement of Cuba and
the West Indies Spain entered on her career as

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES

The
Bull of
Partition.

Italian
Navi
gators.

a candidate for the dominion of the world. To
avoid an internecine struggle between Spain
and Portugal, Pope Alexander VI, who was a
Spaniard by birth, issued, in 1493, his famous
Bull, whereby the world was divided by a line
running from pole to pole a hundred leagues
west of the Azores, and all newly discovered
lands to east and west of this line assigned in
absolute possession to the crowns of Portugal
and Castile respectively. For the next half-
century both Spain and Portugal were busy in
consolidating and extending their domains,
little disturbed by newer competitors.
But the tale of the nations was not yet com
plete. Venice, Genoa, Portugal and Spain were
to be followed by France and England in the
race for the Far East. Each of these latter
countries, like Spain, owed its earliest impulse
to the genius of an Italian navigator. One
land sent forth the masters of the Old World
and the discoverers of the New ; though they
were never to enter into their inheritance, they
saw it with their eyes ; and the beginnings of
modern science, art, and civilisation are the

THE VOYAGERS
debt of the world to Italy. In 1497, John John
Cabot, a citizen of Venice who had settled as a
trader at Bristol, having obtained letters patent
from King Henry VII, sailed with two ships
out of Bristol and discovered the northern end
of the Island of Cape Breton. As his expedi
tion was believed to be the first to reach the
mainland of America, which Columbus never
set eyes on till a year later, much has been made
in controversy of the priority of the English
claim. But indeed in these timid beginnings
nothing was further from the purpose of Eng
land than to enter on a contest with other
powers for the possession of America. The
success of Columbus had set the court of King
Henry aflame with the promise that it offered
of a direct route to Cathay, ' insomuch that all
men, with great admiration, affirmed it to be a
thing more divine than human to sail by the
West into the East, where the spices grow, by
a way that was never known before.' Shortly
after this it was ascertained that beyond America
there lay a halcyon sea, yielding direct access to
the promised land. In 15 13 Vasco Nunez de
13

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
The Balboa, from a height above his colony at
dis- Darien, saw the Pacific Ocean; and in 1520
covered, ^j^^ Portuguese navigator, Magellan, rounded
South America through the straits that bear his
name, and sailed across the Pacific to the Philip
pines, where he met his death.
From this time forward, for many years, the
aim of European navigators was not to explore
or settle America, rather to discover a passage
whereby America might be avoided, and a way
opened to the lands beyond. But the progress
of investigation revealed no break in that great
The barrier. The French voyagers, who, like the
Voyagers. English, followed the lead of a native of Italy,
were long buoyed up by the hope of finding a
better route than the Straits of Magellan, which
were far south, dangerous to navigate, and,
moreover, were in the possession of Spain.
In 1523, Giovanni Verazzano, a Florentine in
the service of King Francis I, explored the coast
of what is now the United States, from Georgia
northward, and of great part of Canada. He
was followed by the brothers Parmentier; by
Jacques Cartier, who in 1535 sailed up the St.
14

THE VOYAGERS
Lawrence and discovered and named Montreal ;
by the Sieur de Roberval ; and many others.
To the earliest voyagers, as in the earliest maps,
America was known as a chain of islands, and
there was something inherently incredible in The
. , . 1 • -...T 1 barrier
the idea of a great continent stretching North continent.
and South over the tropical and temperate
zones. When that idea was accepted, there
remained a last hope, the discovery of a passage
through one of the innumerable inlets of the
North, whereby the nations situated in colder
seas than those of Spain might redeem their
disadvantages, and claim a share in the spoils
of the world. It is at this point that the story
of the English Voyages begins.
The actions that move the world have been
prompted and inspired by dreams and visions.
The search for the philosopher's stone laid the
foundations of modern chemistry ; modern
travel and geography owe their chief advances
to the search for the fabled realm of Cathay. Cathay.
Traditions and fantasies concerning the Golden
Age and the Earthly Paradise are interwoven
with all the practical designs of the early navi-
15

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
gators ; and the poets of the ancient world are
the true fathers of later science. So early as
the sixth century the monk Cosmas, in his
Universal Christian Topography, states the
The object of many a later quest. ' If Paradise,'
Paradise, be says, ' were really on the surface of this
world, is there not many a man among those
who are so keen to learn and search out every
thing, that would not let himself be deterred
from reaching it.? When we see that there are
men who will not be deterred from penetrating
to the ends of the earth in search of silk, and all
for the sake of filthy lucre, how can we believe
that they would be deterred from going to get
a sight of Paradise ?' All through the Middle
Ages the dream held sway, and Paradise was
sought in the East. Columbus, seeking it by
another route, believed that he was near it when,
on his third voyage, he came to the mouths of
the Orinoco, and found a mild climate, green
hiUs, fresh foliage, and a people light in colour
Columbus and graceful in form. The earth, he explains,
on shape
ofthe is probably not spherical but elongated like a
¦ pear, and on the summit of the protuberance
i6

THE VOYAGERS
is situated the Earthly Paradise, ' whither no
one can go but by God's permission.' ' I
think also,' he goes on, ' that the water I have
described may proceed from it, though it be far
off, and that stopping at the place I have just
left, it forms this lake. There are great indica
tions of this being the terrestrial paradise, for
its site coincides with the opinion of the holy
and wise theologians whom I have mentioned ;
and moreover, the other evidences agree with
the supposition, for I have never either read or
heard of fresh water coming in so large a quan
tity, in close conjunction with the water of the
sea ; the idea is also corroborated by the bland-
ness of the temperature ; and if the water of
which I speak does not proceed from the Earthly
Paradise, it appears to be still more marvellous,
for I do not believe that there is any river in the
world so large or so deep.' Whether approached
by the East or by the West, this Earthly Para
dise was to be sought, all were agreed, in the
neighbourhood of Cathay.
This great kingdom of the East had long
been dimly known as an object of curiosity and
B 17

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
wonder. By the revival of Christianity at the
Francis- fj^^g ^f St. Francis and St. Dominic a great
can Mis- _ _ _
sionaries. impulse was given to missionary travel, and the
marvellous tales brought back by wandering
friars took a firm hold on the imagination of
Europe. Rubruquis, a Flemish FranciscaUj,
who, about the middle of the thirteenth cen
tury, was sent by St. Louis on a mission to the
Tartar chiefs, brought back the report that
' there is a certain province on the other side of
Cathay, and whatever a man's age be when he
enters that province he never gets any older.'
The friar is careful to add that he does not
believe a word of this report, but it found cred
ence from others, and so late as 15 12 Juan
Ponce de Leon, an old Spanish cavalier, Gover
nor of Puerto Rico, landed in Florida while he
was cruising in search of a country alleged to
The contain a miraculous Fountain of Youth. Be-
Fountain
of Youth, sides Rubruquis there were other friars whose
accounts of the East were well known to later
explorers. John of Piano Carpini in the Thir
teenth Century was followed later by John of
Monte Corvino, who passed many years of his
18

THE VOYAGERS
life at the Court of the Grand Khan of Cathay,
founded a flourishing Christian community,
built a church, and was made Archbishop of
Cambalu, or Pekin. Odoric of Pordenone was,
like these, a Franciscan ; his residence at Pekin
belongs to the early part of the Fourteenth
Century. The reports brought by these tra
vellers of the survival of some remnants of
Nestorian Christianity in the East lent colour
to the legend of Prester John, the mythical
Christian potentate, who continued to be an,
object of research down to the time of the Por
tuguese voyages. The greatest of all mediaeval
travellers, Marco Polo, who spent a quarter of Marco
. , T-, Polo.
a century, from 1271 to 1295, in the East, was
a Venetian of a noble merchant family, and did
more perhaps than any other writer to excite
interest in the glories of Cathay. The accounts
given by Marco Polo and Odoric, long believed
to be adorned and heightened by fables, have
come to be recognised as veracious and exact
narratives, erring here and there only from
natural misconceptions. Their descriptions of Kubla
the Great Khan's Court, of the magnificence of Khan.
19

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
his retinue, and the resources and extent of his
Empire, might well excite Western curiosity
and stimulate the efforts of voyagers. It was
not without reason that Hakluyt included in his
compilation the stories of some of these Eastern
travellers ; without them his epic would lack
its true beginning. The travels of Marco Polo
were too well known to be inserted, but they
are essential to the completeness of the book.
The quest of Cathay, then, is the main theme
of this long poem of adventure ; it is the pur
pose and soul of centuries of travel. But the
theme is diversified with episodes and digres
sions and underplots. The singleness of an
enterprise is not necessarily reflected in the
minds and hearts of all who take part in it.
Men who left their homes, and sailed to an un
known world, were influenced by the most
diverse motives, political or religious, commer
cial or scientific. In not a few cases the ' good
unsought discoveries ' made by the way caused
the original purpose to be forgotten. The
Letters of Columbus, at the outset of the his
tory, foreshadow some later developments.

THE VOYAGERS
Columbus himself was full of zeal for the spread The aims
... ... ^ , ofColum-
of Christianity, and the increase of knowledge, bus.
But it was necessary to show that his expedition
would pay its promoters in temporal coin. ' I
gave to the subject,' he says in the account of
his Third Voyage, ' six or seven years of great
anxiety, explaining, to the best of my ability,
how great service might be done to our Lord,
by this undertaking, in promulgating His
sacred name and our holy faith among so many
nations ; — an enterprise so exalted in itself, and
so calculated to enhance the glory and immor
talize the renown of the greatest sovereigns. It
was also requisite to refer to the temporal pros
perity, which was foretold in the writings of so
many trustworthy and wise historians, who
related that great riches were to be found in
those parts. And at the same time I thought
it desirable to bring to bear upon the subject,
the sayings and opinions of those who have
written upon the geography of the world. And
finally, your Highnesses came to the determina- rpj^^
tion that the undertaking should be entered spread of
° , Chris-
tipon.' To add a whole realm to Christendom tianity.
21

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
was in the opinion of Columbus a sufficient
object and reward. The people of the West
Indian islands, he says, ' all clearly understand
each other's speech, a circumstance very pro
pitious for the realization of what I conceive to
be the principle wish of our most serene King,
namely, the conversion of these people to the
holy faith of Christ.' And again, — ' Let the
King and Queen, our Princes and their most
happy Kingdoms, and all the other provinces of
Christendom, render thanks to our Lord and
Saviour Jesus Christ, who has granted us so
great a victory and such prosperity. Let pro
cessions be made, and sacred feasts be held, and
the temples be adorned with festive boughs.
Let Christ rejoice on earth, as he rejoices in
heaven in the prospect of the salvation of the
souls of so many nations hitherto lost. Let us
also rejoice, as well on account of the exaltation
of our faith, as on account of the increase of our
temporal prosperity, of which not only Spain,
-pjjg but all Christendom will be partakers.'
increase of 'j'q reinforce this magnanimous and generous
ledge. motive Columbus quotes instances ' of what
22

THE VOYAGERS
great princes throughout the world have done
to increase their fame : as, for example, Solo
mon, who sent from Jerusalem to the uttermost
parts of the East, to see Mount Sopora, in which
expedition his ships were detained three years ;
and which mountain your Highnesses now pos
sess in the island of Hispaniola ; . . . Alex
ander, who sent to observe the mode of
Government in the island of Taprobana, in
India ; and Csesar Nero, to explore the sources
of the Nile, and to learn the causes of its
increase in the Spring, when water is needed;
and many other mighty deeds which princes
have done, and which it is allotted to princes to
achieve.' Lastly, there is ' the recent noble The
example of the Kings of Portugal, who have p^tu^aL
had the courage to explore as far as Guinea, and
to make the discovery of it, expending so much
gold and so many lives in the undertaking, that
a calculation of the population of the kingdom
would show that one half of them have died
in Guinea; and though it is now a long time
since they commenced these great exertions, the
return for their labour and expense has hitherto
23

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
been but trifling. This people has also dared
to make conquests in Africa, and to carry on
their exploits to Ceuta, Tangier, Algiers, and
Alcazar, repeatedly giving battle to the Moors ;
and all this at great expense ; simply because it
was an exploit worthy of a prince, undertaken.
for the service of God, and to advance the
enlargement of His Kingdom.' In consonance
Columbus with these aims, the behaviour of Columbus to
Indians. ^^^ natives of Hispaniola was ordered by the
loftiest code of a Spanish gentleman. ' I gave,''
he says, ' to all I approached whatever articles I
had about me, such as cloth and many other
things, taking nothing of theirs in return : but
Indian they are naturally timid and fearful. As soon
however as they see that they are safe, and have
laid aside all fear, they are very, simple and
honest, and exceedingly liberal with all they
have ; none of them refusing anything he may
possess when he is asked for it, but on the
contrary inviting us to ask them. They exhibit
great love towards all others in preference to
themselves ; they also give objects of great
value for trifles, and content themselves with
24

virtues.

THE VOYAGERS
very little or nothing in return. I however
forbade that these trifles and articles of no
value (such as pieces of dishes, plates, and glass,
keys, and leather straps) should be given to
them, although if they could obtain them, they
imagined themselves to be possessed of the most
beautiful trinkets in the world. . . . They
bartered, like idiots, cotton and gold for frag
ments of bows, glasses, bottles and jars ; which
I forbade, as being unjust, and myself gave
them many beautiful and acceptable articles
which I had brought with me, taking nothing
from them in return ; I did this in order that I
might the more easily conciliate them, that they
might be led to become Christians, and be
inclined to entertain a regard for the King and
Queen, our Princes, and all Spaniards.' With The fate
this fair dawn of mutual courtesy, sincerity, and paniola
the traffic of honourable men, began a day of
pillage and cruelty and devastation such as the
world has seldom seen. Twelve years after the
first landing of Columbus the five great tribes
of Hispaniola were all but exterminated. Many
of the Indians perished by the sword, many
25

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
under the lash of the Spanish task-master;
others died of hunger in the mountains, or took
their own and their children's lives, to escape
from the cruelty of Spain. The successive
names of the island — Hispaniola, San Domingo,
Hayti — embody its miserable history. The
gentle and generous designs of Queen Isabella
gave way to a persecution worthy of the fierce
St. Dominic, and when the Indians were dead,
' by sundry kinds of death,' the island was
peopled with imported negroes, under whose
government at last it fell. In the full Nine
teenth Century, the gold-laced officials of the
Black Republic have been known to retire by
night to the mountains, to celebrate their magic
rites, attended by human sacrifice.
Presages and omens of this tragedy are to be
The found even in the Letters of Columbus. There
sc3]*cji for
gold. arc oft-repeated mentions of gold. ' You will
say to their Highnesses,' he writes to Antonio
de Torres, ' that I should have ardently desired
to send them a larger quantity of gold, . . .
but that the greater part of the people we em
ployed fell suddenly ill.' Again, ' I think it
26

THE VOYAGERS
will be impossible to go this year to make dis
coveries until arrangements have been made to
work the two rivers, in which the gold has been
found, in the most profitable manner for their
Highnesses' interest.' Again, — ' We hope, Provi-
. ¦ ^ r /-^ 1 1-11 dence and
With the aid or God and with the washers that the gold-
we have here with us, when they shall be re- ^^^ ^'^^'
stored to health, to send a good quantity of
gold by the first caravels that shall leave for
Spain.' And later, — ' Though we have not sent
home ships laden with gold, we have, neverthe
less, sent satisfactory samples, both of gold and
of other valuable commodities, by which it may
be judged that in a short time large profit may
be derived.' The pressure put on him to get
gold, no matter how, was unremitting. ' With
respect to the gold,' he writes again, ' which
belongs to Quibian, the cacique of Veragua,
and other chiefs in the neighbouring country,
although it appears by the accounts we have
received of it to be very abundant, I do not
think it would be well or desirable, on the part
of your Highnesses, to take possession of it in
the way of plunder : by fair dealing, scandal and
27

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
disrepute will be avoided, and all the gold will
thus reach your Highnesses' treasury without
the loss of a grain.' In the same letter, written
in 1503, he complains of the class of adven
turers whom gold allures, and who make the
voyage only for plunder. Yet Columbus,
though he was disgusted by the self-interest
and narrow outlook of these gold-seekers, did
not fail to appreciate the significance andimport-
The im- ance of a store of gold. ' Gold,' he says, ' is
of gold ^ ^^^ most precious of all commodities ; gold con
stitutes treasure, and he who possesses it has all
he needs in this world, as also the means of
rescuing souls from purgatory, and restoring
them to the enjoyment of paradise.' His
opinion, so far as it concerns this world, was to
be echoed later by many a patriotic Englishman
who urged that the strength of the King of
Spain lay in his treasure, and that he could be
most effectively attacked in the New World.
The com- So, as the drama proceeds, the plot thickens.
ficancef"'" He who would make an epic of it must follow
ofthe a single strand of the twisted yarn. But this-
Voyages. is work for the poet rather than the historian.
28

THE VOYAGERS
The late Mr. Froude, with a poet's instinct for
unity, chose to regard the whole story of the
English Voyages as an aspect of the Protestant
Reformation. Many other equally promising
aspects invite a similar treatment. The fascina
tion and the power of gold ; the doom of the
races of America, met by them with a tragic
simplicity ; the pathos of Christian missions ;
the romance of map-making ; or the tardy
growth, when all else had failed, of the idea of
colonisation ; these and many other things may
be severally disentangled from the complicated
web of history, and trusted as a clue. History, The
which takes for its hero that many-sided crea- History.
ture, man, must reckon with all of these, and
exhibit a stage where pirates, buccaneers, and
slave-traders rub shoulders with saints and
seers, where martyrs to science and religion are
associated with politicians and misers ; and
where, to complete the disorder, most of the
actors play many parts. It is permissible, at
least, to simplify the problem by concentrating
attention on the fortunes of a single nation.
The history of the English Voyages is the most
29

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
important chapter in the history of the English
nation, and the preface to the history of the
British Empire.
During the half-century after the voyage
of John Cabot, a period more than covered by
the long life of his son, Sebastian Cabot,
English exploration made but little progress.
There were sundry expeditions, fitted out
at Bristol, to the New-found-land, and
some worthless commodities, as well as three
natives of the island, were brought back and
The displayed to King Henry VII. The first of
beginnings of these voyages was undertaken by Sebastian
English Q {3Qt g^ft^ jjj ^ ^T^ f j^- father; he failed
voyaging ' '
to the to penetrate the North, and coasted America
West. southward to Florida. But this southern ten
dency, which might bring England into conflict
with Spain, was not encouraged by the King;
and when Henry VIII succeeded to the throne,
Sebastian Cabot was relegated to the safer em
ploy of making charts of the coast of France.
In 1 5 12 he went to Spain, and for the next
thirty-six years, with one brief interval after the
death of Ferdinand, he was in the service of
3°

THE VOYAGERS
the Spanish government. On the accession of
Edward VI he returned to England, at a time
when a fresh impulse was given to English
navigation. But in the meantime the dominion
of the New World had been strengthened in
foreign hands. While Mexico and Peru were The
. . . . progress of
being added to the dominion of Spain, the voy- Spain.
ages made by the English, under King Henry
VIII, were few and profitless. In 1527 a name
less canon of St. Paul's in London, who was ' a
great mathematician, and a man endowed with
wealth,' fitted out two ships for Labrador, where
one of them was lost. In 1536 Master Hore,
a learned lawyer, took a company of a hundred
to the same coast, whence, their stores being ex
hausted, they returned in a stolen French ship.
It was to speak with the only surviving witness
of this voyage, one Master Thomas Buts, that
Hakluyt, at a much later date, travelled two
hundred miles on horseback. But the most
important document of this early period is ' the
Book made by the right worshipful Master Treatise
Robert Thorne,' in the year i f 27, where the °" ^^.^
¦' . . Northern
true policy of England is outlined and discussed passage.
31

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
at length. Thorne, who was a native of Bristol
and a friend of the Cabots, dwelt long in Seville,
and his writings show traces of the later sen
tentious courtly style which Guevara brought
to perfection. In 15 13 he exhorted King
Henry to take the business of discovery in
hand ; fourteen years later, at the request of the
English ambassador, he expounded his ideas at
length. The world, he says, has been divided
between the Kings of Spain and of Portugal,
and he gives an account of the contested owner
ship of the Philippines, which he takes to be the
richest prize of all. For ' the preciousness of
these things is measured after the distance that
is between us and the things that we have appe
tite unto ' ; moreover, the inhabitants of these
spice islands ' set more by a knife and a nail of
The way iron than by his quantity of gold.' But the way
Spice to these islands is barred to us. The Spaniards
Islands. j^qJ^ ^.j^^ westward route, by the Straits of
Magellan ; the Portuguese the eastward, by the
Cape of Good Hope. The English have left
to them but one way to discover, and that is by
the North. If the seas toward the North be
32

THE VOYAGERS
navigable, we may go to these spice islands a
shorter way by two thousand leagues than Spain
and Portugal, who have each of them more than
four thousand leagues to traverse. ' And,' says
Master Thorne, anticipating an objection which,
forty years later, became a burning question of
practical politics, ' though we went not to the
said islands, for that they are the Emperor's,
or King's of Portingale, we should by the
way, and coming once to the line equinoctial,
find lands no less rich of gold and spicery, as
all other lands are under the said line equinoc
tial ; and also should, if we may pass under the
North, enjoy the navigation of all Tartary,
which should be no less profitable to our com
modities of cloth, than these spiceries to the
Emperor and King of Portingale.' But the
Northern seas, it may be objected, are blocked
with ice ; and the Northern lands are too cold Perils of
r in- ^T^ 1 • 1 I ¦ • the North.
for man to dwell in. lo which objection
Master Thorne replies in a single sentence, fit
to be inscribed as a head-line on the charter of
Britannia — There is no land unhabitable, nor
sea innavigable.
c 33

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
It was in this belief, and in this heroic tem
per, that England set herself to take possession
of her heritage, the North. The adventures to
the North West had been but poorly rewarded ;
and for a time attention was turned to the possi-
The bility of reaching Cathay by way of the North
East East. At the close of the reign of Edward VI
Voyages. ^ Company of Merchant Adventurers was
formed ' for the discovery of Regions, Domi
nions, Islands, and places unknown ' ; Sebastian
Cabot, now in advanced old age, was made its
governor ; and in May, 1553, three ships, under
the leadership of Sir Hugh Willoughby and
Richard Chancelor, were despatched for the
Northern coasts of Asia. They carried with
them letters from King Edward VI, written in
Latin, and opportunely addressed ' to all Kings,
Princes, Rulers, Judges, and Governors of the
Earth, and all other having any excellent dig
nity on the same, in all places under the univer
sal heaven.' Willoughby and Chancelor were
separated by a storm, and Willoughby, after
reaching Nova Zembla, put back and landed
with his two ships' companies on the coast of
34

THE VOYAGERS
Lapland. Here they wintered, and here they
all died of cold and hunger. Chancelor, with Richard
Chancelor.
his single ship, had better fortune. He too was
obliged to turn back, but he established friendly
relations with the fisher folk in the neighbour
hood of the White Sea, and, when news of
the visit of strangers reached the Emperor of
Russia, he was invited with all his company to
the Court at Moscow. His account of the
Kingdom of Muscovy led the Merchant Adven
turers to concentrate their efforts on developing
trade with Russia, and gave a motive to further Trade
^, , ,. ,r with
voyaging. Chancelor himself was cast away Russia.
and drowned on the coast of Scotland in 1556,
as he was bringing the first Russian ambassador
to the Court of England, but his work went on.
Stephen Burrough, who had served under him,
in the same year explored the coast of Nova
Zembla; and Anthony Jenkinson, in 1558,
went as far as Bokhara to seek for an overland
route to Cathay. The last of the North East
ern voyages was undertaken by Arthur Pet and ,
Charles Jackman in the year 1580. They sailed
as far as the Sea of Kara, but the ice and fogs
35

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
were too much for them ; Jackman never
reached home, and the failure of the expedition
cast grave doubts on the possibility of reaching
Cathay by the North East. By this time,
moreover, Frobisher's voyages to the North
West had awakened hopes of gold to be found
in that inhospitable region ; and Hawkins and
Drake, by their exploits in the Spanish Indies,
had begun a new era in English navigation,
and given a new direction to English pohcy.
In the excitement of these later developments
the North East passage was forgotten.
When the North West attempt, after a lapse
of many years, was again taken up, it led to far-
reaching consequences. The only incidental
gain of the North Eastern voyages was the
establishment of trading relations with Russia.
There was no word of treasure to be found on
the frozen Siberian coast, no prospect of settle
ment there, and the voyagers came into conflict
with no rival nations. The search for gold,
the beginnings of colonisation, and the gradual
entanglement of England in a death-struggle
with Spain are developments intimately con-
36

THE VOYAGERS
nected with the voyaees to the North West. The
r ^ North
Many or the seamen. West
Feared by their breed and famous by their birth, oyages.
who were to be the terror of the Spaniards
upon the high seas, had their hard training in
this forlorn hope. When England found her
self baffled in her efforts to escape from her
ring-fence by way of the North, she struck
Southwards ; timidly at first, then, surprised
and elated by her own success, with ever in
creasing vigour, until, after a few years, the
small barks that cruised to Greenland and
Labrador gave way to armed fleets, prepared
to assert a right of way and a right of conquest
in all the seven seas.
The suddenness and rapidity of this develop
ment might well surprise the world. The
English naval power, like the English drama,
seemed to be the growth of a single night. In
either case, hidden causes had been at work ;
the power that startled Europe had long been
nurtured in the quiet. Yet these causes are so
obscure, and seem so inadequate, that it is diffi
cult to put off the language of miracle. Fuller
37

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
frankly invokes a special Providence. ' Ob
serve, by the way,' he says, in narrating the
death of Captain Edward Fenton, in 1603,
Queen some days after Queen Elizabeth's, ' how God
^^^ ^ set up a generation of military men, both by
sea and land, which began and expired with
the reign of Queen Elizabeth, like a suit of
clothes made for her, and worn out with her;
for Providence designing a peaceable prince to
succeed her (in whose time martial men would
be rendered useless), so ordered the matter,
that they all almost attended their mistress
before or after, within some short distance, unto
her grave.' However this may be, no lan
guage is extravagant to praise the deeds of the
greatest generation of Englishmen, the genera
tion of Drake and Raleigh, of Bacon and
Hooker, of Shakespeare and Marlowe. If the
names of Queen Elizabeth's men, the men born
in the early part of her reign, or just before it,
were struck off the roll of fame, England would
be robbed of half her glory.
Sir It was one of the eldest-born of these, Hum-
Gilbert, phrey Gilbert, the son of a Devon gentleman,
38

THE VOYAGERS
who revived the North West project. He had
been trained, during the years of peace, in that
school of war, government, and adventure
which gave Elizabeth the best of her servants.
Under Sir Henry Sidney, in Ireland, he had
spent years of warfare with the rebels, and for
his achievements there was knighted. Thence
he had passed to the Low Countries, where he
headed a band of volunteers to give help to the
people of the Netherlands in their struggle with
Alva and the power of Spain. In these rough The
c r^ .. .1 1 T • 1 School for
experiences or Continental war and Irish Adventure.
government Raleigh also was trained, and
Grenville ; while Hawkins and Frobisher were
learning their elements in trade and piracy on
the coast of Guinea. With all its evil lessons
of cruelty and craft, it was a school that fostered
reckless courage and self-confidence in its
pupils, and gave leaders to all kinds of perilous
adventure. During his periods of active ser
vice, Gilbert cherished, deep in his heart, the
dream of Cathay. He plotted a North East
passage with Jenkinson ; and, when that
scheme was thwarted, bent his studies to the
39

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
West. He repeatedly importuned Queen
Elizabeth for assistance ; and in a period of
enforced idleness, about 1574, he wrote The
Discourse to prove a Passage by the North-
, west to Cathaia and the East Indies; which
was published in 1576, and begat the voyages
of Frobisher and Davis.
Gilbert's Gilbert's argument is so full and reasonable,
Discourse ^ • • • /. . . .
on the SO fair in its treatment or objections, and so
North strong in its appeal to tradition and authority,
passage, that it is no wonder if many were convinced by
it. America, he says, is an island, and was
known by report to Plato and the ancients, who
called it Atlantis. If it be joined at its nor
thern extremity with the continent of Asia,
how comes it that no civilised man has ever
found his way to America by land, and that the
animals of America differ wholly from the
animals of Asia.'' Need makes the old wife
to trot, and -'the Scythians and Tartars would
have found their way there, if any way had
been by land. The current of the sea, more
over, is known to run westward from the Cape
of Good Hope, and on striking America is
40

THE VOYAGERS
deflected along the coast to the North. If it
found no outlet there, it would run eastward
again to the coast of Europe, which it does not
do ; therefore there is a fair and broad water
way from the Atlantic to the Pacific, somewhere
between the 62nd and the 72nd parallels of
latitude. But if a passage had existed, it may
be said, it would have been discovered long
ago by the navigators of Spain and Portugal.
This objection is met in triumphant fashion by The
Gilbert. It is against the interest of these i^gnorance
nations that a passage should be found ; and °^ Spain.
he repeats a tale of Ulloa, that the King of
Portugal gave the Emperor Charles V three
hundred and fifty thousand crowns to leave the
discovery unattempted. ' It is to be thought,'
he adds, ' that the King of Portugal would not
have given to the Emperor such sums of money
for eggs in moonshine.' The pilots of these
nations are now forbidden, on pain of death, to
explore to the North West, lest they ' should
beat the bush, and other men catch the birds.'
The enterprise is reserved for the English, who
have most to gain by it. And Gilbert concludes
41

Frobisher.

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
Gilbert's -with a declaration of the antique Roman faith
creed. which inspired his life — ' He is not worthy to
live at all, that for fear or danger of death
shunneth his Country's service and his own
honour ; seeing death is inevitable, and the
fame of virtue immortal.'
The three 'pj^g influence of Gilbert's Discourse was
Voyages of
Martin seen immediately in the voyages of Frobisher
and Davis. After a vain attempt to stir up
the Muscovy Company (as the Merchant
Adventurers were now called) to Western en
terprise. Queen Elizabeth granted, in 1575, a
licence to Martin Frobisher; the Court and
the City stood in with the adventure, which was
largely financed and controlled by Michael
Lock, a London merchant of scientific tastes;
and in 1576, with two small barks of twenty-
five tons and a pinnace, Frobisher set sail.
The pinnance was wrecked, and the barks
separated, but Frobisher in the Gabriel reached
Meta Incognita, or Cumberland's Island, made
acquaintance with the Esquimaux, and partly
explored the inlet to which he gave its opti
mistic name of Frobisher's Straits. The ex-
42

THE VOYAGERS
pedition was without substantial results in
discovery or profit, and but for an accident,
would hardly have been repeated. One of the
company chanced to pick up and bring home
a piece of shining black stone, which the
assayers of London tested and pronounced to be
rich in gold. So Frobisher was despatched again
next year, his small fleet reinforced with a
vessel of two hundred tons' burthen, lent by
the Queen. The worthless stuff he brought
home did not extinguish the hopes of the pro
moters, and in 1578 he put out once more,
this time in command of no fewer than four
teen vessels. But his success was no greater
than before. His explorations were hampered
by the quest for gold ore, and the outcome of
his three voyages was the discovery of Hud
son's Straits, much recrimination among the
undertakers, and no gold. A fourth expedi
tion was planned, but when at last it was ready
for sea, the command was given to Captain
Fenton, and its purpose changed to piracy in
the South Seas. The return of Drake in 1580,
treasure-laden from his voyage round the
43

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
world, had cast a pallor upon Northern enter
prise.
The three The three voyages of John Davis, in 1585
of John and the two following years, were the last
Davis. Elizabethan effort to discover the North West
passage. It is a testimony to the geographical
enthusiasm of the time that these voyages were
undertaken in the very years when the Spanish
invasion of England was imminent. Like
Frobisher, Davis found a wealthy merchant
patron and support in high quarters ; like
Frobisher, he was crippled in his explorations
by the necessities of gain. Some of his ships
were told off for cod-fishing and the fur-trade,
yet he explored Cumberland Sound, coasted the
West of Greenland by Davis Straits, and
reached Baffin's Bay. By the death of Sir
Francis Walsingham in 1590 he lost his chief
friend at Court, but his heart was still set on
the North West, and he took service under
Cavendish in the following year, induced only
by the promise that he should have the loan of
a vessel to search for the farther entrance to the
passage, on the back parts of America. Nor
44

THE VOYAGERS
did he give up hope after the tragic failure of
that voyage. In the preface to The Seaman's His belief
Secrets, his nautical handbook of 1594, and North
still more earnestly and frilly in The Worldes ^^l^„^
Hydro graphical Description of 1595, he ex
pounds the certainty of a North West passage,
and the gains that its discovery would bring to
England. Davis was a single-minded seaman,
whose life was given to trade and exploration
wh^le others fought with Spain ; and the great
idea that dominated him sometimes kindles his
language to an almost poetic fervour. The
North Pole, he says, is the place of greatest The
dignity in the world ; and the people who dwell the North
near it ' have a wonderful excellency, and an ^°'*-
exceeding prerogative above all nations of the
earth.' ' How blessed may we think this
nation to be : for they are in perpetual light,
and never know what darkness meaneth, by the
benefit of twilight and full moons, as the
learned in astronomy do very well know : which
people, if they have the notice of their eternity
by the comfoftable light of the Gospel, then
are they blessed and of all nations most blessed.
45

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
Why then do we neglect the search of this
excellent discovery, against which there can be
nothing said to hinder the same."* Why do
we refuse to see the dignity of God's creation,
since it hath pleased his divine Majesty to place
us the nearest neighbour thereunto.? I know
there is no true Englishman that can in con
science refuse to be a contributor to procure
this so great a happiness to his country, whereby
not only the Prince and mighty men of the land
shall be highly renowned, but also the merchant,
tradesman, and artificer mightily enriched.'
His eloquence was in vain : and his later years
were spent as pilot on the East India route,
in the service at first of the Dutch and after
wards of the East India Company. He was
Death of killed in 1605 ^7 ^^^ treachery of Japanese
pirates, to whom the Master of his ship, the
Tiger, had offered hospitality and courtesy
while the two vessels lay alongside in the
Straits of Malacca. The North Western
enterprise which had been the dream of
his life passed into the hands of the Dutch,
who were beginning also, before the cen-
46

THE VOYAGERS
tury closed, to supplant the English in the
trade with Russia.
The stalwart honesty and simplicity of the
character and writings of Davis give a singular
charm to his name and story. He was a man
after Hakluyt's own heart, a fearless explorer,
a trusted leader, an ardent student and professor
of the science of navigation. He yields to
none in esteem and zeal for his profession.
' Sith Navigation,' he says, ' is the mean where- The praise
by countries are discovered, and community gation.
drawn between nation and nation, the word of
God published to the blessed recovery of the
foreign offcasts from whence it hath pleased
his divine Majesty as yet to detain the bright
ness of his glory : and that by Navigation
common-weals through mutual trade are not
only sustained, but mightily enriched ; with
how great esteem ought the painful Seaman to
be embraced, by whose hard adventures such
excellent benefits are achieved, for by his ex
ceeding great hazards the form of the Earth,
the quantities of countries, the diversity of
nations, and the natures of Zones, Climates,
47

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
Countries, and people, are apparently made
known to us ; besides the great benefits mutu
ally interchanged between nations of such fruits,
commodities, and artificial practices wherewith
God hath blessed each particular country, coast
and nation according to the nature and situation
of the place.' Moreover, Davis, almost alone
among the English navigators of his time, be-
The lieved sincerely in the mission of England to
Christian ' ' °
mission ot take the Gospel to the heathen. He was a
"^ ^" ¦ student of the Bible, and quotes the prophecies
of Isaiah concerning the salvation and union of
the Gentiles. ' Then sith it is so appointed,'
he goes on, ' that there shall be one shepherd
and one flock, what hindereth us of England (be
ing by God's mercy for the same purpose at this
present most aptly prepared) not to attempt that
which God himself hath appointed to be per
formed.'' There is no doubt but that we of
The England are this saved people, by the eternal
chosen ^_ . f f i J
people. and infallible presence of the Lord predestined
to be sent unto these Gentiles in the sea, to those
Isles and famous Kingdoms, there to preach the
peace of the Lord : for are not we only set upon
48

THE VOYAGERS
Mount Zion to give light to all the rest of the
world.'' Have not we the true handmaid of
the Lord to rule us unto whom the eternal
majesty of God hath revealed his truth and
supreme power of Excellency ? By whom then
shall the truth be preached, but by them unto
whom the truth shall be revealed.'' It is only
we, therefore, that must be these shining mes
sengers of the Lord, and none but we ; for, as
the prophet saith, " O how beautiful are the feet
of the messenger that bringeth the message from
the mountain, that proclaimeth peace, that
bringeth the good tidings and preacheth health,
and saith to Zion, Thy God is King." So that
hereby the spiritual benefit arising from this
discovery,' he concludes, returning to his fixed
idea, ' is most apparent ; for which, if there were
no other cause, we are all bound to labour with
purse and mind, for the discovery of this notable
passage.' During the reign of Elizabeth, and for many
years after, this scheme for the evangelisation of
the heathen had no history. It was a stock The evangelical
weapon in the argumentative armoury of deter- argument.
D 49

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
mined explorers, many of whom allude to the
religious mission of England in cursory fashion,
or plead for it like sharp Christian attorneys,
with none of the fire and sincerity that shine in
the eloquence of Davis. Hakluyt, who had the
same object at heart, writing in 1584, was
troubled by his inability to answer the Papist
adversary. ' The Papists,' he says, ' confirm
themselves, and draw others to their side, show
ing that they are the true Catholic Church
Catholic because they have been the only converters of
Missions. . r • r t ^ /-Il • • •
many millions of infidels to Christianity. Yea,
I myself have been demanded of them, how
many infidels have been by us converted?
Whereunto, albeit I alleged the example of the
ministers which were sent from Geneva with
Villegagnon into Brazil, and these that went
with John Ribault into Florida, as also those of
our nation that went with Frobisher, Sir Francis
Drake, and Fenton ; yet in very deed I was not
able to name any one infidel by them con-
verted.' ^ Hakluyt was indeed hard put to it
^ From ji Discourse of Western Planting, written by M.
Richard Hakluyt, 1584. This valuable discourse was first
SO

THE VOYAGERS
to be driven to make shining messengers of
Master Wolfall, who went with Frobisher's
third voyage as chaplain to the hundred of the English
- chaplains.
company that were to gather ore for a year on
Cumberland's Island ; and of Master Francis
Fletcher, Drake's chaplain, whom, for his faint
heart and double dealing, Drake solemnly ex
communicated, causing a posy to be bound
about his arm — ' Francis Fletcher, the falsest
knave that liveth.' On these two pillars of the
cause English evangelical effort was fain to rest
for the time ; but it is to be hoped, says Hakluyt,
that volunteers will soon be forthcoming. ' For
those of the clergy which by reason of idleness
here at home are now always coining of new
opinions, having by this voyage to set them
selves on work reducing the savages to the chief
principles of our faith, will become less conten
tious, and be contented with the truth in religion
already established by authority.' In a later
part of the same Discourse Hakluyt throws a
curious side-light on this question of religion.
printed, from the MS. in the possession of Sir Thomas
Phillipps, by the Maine Historical Society in 1877.
51

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
It is imperative, he says, that England should
seek some new outlet for her trade, and some
region where she may establish a monopoly : —
' the rather to avoid the wilful perjury of such
of our English nation as trade to Spain and other
The of King Philip's dominions.' Before being
ofthe admitted to trade at any Spanish port, the Eng-
tra er. jjgj^ ^^^ required to make oath, on the sign of
the Cross, that they adhere to the faith of the
Catholic Church of Rome, and they and their
companies must attend mass on Sundays and
Holy days. This they do ; and thus ' the
covetous merchant wilfully sendeth headlong to
hell from day to day the poor subjects of this
realm. The merchant in England cometh here
devoutly to the communion, and sendeth his
son into Spain to hear Mass. These things are
kept secret by the merchants ; and such as
depend upon the trade of merchandise are loth
to utter the same.'
There was no English counterpart, then, or
counterblast, to the devoted work of Las Casas
and the Spanish missionaries. But year by
year, as English trade to the South increased,
52

THE VOYAGERS
there was a growing hostility to_ Spain, and a
growing disinclination to accept her mastery of
the New World. The merchant might feign The
... Protestant
submission ; the buccaneers and sea-dogs Buccaneer.
avenged his disgrace by challenging and harry
ing the power they were soon to overthrow.
And these men, though there was little of saint-
liness in their character, had a religion, and
fought and suffered for it. It was a religion
not wholly unlike that of the later Orangeman,
a Protestant compound, made up of fervid
patriotism, a varied assortment of hates, a rough
code of morals, and an unshaken trust in the •
providence of God. To the heathen they
brought not peace but a sword. To the Pope, ¦
whom they named with the Turk and the Devil,
they wished destruction. For Queen and
Country they, would go anywhere and attempt
anything. Their mission was quite unlike
his ' that bringeth the message from the
mountain ' ; they coveted the things of the
Gentiles, and their purpose and methods are
set forth, in imperial language, by Michael
Drayton : — 53

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
A thousand Kingdoms will we seek from far,
As many Nations waste with civil war ;
Where the dishevelled ghastly sea-nymph sings,
Our well-rigged ships shall stretch their swelling wings.
And drag their anchors through the sandy foam.
About the world in every clime to roam ;
And those unchristened countries call our own
Where scarce the name of England hath been known.
The North East and North West voyages
failed in their primary purpose ; and the men of
peace gave place, in the end, to the men of war.
But before the Queen and her Ministers recog
nised the necessity of an armed conflict with
Spain, all pacific devices for the readjustment
of the balance had been examined and patiently
put to the test. One more series of these
Colonisa- remains to be chronicled. The idea of coloni
sation, of appropriating some part of America
as yet unsettled by the Spaniards, and there
establishing a prosperous English community,
whose imports and exports might benefit the
mother country, received its first effective im
pulse from Sir Humphrey Gilbert. Already in
1555 Richard Eden had outlined this idea, in
the preface to his translation of Peter Martyr's
Decades. From Florida northward to New-
54

tion

THE VOYAGERS
foundland, says Eden, there are lands ' not
yet known but only by the sea-coasts,
neither inhabited by Christian men.' His
suggestion that England should take posses- Eden's
r 1 !¦! 1 r • suggestion.
Sion of these was not likely to bear fruit
while Mary reigned and Philip governed.
In his notable Discourse of 1576 Gilbert pointed
not obscurely in the same direction. There are
* divers very rich countries,' he says, ' both
civil and others, . . . where there is to be
found great abundance of gold, silver, precious
stones, cloth of gold, silks, all manner of spices,
grocery wares, and other kinds of merchandise
of an inestimable price, which both the Spaniard
and Portugal, through the length of their jour
neys, cannot well attain unto.' What was to be Trans-
the weakness of all early English attempts at ^°'^ ^ '°""
colonisation is foreshadowed in his further sug
gestion that ' we might inhabit some part of
those countries, and settle there such needy
people of our country, which now trouble the
commonwealth, and through want here at home
are forced to commit outrageous offences,
whereby they are daily consumed with the gal-
55

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
lows.' And this scheme might be carried out,
he adds, ' without injury done to any Christian
prince, by crossing them in any of their used
trades, whereby they might take any just occa
sion of offence.' Hakluyt, writing in 1584,
makes the same recommendation and supports
it by the same arguments, which no doubt were
intended to appeal to the Queen's well-known
resolve to maintain peace. Portugal and Spain,
he says, have found employment for all their
subjects, so that these two nations breed no
pirates ; ' whereas we and the French are most
infamous for our outrageous, common, and daily
piracies.' By planting the coast of America,
between 30 and 60 degrees of Northern lati
tude, we may provide for the unprofitable mem
bers of the commonwealth, and greatly advance
English trade.
Hakluyt was by profession a man of peace;
but there is little doubt that Gilbert would have
been glad to be let slip at the throat of Spain.
In a paper of 1577, probably drafted by him,
the Queen is advised to prepare a fleet of war
ships under pretence of a voyage of discovery,
56

THE VOYAGERS
and to attack the Spaniards in their cherished
West Indies. When in 1578 he succeeded in Gilbert'*
obtaining a charter ' to inhabit and possess at his
choice all remote and heathen lands not in the
actual possession of any Christian prince,' the
expedition that he fitted out was, in point of
fact, diverted from peaceful purposes. He got
together a fleet of eleven ships, and enlisted the
assistance of many gentlemen adventurers, the
most notable among them being his own step
brother, Walter Raleigh, who was weary of
land-service, and desired to try his fortunes by
sea. Feuds and divisions broke out at the be
ginning of the voyage ; four ships refused the
expedition ; and Gilbert, intending an attack on
the West Indies, fell across some Spanish ves
sels, and was beaten in fight. The second and His last
more memorable adventure of 1 583, in which he ^
met his death, was of less ambitious design.
Five vessels were equipped ; the Delight, of 120
tons, in which Gilbert sailed as Admiral, the
Bark Raleigh, of 200 tons, with its owner as
Vice-admiral, the Golden Hind and Swallow, of
40 tons each, and the Squirrel, of 10 tons.
57

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
The pixrpose was to plant a colony on some
Disasters, convenient site near Newfoundland. The men
proved disorderly and mutinous ; Raleigh, who
never took kindly to a subordinate command,
deserted the expedition for some reason un
known ; the Swallow was employed by its crew
in piracy, and was ultimately sent back to Eng
land with the sick ; and the Delight, after the
failure of a three weeks' experiment in colonisa
tion at St. John's Harbour, struck on a rock,
and was lost with its men and cargo of mineral.
But these failures and disasters were destined to
give Gilbert his undying fame. Starting for
home with his two remaining ships, he chose to
sail in the Squirrel, which he had made much use
of to explore the coast. ' I will not,' he said,
' forsake my little company going homeward,
with whom I have passed so many storms and
perils.' They met foul weather and terrible
seas, ' breaking short and high, pyramid-wise.'
But Gilbert was undismayed. The last vivid
scene has been stamped for ever on the memory
of his countrymen by the narrative of Edward
Gilbert. Hayes. ' Monday, the ninth of September, in
58

THE VOYAGERS
the afternoon, the frigate was near cast away,
oppressed by waves, yet at that time recovered :
and giving forth signs of joy, the General, sit
ting abaft with a book in his hand, cried out unto
us in the Hind, so oft as we did approach within
hearing, We are as near to heaven by sea as by
land.' At twelve o'clock that night the Squir
rel's lights suddenly disappeared, and she was
seen no more.
Gilbert's last speech is his sufficient memor
ial : perhaps it was ringing in Robert Burton's
memory, when, writing of the remedies for
discontent, he paraphrased Gilbert's great
saying, and embroidered it after his own
fashion. ' So it is. Fortune favours some to
live at home to their fiirther punishment ; 'tis
want of judgement. All places are distant from
Heaven alike, the sun shines haply as warm in
one city as in another, and to a wise man there
is no difference of climes: friends are every
where to him that behaves himself well, and a
prophet is not esteemed in his own country.'
Gilbert, at least, is esteemed in his own country
as the pioneer of North West discovery, and the
59

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
first who set his hand to the building up of
Greater Britain.
Virginia. His work was taken up immediately by
Raleigh. ' After a night of storm so ruinous,'
the scene rises on a fair landscape and the inno
cent and gentle happiness of Arcadia. In the
spring of the year after Gilbert's disaster,
Raleigh despatched two small ships, under Philip
Amadas and Arthur Barlow, to prospect the
coast of America, from Florida northwards, with
a view to a permanent colony. They had a
prosperous voyage by way of the Canary
Islands, and reached the continent in the lati
tude of North Carolina. Here they landed on
the Islands of Wocoken and Roanoak, taking
possession of the land in the Queen's name and
establishing relations of the most friendly kind
with the natives. Their description of the
country, fertile and luxuriant to the water's
edge, and of their joyous reception by the
Indians, makes the dreams of pastoral poets
people seem true. ' We found the people,' they re-
of the pQj.|.^ c rnost gentle, loving, and faithful, void of
Age. all guile and treason, and such as live after the
60

THE VOYAGERS
manner of the Golden Age.' The King, or
chief, being absent, his brother, with a retinue,
received the visitors, and showed them every
possible courtesy. ' When we came to the shore
to him,' says Captain Barlow, ' with our wea
pons, he never moved from his place, nor any
of the other four, nor never mistrusted any harm
to be offered from us ; but, sitting still, he
beckoned us to come and sit by him, which we
performed ; and, being set, he made all signs of
joy and welcome, striking on his head and his
breast and afterwards on ours, to shew we were
all one, smiling and making shew the best he
could of love and familiarity.' ' He was very
just of his promise ' ; the narrator goes on, ' for
many times we delivered him merchandise upon
his word, but ever he came within the day and
performed his promise.' He loaded the voy
agers with gifts ; and his wife, who was equally
hospitable, tended them in her house. ' While Indian
we were at meat there came in at the gates two °^'^ ^^^'
or three men with their bows and arrows from
hunting, whom when we espied, we began to
look one towards another, and offered to reach
6i

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
our weapons : but as soon as she espied our
mistrust, she was very much moved, and caused
some of her men to run out, and take away their
bows and arrows and break them, and withal
beat the poor fellows out of the gate again.
When we departed in the evening and would
not tarry all night, she was very sorry, and gave
us into our boat our supper half -dressed, pots
and all, and brought us to our boat side, in
which we lay all night, removing the same a
pretty distance from the shore. She perceiving
our jealousy was much grieved, and sent divers
men and thirty women to sit all night on the
bank-side by us, and sent us into our boats fine
mats to cover us from the rain, using very many
words to intreat us to rest in their houses. But
because we were few men, and if we had mis
carried the voyage had been in very great
danger, we durst not adventure anything,
although there was no cause of doubt; for a
more kind and loving people there cannot be
found in the world, as far as we have hitherto
had trial.'
Who does not recognise, in this description
62

THE VOYAGERS
of native humanity and delicate courtesy, the
beginning of an oft-repeated drama, played to
its bitter end in Hispaniola, in North America,
and in many an island of the South Seas?
The report of the captains pleased Queen Eliza- The first
beth, who stood god-mother to the new colony, coloniL
naming it Virginia; and in 1585 Raleigh Virginia.
furnished a fleet of seven ships to go and take
effective possession. There was some ques
tion of trusting the command of the venture
to Sir Philip Sidney, who longed to escape
from the fetters of the Court ; but the Queen
would not relax her hold, and the choice fell
on Sir Richard Grenville, Raleigh's cousin, as
Admiral, with Ralph Lane as Governor of the
colony. Had Sidney gone, it is possible that
the whole course of the history of Virginia and
of North America might have been changed.
But Sidney was to die, a year later, ak Zutphen,
and that ever-memorable and heroic fire-eater.
Sir Richard Grenville, was to work his will on Grenville
the people of the Golden Age. He spent the ""'^ ^''"*'-
summer in exploring the islands, dragooning
the natives, and burning their crops and houses ;
63

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
on his way home with the fleet he fought and
captured a rich Spanish ship. His right work
was fighting, not civilising. Lane, who was
left in charge, spent his time in gold-seeking
and organising forced labour among the Indians.
Before a year was out they were in open rebel
lion, and the business of massacre began.
Thenceforward no help was to be had in sowing
Corn and catching fish ; and the colonists re
joiced when Drake, on his way back from his
famous West Indian exploits, lent them ships
to go home in. A fortnight after their depar
ture. Sir Richard Grenville turned up with three
ships, and put fifteen men in possession, who
were never seen again. Raleigh's last attempt
was made in 1587, with a hundred and fifty
Failure colonists, under Captain John White. White
Colony, himself returned to England the same summer,
and in the turmoil that followed was unable to
send ships to the relief of his colonists until
1590, when none of them could be found. A
few were naturalised among the Indians, and
when Virginia was at last planted, nearly twenty
years later, seven English were found alive. * It
64

THE VOYAGERS
is the sinfuUest thing in the world,' says Bacon,
' to forsake or destitute a plantation once in
forwardness : for besides the dishonour, it is
the guiltiness of blood of many commiserable
persons.' Perhaps he is glancing at Sir Walter
Raleigh, to whom, it cannot be denied, some
part of this guiltiness attaches. Raleigh was '
always impatient of the day of small things, and
when his colony languished, made over his
patent to a company of merchants, and turned
his attention to El Dorado, the latest comer in
the gorgeous pageant of his dreams of world-
empire. The miscarriage of the Virginian
attempt is the least magnificent of the failures
that make up the story of his life.
So the voices that had counselled discovery The long
and peaceful settlement were silenced, or were
caught up and went to swell the clamour of war.
For its first thirty years the reign of Elizabeth
was, in effect, one long preparation for the great
day. It is a time singularly barren, in the Eng
lish annals at least, of notable political events.
Events were what the Queen and her cautious
Ministers, Burghley and Walsingham, most
E 65

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
dreaded. Their business was to hold on to the
reins of power, to retard natural developments,
to refuse action, to disclaim responsibility, to
chasten the impulses of fervid patriots, and to
avoid the open hostility of rival powers. The
Government sat still, and deprecated all vigor
ous intentions, and waited. The Queen's fixed
policy, her single resource for many long years,
was to continue saying ' Peace, Peace,' when
there was no peace. Her subjects were not slow
The price to grasp the situation. They were free to serve
riotism. the Crown, but it must be at their own risk.
They might give battle to the enemy of their
country and their religion, but they must fight
in the character of pirates. If they won, the
Crown would gladly accept a share in the spoil ;
if they lost, they knew what doom to expect.
It is surely a high tribute to Elizabeth, and to
the trust and love she inspired in her subjects,
that they accepted these conditions without a
murmur. They knew that the Queen had no
care but the country, and that her courage was
without blemish. They were content to let her
work in her own way, so they might work in
66

THE VOYAGERS
theirs. A Prince, in the high political doctrine Tudorsover-
of Tudor England, has no friends, only servants ; eignty.
and owes no gratitude, only acceptance or
approval. When this doctrine was inherited,
along with other great things, by Stuart
pedantry from Tudor state-craft, it made clumsy
havoc of the happiness of a people, and tumbled
the Crown in the mire. But the hands that
fashioned it knew how to wield it for the safety
and glory of the nation. Towards the close of
her reign, when Elizabeth was able at last to
speak with kings in the gate, she spoke with the
voice of England.
The meaning and interest of English history, The
... . . . Privateers.
therefore, during this long period of incubation,
is to be found not in the doings of the Govern-
ment, but in the unauthorised, activities of the
people. The political history of a country is
commonly an affair of great dignity ; it deals
with the legitimate acts of the rightful govern
ment. But the great deeds of Elizabeth's
reign were most of them unlawfully begotten,
and were legitimated when they came of age.
The volunteer efforts of the nation gathered
67

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
yearly in strength and volume ; at last the
Queen threw off her mask of indifference, and
accepted the command. Until the time was
ripe, she held sedulously aloof. The body
politic was full of life, but the brain was careful
not to know what the hands were doing. It is
not what Burghley and Walsingham were writing,
but what Shakespeare and Jonson were saying,
that makes the greatness of the reign ; not what
the Treasurer of the Navy was commanded to do,
but what Drake and Hawkins did without wait
ing for the Royal command. The public acts
of the regularly constituted Government were
tame and few. But the Queen knew what was
going forward. The Catholic power of Spain,
overshadowing and threatening Europe, was
never out of her mind. She is sometimes
accused, on plausible evidence, of neglecting her
The Navy. Navy. 'In February 1559,' says an excellent
recent historian, ' she possessed twenty-two
effective ships of a hundred tons and upwards ;
in March 1603, twenty-nine; practically there
fore, she did little more than replace those worn
out by efflux of time, for only two were lost in
68

THE VOYAGERS
warfare.'^ But, as the same writer justly points
out, there was great plenty of pirates, — some
four hundred were known in 1563, — and, by a
merciful dispensation of Providence, they did
far more harm to foreign commerce than to
English. Twenty-nine ships is not a large
navy ; but when the Armada came, a hundred
and thirty vessels were waiting for it in the nar
row seas. The history of the Royal Navy under
Queen Elizabeth is as little adequate to express
the growth of national sea-power as is the
history of the Royal Academy under Queen
Victoria to express the progress of the nation in
the Fine Arts.
The main policy of the Queen was, at any The Policy of
cost, to prevent disunion among her subjects, Elizabeth.
and to win their firm allegiance. She foresaw
the dangers of internal religious disruption, and
succeeded in staving it off. Her strength at sea
depended on the loyalty of the irregulars ;
she kept in with the police, and did not fall out National Unity.
With the thieves. A wonderful good under-
1 M. Oppenheim, The Administration of the Royal Navy
j5og-i66o. (1896). 69

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
standing prevailed between the two parties.
When Drake came back in 1580, laden with
pillag^, from his voyage of circumnavigation,
he was nicknamed by the people ' The Master
Thief of the Unknown World.' His old
friend and chief, John Hawkins, was then the
official head of the Navy. ' The Queen,' says
Stow, ' not yet persuaded to accept and approve
his unknown purchase, paused a while, and
heard every opinion, which at that time were
many.' In the end she went aboard his ship at
Deptford, and knighted him. By this act, with
full knowledge of what she was doing, she cast
the die. Everywhere her over-ruling hand was
felt. If Burghley, and others of her statesmen,
had had their way, she would have broken with
France. ' For my own part,' wrote Lord
Howard of Effingham, in the very year of the
Armada, ' I have made of the French King, the
Scottish King, and the King of Spain, a Trinity
that I mean never to be saved by, and I would
others were of my opinion.' The Queen was
not of his opinion. She was a Unitarian in her
to France, enmity. It was a saying of hers ' Whensoever
70

Attitude

THE VOYAGERS
the last day of the Kingdom of France cometh,
it will undoubtedly be the eve of the destruction
of England.' The division of France would
have meant an accession of strength to Spain.
The French pirates and Huguenots had shewn
Englishmen the way to trouble Spain upon the
seas; and Elizabeth approved their work.
But the King of France, if he had lost control
of his realm, would have been driven into the
arms of Spain ; and Elizabeth lent him her sup
port. She isolated her enemy, and she united
her people. She understood a free nation, and
was worthy of the seamen who served her.
A more important thing than the actual num- The
r . . . . English
ber of ships in the Navy was its efficiency of Sea Power.
organisation, and this was greatly improved
during the Queen's reign. By the institution
of the Navy Board, in 1546, Henry
VIII had created the means of organisa
tion. The practice of piracy made for
the efficiency of the units. Long before an
armed conflict seemed probable, English ships
and English seamen were, as Mr. Corbett has
shown, far superior in warlike qualities to those
71

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
of Spain. The ships were smaller, better de
signed, quicker in handling ; and they could sail
nearer to the wind. The prime importance of
gunnery had been learned by the EngUsh, and
was to be taught by them to Spain. ' For the
new school,' says Mr. Corbett, ' the arm of the
sailor was his ship. Hitherto the ofi^ensive
force of a war-vessel had been measured mainly
by the number of boarders it could throw upon
the deck of an enemy, and guns had been valued
chiefly as a means of crippHng his power of
The ship eluding this form of attack. But now the ship
as a gun- . , . -iri
carriage, ''^itb its guns was itself the weapon, the captain
the eye, the crew the muscles that played it.
Already during Henry's last French war the
power that lay in the broadside had begun to be
seen by EngUsh seamen.' ^ Meantime the navi
gators of Spain had no thought of war. The
Pope had guaranteed to them their new posses
sions, and they took their ease on the sea.
Their great treasure-coffers were wafted lazily
to and from the Indies, unprotected save by a
few inferior guns. It was the enterprise of the
^ Drake and the Tudor Navy (1899), Vol. I. p. 137.
72

THE VOYAGERS
French pirates which first awakened them to a
sense of danger, and caused them to take pre
cautions. The galleons of the Indian Guard, a
squadron of twelve for the protection of trade,
were sent out to the Indies for the first time in
1568, the very year that Hawkins first brought
the Spaniards acquainted with English gunnery
in the affair of San Juan de Ulloa.
Sir John Hawkins, who more than any other John Hawkins.
single man, was responsible for the rise of the
war-spirit, came of a line of seamen. His
grandfather had served in King Henry VIII's
Navy. His father, William Hawkins, had been
the first, in 1530, to carry on trade with Brazil.
The voyage to Brazil was subsequently fre
quented, about 1540, by several wealthy mer
chants of Southampton. English traders were
active enough during the early part of the
century ; it was John Hawkins who first taught
them how arms might signally help the expan
sion of trade. He served his apprenticeship in trading
the usual voyages to the West African coast, and Voyages to
. 'the West
in 1562 launched on a bolder scheme. By this Indies.
73

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
time negroes were in great demand at His
paniola, and Hawkins was determined to supply
them. With the help of some city merchants,
he equipped three vessels, and sailed to Sierra
Leone, where, by force and purchase, he obtained
three hundred negroes ; then, with the help
of a Spanish pilot, he crossed the Atlantic, and
obtained ' reasonable utterance of his living
commodities ' in the ports of Hispaniola. He
gained in exchange an enormous quantity of
valuable merchandise ; some of it he took home
with him, some he sent to be disposed of at
Cadiz, where it was seized and confiscated.
Orders were at once despatched to the Indies
that no English vessel should be aUowed to
trade there.
Hawkins intended to trade there. In 1564
he equipped a fleet of five ships, among them the
Jesus of Lubeck, a ship of the Royal Navy, lent
him by the Queen. He collected his negroes
and proceeded with them, this time, to the
ports of the Spanish Main. Negro slaves were
much coveted ; and by a mixture of persuasion
and armed force he succeeded in disposing of
74

THE VOYAGERS
them all. He brought back to England a hand
some profit for those who had financed his
expedition.
His third voyage, begun in 1567, is a date J^^g'^^'^uan
in English history. It brought him into open de Ulloa.
conflict with the Spanish galleons; it proved ,
the weakness of the Spanish power; it settled
him in his Ufe-long enmity to Spain; and it
baptised with fire the greatest fighting sailor of
the age, Francis Drake. The father of Francis
was Edmund Drake, a Protestant seaman, who,
after performing a chaplain's duties in Edward
VI's Navy, took orders and was given a Vicar
age under Elizabeth. He had twelve sons;
' and as it pleased God to give most of them a
living on the water, so the greatest part of them
died at sea.' The eldest and most famous of
them had been conversant with the sea from
boyhood, and when his cousin, John Hawkins, Hawkinsand Drake.
was preparing this third expedition, he was en
trusted, at the age of twenty-two, with the com
mand of the Judith, a bark of fifty tons. The
Queen contributed two great ships, and did her
best to allay the suspicions of the Spanish
75

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
ambassador. Hawkins had more trouble than
formerly in laying hands on his negroes, and
much more trouble in disposing of them. The
West Indian ports were warned and closed
against him. At Rio de la Hacha Drake seized
a Spanish despatch-boat ; Hawkins took the
town by assault, and held it while he disposed
of his negroes to purchasers who came in secretly
by night. Carthagena was bombarded; and
trade was forced on many a lesser place. Thus,
' making their traffic with the Spaniards as they
might,' Hawkins and Drake found that the sea
son of hurricanes was near at hand. Lacking
other shelter, they resolved to take refuge in the
chief port of Mexico, San Juan de Ulloa.
Eliza- Hawkins, it is true, held that by ancient
free treaty and the law of nations the English had a
tra ers. j-jgj^j ^q trade in the Spanish dominions. But
the purpose of his expedition had been labori
ously concealed from the Spanish Ambassador,
and it had assumed a piratical complexion even
on the coast of Africa, where several Portuguese
slave-ships were seized and plundered. There
is all the more reason, therefore, to admire the
76

THE VOYAGERS
cool assurance of the English captains. They
sailed into the harbour of San Juan de Ulloa,
and anchored inside the island which protected
the roadstead. Over against them, on the
landward side, was a Spanish treasure-fleet.
How Hawkins would have dealt with this does
not appear. How Drake would have dealt with
it, had he been in command, is fairly certain.
The question did not arise. On the morning
after the arrival of Hawkins there appeared in
the offing thirteen Spanish ships, escorting Don
Martin Enriquez, the new Viceroy of Mexico.
Hawkins had guns mounted on the island, and
was well able to hold the harbour. But he feared
the wrath of the Queen, and would not take
the responsibility of unprovoked war. So, after
mutual defiances, the English and the Spaniards
treated. It was agreed that the two fleets should
be amicably moored side by side ; the island to
remain in possession of the English. To the
Spanish commanders Hawkins and his company The
, , . , , treachery
were no better than corsairs, and a treacherous ofthe
plot against them was put in action. While the Sp*°*^'^'^-
crews were entertaining each other, the signal was
77

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
given, the English ashore were murdered, the
guns on the island seized, and the English ves
sels boarded. The Jesus of Lubeck was taken.
Only by extraordinary promptitude and heroic
valour were the Minion, which was also a
Queen's ship, and the Judith drawn clear of the
entanglement, leaving the three other ships to
their fate. A terrific action followed, at close
quarters, and the damage inflicted by the Eng
lish gunners on the great ships of Spain was so
severe that when at last the two English vessels
got out of the haven, they were not further
molested, though for two days they took shelter
close to the port. On the first day of their
Sufferings voyage home they were separated ; Hawkins,
kins' men. with two hundred men on board the Minion,
was unable to provide for so large a company,
and agreed to the proposal of a hundred of them,
who volunteered to be set on shore in the Bay
of Mexico, to shift for themselves. The
miseries and persecution that these men suf
fered at the hands of the Indians and the
Inquisition were narrated, years later, by the few
survivors, and fanned the flame of EngUsh
78

THE VOYAGERS
hatred for Spain. When Drake and Hawkins
reached home, with their tale of Spanish trea
chery, ' military and sea-faring men,' says
Camden, ' all over England fretted, and desired
war with Spain. . . . But the Queen shut her
ears against them.'
The Queen was not ready to face the great Sl"se» , ,
_ ^ , _ . ^ ^ Elizabeth's
Catholic coalition in open warfare. She was difficulties.
struggling in the meshes of conspiracy. While
Hawkins was selling his negroes in the Indies,
Ridolfi was plotting in London ; the Queen of
Scots had arrived in England, to become a centre
of disaffection ; Alva Was inaugurating his
reign of terror in the Netherlands ; and the
Guises were putting in operation their scheme
for extirpating the Huguenots in France. The
Queen did what she could. She detained the
treasure destined for Alva, which, conveyed in
five ships from Spain, had been driven by French
pirates into English ports ; and she sent money
and munitions of war to the Huguenots. This
policy of hers gave a broad hint to her subjects.
There was to be no war ; but short of war, acts
of hostility and reprisal were the order of the
79

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
day. When the efforts of the King of Spain
and Pope Pius V to stir up rebeUion against
Elizabeth became known to the maritime people
of England, ' incredible it is,' says Camden
again, ' with how great alacrity they put to sea,
and how readily they exercised piracy against
the Spaniards.'
Hawkins was to take no further part, for the
present, in these forays. He was needed for
defence at home. But, as the Portuguese
chronicler justly remarks, ' there was a certain
Francis Englishman, called Francis Drake.' At San
Drake. Juan de Ulloa Drake had learned his lesson.
The Spaniards were never to be trusted ; ex
treme measures, such as Hawkins had shrunk
from, were in the end the safest ; a well-fur
nished English ship could go anywhere in the
Spanish seas. For the next twenty years he put
the lesson into practice, waxing bolder and
bolder by success. When precautions were
taken against the repetition of his exploits, he
made precautions foolish by rising from height
to height of daring, until the very wind of his
name cleared the seas before him.
80

THE VOYAGERS
In 1570, the year after his return in the His
, Exploits
Judith, Drake was back on the coast or the on the
Spanish Main, where he robbed divers barks of ^^^^
their merchandise. In the foUowing year he cut
out a Spanish ship of a hundred and eighty tons
from the harbour of Carthagena. To provide
himself with a convenient retreat, he established
a base in the Gulf of Darien, a natural harbour,
far from any Spanish settlement. Hither he
•came in 1572 with two ships, the larger only
¦seventy tons, and with seventy-three men. He
entered into friendly relations with the Maroons,
or hiU-tribes descended from escaped negroes,
who shared his hatred of Spain. With his
diminutive force he surprised the city of
Nombre de Dios, and, if he had not been
wounded, would probably have emptied its
treasure-house. He planned the capture and
Back of Carthagena itself; then, finding that
watch was kept for him at all the Spanish ports,
he changed his plans, and transferred his opera
tions from sea to land. The yearly produce of The
, . - 1 ,./- Peruvian
the mines or Peru was wont to be brought fifty treasure.
miles overland by mule-trains from Panama to
F 81

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
Nombre de Dios, and thence shipped to Spain.
' By the abundant -treasure of that country,*
wrote Sir Walter Raleigh, ' the Spanish King
vexeth all the Princes of Europe, and is become
in a few years from a poor King of Castile the
greatest monarch of this part of the world.' It
was Drake's purpose to surprise and capture the
treasure as it crossed the isthmus. He made
his first attempt on the Panama side with eigh
teen men, all that were available of his original
company; but by an accident the mule-trains
were alarmed and the attempt failed. Nothing
disheartened, he joined hands with a Huguenot
privateer and, aided by Maroon scouts, suc
ceeded, near the very gates of Nombre de Dios,
in waylaying and rifling the convoy. In order
to fit out pinnaces for river-work he had dis
mantled his ships; his homeward voyage was
made in new Spanish frigates, of the latest
A year's design, captured by his pinnaces. During his
abode in these parts he had disorganised the
whole coasting trade of the Spanish Main; he
had taken the spoils of many vessels, had boldly
entered more than one town, had diverted the
82

THE VOYAGERS
steady flow of the Peruvian gold, and, as an
earnest of what was yet to come, had seen the
Pacific Ocean and vowed that with the help of
God he would sail on that sea in an English ship.
He arrived in Plymouth, after an absence of
about fifteen months, in August, 1573.
It is to be regretted that these early exploits Hakluyt
of Drake are barely recorded in Hakluyt's com- Drake.
pilation, and rest on later authority, '^ eked out
with Spanish State papers. Hakluyt, who was
willing enough to memorise deeds of war, shows
a certain tenderness of conscience with regard to
sheer piracy. He was bound, moreover, to pay
heed to the possible international bearings of
his publication. In his 1589 preface To the
Favourable Reader he apologises for his omis
sion of the Voyage of Circumnavigation, and
explains it on the ground that a collection of
Drake's voyages was being made by another
hand. He speaks somewhat slightingly of
Drake's great voyage, and offers no excuse for
1 Sir Francis Drake Revived . . . by Philip Nichols, Preacher.
(1626). 83

/

ments.

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
omitting the raids on the Spanish Main. Yet
Drake's the greatness of Drake is perhaps best seen in
achieve- these early buccaneerings. Time and again he
is within an ace of irreparable failure ; time and
again his incredible quickness of resource uses
the material of his broken plans for a new and
startling success. His spirits are at their highest
when things seem most hopeless. His decisions
are taken and his blows delivered like lightning.
He makes a fine art of surprise, and escapes
from difficulties by the unguarded way, the way
of the impossible. A single purpose animates
all his exploits, and the chart of his movements
is like a cord laced and knotted round the throat
of the Spanish monarchy. Withal he is an adept
at dealing with men, French Protestants, Eng
lish adventurers, Negro Maroons, or Spanish
emissaries ; and carries himself in the pirate's
profession with a courtesy, magnanimity, and
unfailing humanity that give to his story the
glamour of romance. Like Napoleon's ItaUan
campaign, the achievements of Drake on the
Spanish Main show a master at work, unbur
dened and unfettered as yet by responsibility
84

THE VOYAGERS
and reputation, adapting himself solely to his
material, and inventing at every stroke.
Drake's object was to drive England into TheVoyage of
war. The object of the Government was to Circum-
keep a free hand. For some years he was hin- "^^'^^ '°°'
dered from further expeditions, and work was
found for him in Ireland. But the Queen had
a soft corner in her heart for him, and when the
whirligig of time once more cast into the shade
the hope of a peacefiil understanding with Spain,
she offered him secret encouragement. In the
autumn of 1577 he started on the greatest of
his voyages in the Pelican, of a hundred tons, •
(afterwards re-named the Golden Hind), with
the Elizabeth, two lesser ships, and a pinnace,
carrying among them a company of about a
hundred and fifty men. His purpose, as he ex
plained to the Queen, was to sail into the Pacific,
and raid the Spanish possessions from the West.
There was no word, at the outset, of sailing
round the world. It is more likely that he
intended to circumnavigate America, and to
return by the North West passage, which, earlier
in the same year, Frobisher had gone for the
85

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
second time to seek. But whatever his plan,
Drake was no longer the obscure buccaneer.
He kept the state of a King ; was served on
silver plate stamped with his own arms, and was
attended by musicians and painters. There
dined with him at table nine or ten gentlemen
of good family, who were in training for similar
adventures, and he offered them delicacies, the
gift of Queen Elizabeth.
Trouble The presence of these gentlemen was a chief
gentlemen cause of trouble on the outward voyage. If we
^ ^^"" are to believe one of them, there were faUings
turers. ' °
out and quarrels, and no one was certain whom
to obey, because there were many who took upon
them to be masters. The Elizabethan gentle
man adventurer was the ruin of many an expedi
tion on which he embarked; he was full of
courage and initiative, but headstrong, giddy,
and insubordinate. And this was not the worst.
By the time the ships had made the coast of
Brazil, taking on the way such booty as they fell
across, Drake found cause to suspect that treason
was at work, that an attempt was being made to
induce some of the crew to mutiny ; perhaps to
86

THE VOYAGERS
become pirates on their own account. His sus
picions feU on Thomas Doughty, a gentleman Thomas
of good parts, whom he had met in Ireland, and executed.
to whom he had given a place of trust and
honour in his enterprise. The rights and
wrongs of this dark business are beyond our
recovery. Drake believed, not without grounds,
that Doughty had betrayed his plans to Burgh
ley before starting, and was doing what in him
lay to wreck the success of the voyage.
Doughty, for his part, believed that Drake,
being embarked on piracy, could claim no ulti
mate legal authority over his followers. At
Port St. Julian, where Magellan, almost sixty
years before, had hanged one of his captains.
Doughty was tried by jury and condemned to
death ; and Drake, after receiving the sacra
ment with the prisoner, and dining with him by
way of farewell, executed the sentence with his
own hand. The speech that he made, a few
weeks thereafter, still glows, in the imperfect
report which has come down to us, with the
passion of that tragedy. When the men were
assembled by command in a tent on shore,
87

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
Master Fletcher, the chaplain, offered himself
Drake's to make a sermon. ' Nay, soft, Master Flet
cher,' quoth he, ' I must preach this day myself,
although I have smaU skiU in preaching. WeU,
be all the company here, yea or not?' Answer
was made that they were all there. Then he
commanded every ship's company to stand
severally together, which was also done. Then
he said, ' My masters, I am a very bad orator,
for my bringing up hath not been in learning,
but what so I shaU here speak, let any man take
notice of what I shaU say, and let him write it
down if he list, for I will speak nothing but I
wiU answer it in England, yea, and before her
Majesty, and I have it here already set down.
Thus it is, my masters, that we are very far from
our country and friends, we are compassed in on
every side with our enemies, wherefore we are
not to make small reckoning of a man, for we
cannot have a man if we would give for him ten
thousand pounds. Wherefore we must have
these mutinies and discords that are grown
amongst us redressed, for by the life of God it
doth even take my wits from me to think of it ;
88

THE VOYAGERS
here is such controversy between the sailors and
the gentlemen, and such stomaching between
the gentlemen and sailors, that it doth even
make me mad to hear it. But, my masters, I The right
• 1 <- <- T doctrine of
must have it left ; for I must have the gentlemen the Navy.
to hale and draw with the mariner, and the
mariner with the gentlemen. What, let us show
ourselves aU to be of a company, and let us not
give occasion to the enemy to rejoice at our
decay and overthrow. I would know him that
would refuse to set his hand to a rope, — but I
know there is not any such here ; and as gentle
men are very necessary for government's sake in
the voyage so have I shipped them for that, and
for some farther intent, and yet though I know
sailors to be the most envious people of the
world, and so unruly without government, yet
may not I be without them. Also, if there be
any here wiUing to return home, let me under
stand of them, and here is the Marigold, a ship
that I can very well spare ; I will furnish her to
such as will return with the most credit I can
give them, either by my letters or any way else ;
but let them take heed that they go homeward,
89

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
for if I find them in my way I will surely sink
them ; therefore you shall have time to consider
hereof until to-morrow; for, by my troth, I
must needs be plain with you, I have taken that
in hand that I know not in the world how to go
through withal ; it passeth my capacity ; it hath
even bereaved me of my wits to think on it.'
None of the company was for returning.
Then he asked them whether they had any claim
against him for wages, or would trust to his good
wiU. They declared they would trust to his
good wiU. Then he formally discharged from
their command all the captains of the ships.
Two of them asked him what moved him so to
displace them. He asked whether they cotJd
give any reason why he should not do so. The
explanation that he added of the origin of his
The voyage is of the deepest interest. The Queen,
Drake's he said, was a party to it ; and he showed a biU
f°oTthe°° °^ ^ thousand crowns which she had given
"gueen. towards the expenses. Walsingham was in the
secret ; but she had strictly commanded that the
Lord Treasurer, Burghley, to whom Doughty
had revealed the plan of the voyage, should have
90

THE VOYAGERS
no knowledge of it ; and she had sworn by her
crown that if any one in her realm should send
word to the King of Spain, they should lose
their heads. ' And now, my masters,' quoth he,
' let us consider what we have done. We have
now set together by the ears three mighty
princes, as first her Majesty, the Kings of Spain
and Portugal, and if this voyage shall not have
good success, we shall not only be a scorning, or
a reproachful scoffing-stock, unto our enemies,
but also a great blot to our whole country for
ever ; and what triumph will it be to Spain
and Portugal : and never again the like wiU be
attempted.' So, after restoring the captains to
their command, and promising the men that he
would pay their wages though he should have
to seU his shirt, he concluded : ' For,' quoth he,
' I have good reason to promise, and am best
able to perform it, for I have somewhat of mine
own in England, and, besides that, I have as
much adventure in this voyage as three of the
"best whatsoever ; and if it so be that I never
come home, yet will her Majesty pay every man
his wages, whom indeed you and we all come
91

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
to serve ; and for to say you come to serve me,
I wiU not give you thanks, for it is only her
Majesty that you serve, and this voyage is only
her setting forth.' ^ So, wiUing them aU to be
friends one with another, he sent them to their
business.
His bold This speech deserves to be set out in frill in
policy, any story of the English Voyages. It is the
speech of a man not in love with speech, whose
thoughts are wrung from him at a crisis; it
throws a vivid light on the situation, and on
Drake's manner of dealing with it. The
troubles with his men, and the treachery of
Doughty, had brought him to a hard pass. He
must either admit himself a baffled man, or
must take the enormous risk of angering the
Queen by declaring openly his fiiU commission
from her. It is highly unlikely that he had
any such commission in writing. What he
counted on rather was her approval, and support
against the Lord Treasurer's party, if he should
bring his voyage to a successful issue. Accord-
1 Narrative of John Cooke, in The World Encompassed
(Hakluyt Society, 1854). 92

THE VOYAGERS
ing to his wont, he chose the bolder way ; and
from this time forward the failure of his expedi
tion would have meant his doom, whether from
England or from Spain.
The dreaded Straits of MageUan were passed ^^^•'^
in safety, and Drake was in the Pacific Ocean. South.
Here a terrific storm, or series of storms, fell
upon the ships. The Marigold was over
whelmed and lost ; and the Elizabeth, separated
from the Golden Hind, waited for a time at the
mouth of the Straits and then returned to Eng
land. The two other vessels had been broken
up or cast off on the coast of Brazil. Drake's
ship was left alone to finish the voyage. The
storm brought him the discovery that Tierra del
Fuego was not a continent, as had been sup
posed, but that there was open sea to the south
of it. And now his reward was near. The The
Pacific had been treated by the Spaniards as if the Pacific.
it were an inland lake ; their route to it lay over
land ; and the ships they sailed on it were built
on its own shores. No enemy had as yet entered
it by water ; the ports were feebly guarded ;
and the crews of the merchant ships were very
93

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
small. The Golden Hind was well-manned, and
bristled with guns ; the Pacific fell a prey to
her. Her voyage northwards along the coast
was a carnival of plunder, the richest prize of aU
being the Cacafuego,s. treasure-ship bound from
Guayaquil to Panama. Drake's ship was now
heavy with precious metals, and the only ques
tion was how to get her home. He sailed north
ward, almost to Vancouver's Island, but was
deterred by the cold and fogs from proceeding
further. Turning to the south again, along the
coast of California, he put into a bay near San
Francisco, repaired his ship, and was solemnly
crowned by the Indians as their king. He
by the named the district ' New Albion,' and nailed a
Indians. . ,...,,
Sixpence to a great post, leaving it, with the
Queen's name inscribed above it, for the Indians
to worship. Then he struck across the Pacific,
to the Philippines and Moluccas, where he
entered into alliance, amity, and traffic with the
princes of those islands ; and so back by the
Cape of Good Hope. In September, 1580,
after an absence of almost three years, the Golden
Hind sailed into Plymouth Sound. Drake's
94

Drake crowned

THE VOYAGERS
first question, before he cast anchor, was whether
the Queen was alive and weU.
The Queen was alive and well, and his His
reception!
anxieties were soon ended. ' She received him by the
graciously,' says Camden, ' and laid up the kJ"^^"-
treasure he brought by way of sequestration,
that it might be forthcoming if the Spaniards
should demand it.' She was by this time stor
ing a good deal of treasure on trust for the
Spaniard. Drake was allowed to retain a rich
share of the booty for himself and his men.
The thing that troubled him most, we are told,
was 'that some of the chief men at Court
refiised to accept the gold which he offered
them, as gotten by piracy. Nevertheless the
common sort of people admired and highly
commended him, as judging it no less honour
able to have enlarged the bounds of the Eng
lish name and glory than of their Empire.'
The completion of Drake's voyage round The mid-
the world marks the mid-point of his career. Drake's
For fourteen years he had forced his policy on '=*'^^^''-
the government; and now he had gained his
point. There was to be no further question,
95

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
during his life-time, of conciliating the good
graces of Spain. By the failure of the royal
line of Portugal, King Philip had acquired,
soon after Drake's return, a new vast empire,
and had more than doubled his naval power.
Drake was now a knight, and a trusted naval
counseUor. For fourteen years more he was to
work in the open for the overthrow of Spain.
"T^Vt T A'
e naies y-j^^ change is well seen in the equipment of his
Voyage of = n. r
^585- expedition of 1585. In place of the two or
three smaU ships which had hitherto sufficed
him, he sailed from Plymouth in command of
twenty-one ships and eight pinnaces, with a
force of more than two thousand men. Fro
bisher was Vice-Admiral, and their destination
was the West Indies, there to waylay the Plate
fleet laden with the wealth of Peru.
After an armed demonstration off the harbours
of Portugal the fleet reached Santiago, which
was taken and sacked, but yielded little trea-
Defects gure. The same disappointment awaited them
ofthe ^^
buc- in the West Indies. Despising smaller game,
^ystem'"^ they took and held for a time San Domingo,
the oldest town in the Indies, and Carthagena,
96

THE VOYAGERS
the capital of the Spanish Main. The moral
effect of these exploits was no doubt great, but the
material profit was less than had been expected,
and Drake, in order to indemnify the Queen
and the other promoters of the expedition, ex
acted a large ransom in either case for the
evacuation of the town. It had been a part of
the original plan to seize Havana, but losses
from sickness and war caused the expedition
to turn homeward, not without a fair share of
plunder. St. Augustine, on the coast of Florida,
was looted on the way, and the miserable colo
nists of Virginia were visited and taken home.
It is difficult and presumptuous to criticise
Drake's plan of action. In his later expedi
tions he was hampered by the instructions of
the Government and the opinions of others, as
he had not been hampered earlier. He had
proposed in 1581 to seize Terceira, and make Lack ofa
it a naval base for harassing and plundering ^^^^^l^^s^-
Spanish commerce. Many of his critics held,
and some still hold, that he should have kept
possession of Carthagena with the same object.
But the profit-sharing system of naval enter-
G 97

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
prise made a policy of this kind almost impos
sible ; and to the end of his life the buccaneer
in Drake held the upper hand of the statesman.
If the English had established and fortified
themselves on the main trading route of the
Spanish Indies the story of the Armada might
have remained unwritten.
The It is unnecessary to touch, except very
of King briefly, on what followed. The founding of
, ' T ' Colonies and the exploration of unknown lands
had given way to the necessities of war; and
the history of Drake and Hawkins and Fro
bisher henceforward is a part of the history of
England. In 1587 Drake was despatched with
another fleet to make havoc of King PhiUp's
preparations for invading England. It is from
the realm of the Indies, says an Elizabethan
sailor, that King Philip ' has feathers to fly to
the top of his high desires.' Drake had singed
his feathers ; he was now to singe his beard.
He took and burned the shipping in Cadiz
harbour, seized Cape St. Vincent, threatened
The Lisbon, and struck terror into the heart of the
Armada. Spanish commanders. When the great Armada
98

THE VOYAGERS
at last set sail, Drake, if he had had his way,
would have met and fought with it at the
mouths of the Spanish harbours. But he was
controUed by men who feared the boldness of
his strategy, and the Spanish preparations were
permitted to proceed in quietness. Let the
rest be told in the grand style which reached its
maturity in English at this very time, as if it
had been designed for the deeds it was to cele
brate. 'This great preparation,' says Bacon,
' passed away like a dream. The Invincible
Navy neither took any one barque of ours,
neither yet once offered to land ; but after they
had been weU beaten and chased, made a per
ambulation about the Northern seas, ennobling
many coasts with wrecks of mighty ships ; and
so returned home with greater derision than
they set forth with expectation.'
The repulse of the Armada gave Drake no Expedition
,-r,, ... 1 . , to Lisbon.
rest. The next year, in joint command with
Sir John Norris, he led the expedition to
Lisbon. They failed in their main purpose;
their losses were heavy, and their booty small.
' But the truth is,' says Camden, ' England
99

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
reaped this benefit by the voyage, that from
this time forward she feared nothing from
Spain, but took greater heart and courage
against the Spaniards.' Drake fell into dis
grace, and was restored to favour only to share
The last with Sir John Hawkins the command of
V OVcl&G of
Drake and another expedition, their second and last. In
Hawkins, i^^^^ twenty-eight years after their fateful
adventure in slave-trading, they put out again
for the Indies with a fleet of twenty-seven sail,
and strong land-forces. Sir John Hawkins was
now over seventy years of age, burdened and
saddened by the long cares of administration;
and the differences of temper and character
between the two admirals had not been lessened
by time. Thomas Maynarde, who served in
the expedition, has left a vivid account of these
differences.-^ Of Drake he says, — ' It may be
his self-wiUed and peremptory command was
doubted, and that caused her Majesty, as should
seem, to join Sir John Hawkins in equal com
mission, — ra man old and wary, entering into
^Sir Francis Drake, His Voyage, IS95 > h Thomas May
narde. (Hakluyt Society, 1849.)

THE VOYAGERS
matters with so leaden a foot, that the other's
meat would be eaten before his spit could come
to the fire : men of so different natures and
dispositions, that what the one desired the
other would commonly oppose against ; and
though their wary carriages sequestered it
from meaner wits, yet was it apparently seen to
better judgments before our going from Ply
mouth, that whom the one loved, the other
smally esteemed.' When they reached the
Indies they found the Spaniards forewarned
and forearmed against them ; and their voyage
was an unbroken tale of ill-success. The Its failure.
Spanish sea-power was enormously increased,
the towns guarded, the payment of ransom for
bidden, and the treasure concealed, so that even
if Drake had been permitted to foUow his old
methods, it is doubtful whether he could have
averted failure. Maynarde, in conversation,
asked him where were the rich places he had
promised to his foUowers. ' He answered me
with grief, protesting that he was as ignorant
of the Indies as myself, and that he never The
thought any place could be so changed, as it Pandise.

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
were from a delicious and pleasant arbour into
a waste and desert wilderness; besides the
variableness of the wind and weather, so stormy
and blustrous as he never saw it before. But
he most wondered that since his coming out of
England he never saw sail worth giving chase
unto ; yet, in the greatness of his mind he
would, in the end, conclude with these words:
" It matters not, man ; God hath many things
in store for us ; and I know many means to do
her Majesty good service, and to make us rich ;
for we must have gold before we see England" ;
when, good gentleman, (in my conceit), it fared
with him as with some careless living man who
prodigally consumes his time, fondly persuad
ing himself that the nurse that fed him in his
childhood will likewise nourish him in his old
age, and, finding the dug dried and withered,
enforced then to behold his foUy, tormented in
mind, dieth with a starved body.' To redeem
his favour with the Queen, Drake had thought
to repeat some of his brilliant early exploits.
No good thing can be repeated ; and this last
voyage saw a dramatic reversal of his most for-

THE VOYAGERS
timate achievements. His forces were repulsed
at Las Palmas and at Puerto Rico. Here Death of
Hawkins sickened and died. They sacked and
burned Rio de la Hacha, seized Nombre de
Dios, and thence sent forward a land expedition
to surprise and plunder Panama. The isthmus
was held in force by Spain, and the English
were beaten off. Drake's chief hopes were now
shattered. ' Since our return from Panama,'
says Maynarde, ' he never carried mirth nor
joy in his face ; yet no man he loved must con
jecture that he took thought thereof.' He did
what he had seldom done while his star pre
vailed ; he asked the advice of his officers. It
was resolved to njake an attempt on Granada,
Leon, and the towns on the Lake of Nicaragua.
The course was laid for St. John's Harbour,
but the wind was steadily against them ; sick
ness broke out in the crews, and after some
weeks' struggle, Drake 'resolved to depart, and
to take the wind as God sent it.' He had been
attacked by the prevalent sickness ; on the
morning of the 28th of January, 1596, he died. Death of
and was buried in the sea off Puerto Bello.
103

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
' He was as famous,' says Stow, ' in Europe
and America, as Tamburlaine in Asia and
Africa.' When the news of his death was
brought, there was joy in Spain, and the people
felt that the heavy hand of God had at last been
lifted from them.
The three great Vice-Admirals who defeated
the Armada were now dead ; for Frobisher had
died in 1594, of a wound received at the work
of dislodging the Spaniards from the coast of
Other Brittany. The Lord High Admiral, Lord
Charles Howard of Effingham, under whose
command they had all served, led a great arma
ment to Cadiz in the summer of 1596, seized
the city, and inflicted enormous damage on the
shipping in the harbour. He was created Earl
of Nottingham, and lived on to an advanced.
old age. And how many more are there not,,
whose names are less famous, and whose deeds,.
recorded or unrecorded by Hakluyt, served to
raise the name of their country.? John Oxen-
ham, Drake's follower, the first Englishman who
launched a boat on the Pacific ; Captain Thomas
Fenner, one of three brothers, each of whom
104

THE VOYAGERS
commanded a ship against the Armada ; Cap
tain Edward Fenton, who explored the Arctic
Seas, and harried the ships of Spain ; George
Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, who made ten
voyages in twelve years ; Sir William Monson,
author of the Naval Tracts, who began as a
common sailor on board a merchantman, and
rose to be an Admiral ; or James Lancaster,
who in the years immediately after Hakluyt's
publication opened a way for English commerce
to the East ; — aU these deserve celebration.
And the sailors who manned the ships, who ate The
putrid penguins and drank bilge-water on bethan
strange seas, and who often, when their service Planners.
to their country was rendered, pined in foreign
prisons, or died by hundreds of starvation and
cold and plague in the streets of the sea-ports
of England, — they most pass without other
memorial than the saying of the Lord High
Admiral, ' God send us to see such a company
together again, when need is.' They were a
cheerful race ; and, as Drake says, when they
were blessed with some little comfortable dew
of heaven, some crowns, or some reasonable
105

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
booties, they would take good heart again.
The although they were half dead. Last of all, and
Gentlemen , , , . - . ,
Adven- among the most characteristic figures of the
turers. Elizabethan age, there are the gentlemen
1 adventurers, the ambitious courtiers like Essex,
the single-minded warriors, like Grenville, the
spendthrift sons of fortune, like Cavendish, to
whom the world was their oyster, which with
their sword they must open. Never was there
a set of men worse adapted for the sober busi
ness of establishing a colony, or governing a
subject race ; yet they too were servants of the
Empire, and cleared a way for those who came
after them. Long generations of training and
many hard blows were needed before the Bri
tish race learned those lessons of justice and
tact and tolerance which every Civil Servant in
India must have by heart, now that the round
world is mapped and settled. Whatever their
faults, these Elizabethans bear the stamp of the
heroic age; they lived in an illimitable world,
and had nothing about them of tame civility.
They are arrogant, excessive, indomitable, in
quisitive, madmen in resolution, and children at
io6

THE VOYAGERS
heart. The great fight of the Revenge was
undertaken against all the rules of orthodox
naval tactics, and in defiance of common sense.
Its hero, says Linschoten, ' was of so hard a Sir
, . , , . , , Richard
complexion, that as he continued among the Grenville.
Spanish captains, while they were at dinner or
supper with him, he would carouse three or
four glasses of wine, and in a bravery take the
glasses between his teeth and crash them in
pieces and swallow them down, so that often
times the blood ran out of his mouth.' In his
own age his action off the Azores was recog
nised as something out of the beaten path of
history, and to be matched only by poetry in
its strongest and highest flights. ' In the year
1 59 1,' says Bacon, 'was that memorable fight The Last
of an English ship called the Revenge, under of^j^g
the command of Sir Richard GrenviUe, memor- Revenge.
able (I say) even beyond credit and to the
height of some heroical fable : and though it
were a defeat, yet it exceeded a victory ; being
like the act of Samson, that killed more men at
his death, than he had done in the time of aU
his life. This ship, for the space of fifteen
107

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
hours, sate like a stag amongst hounds at bay,
and was sieged and fought with, in turn, by
fifteen great ships of Spain, part of a navy of
fifty-five ships in all ; the rest like abettors
looking on afar off. And amongst the. fifteen
ships that fought, the great San Philippo was
one ; a ship of fifteen hundred ton, prince of
the twelve Sea-Apostles, which was right glad
when she was shifted off from the Revenge.
This brave ship the Revenge, being manned
only with two hundred soldiers and marines
whereof eighty lay sick, yet nevertheless after
a fight maintained (as was said) of fifteen hours,.
and two ships of the enemy sunk by her side,
besides many more torn and battered and great
. slaughter of men, never came to be entered, but
was taken by composition ; the enemies them
selves having in admiration the virtue of the
commander and the whole tragedy of that
ship.'
Thomas Thomas Cavendish, who served as a volun
teer under Sir Richard Grenville in the Vir
ginian Expedition of 1585, is perhaps the most
typical of the adventurous gallants of the time-
108

THE VOYAGERS
Like Bassanio, in The Merchant of Venice, he
had disabled his estate
By something showing a more swelling port
Than his faint means would grant continuance ;
and in 1586, encouraged by the success of
Drake, he furnished three ships to go in quest
of the golden fleece. His voyage round the
world was completed in a shorter time than
Drake's; he returned in September, 1588, soon
after the repulse of the Armada. The nature
of his doings by the way is well set forth by
himself in a letter to Lord Hunsdon : — ' I His
methods.
navigated along the coast of Chili, Peru, and
Nueva Espana, where I made great spoils : I
burnt and sunk nineteen sails of ships, small
and great. All the villages and towns that ever
I landed at, I burned and spoiled ; and had I not
been discovered upon the coast, I had taken
great quantity of treasure.' This account is not
complete. He also slaughtered the Indians,
devastated crops and orchards, and wherever
he could lay hands on the symbols of ancient
Christianity, crosses and images, he destroyed
109

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
them with great zest. His violent and petulant
temper breaks forth in his last melancholy
letter, written when his second voyage, under
taken in 1 591, had failed, and he was a broken
man. His crew are ' hell-hounds ' ; and John
Davis, whose ship had been separated from the
others by storms, is ' that villain, that hath been
the death of me and the decay of this whole
action.' Boastful and brave, careless of others,
unflinching, unrelenting, unforgiving, Caven
dish has yet that intensity and wholeness of
pixrpose which is the pith and marrow of great
deeds. The greatest adventurer of them all lived on
into the next reign, to be a monument of the
age that was irrecoverably past, and, by his
death, to cast a stain (if anything so dark and
small can take a stain) on the character of James
Sir Walter I. Of aU the notable Elizabethans, Sir Walter
Raleigh is perhaps the most difficult to under
stand. He has the insolent imagination of
Marlowe, and the profound melancholy of
Donne. 'The mind of man,' he says, in his
History of the World, 'hath two ports, the

THE VOYAGERS
one always frequented by the entrance of mani
fold vanities ; the other desolate and over
grown with grass, by which enter our charit
able thoughts and divine contemplations.'
Both gates of his mind stood open ; worldly
hopes and braggart ambitions crowd and jostle
through one entrance, but the monitors of death
and eternity meet them, and whisper them in
the ear. He schemes elaborately, even while he
believes that 'the long day of mankind draweth
fest towards an evening, and the world's tragedy
and time are near at an end.' The irony of
human affairs possesses his contemplation ; his
thoughts are high and fanciful ; he condescends
to action, and fails, as all those fail whose work
is done stooping. He is proud, sardonic, and
aloof. His own boast is true — ' There is none
on the face of the earth that I would be fastened
unto.' He takes part with others in no move
ment, and stakes little or nothing on the
strength of human ties. The business of men
on this earth seems trivial and insignificant
against the vast desert of eternity ; and great
deeds alone are worth doing, for they, when
III

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
they perish, add pomp to the triumph of death
and oblivion.
His pride. His political schemes are grandiose and far-
reaching : the mere unfolding of them dwarfs
the exploits of more practical men. Has
Cavendish gained fame by plundering the
Spaniard .i* 'It became not the former fortune,'
says Raleigh, ' in which I once lived, to go jour
neys of picory ; it had sorted ill with the offices
of honour, which by her Majesty's grace I
hold this day in England, to run from cape to
cape, and from place to place, for the pillage of
ordinary prizes.' Has Drake earned praise and
reward for his assaults on the Indies .'' ' The
King of Spain,' says Raleigh, ' is not so
impoverished by taking three or four port
towns in America as we suppose, neither are
the riches of Peru, or Nueva Espatia, so left by
the sea side, as it can be easily washed away
with a great flood or springtide, or left dry upon
the sands, on a low ebb.' So he introduces his
promise of El Dorado, the finding in Guiana
of a better and richer Indies for her Majesty
than the Indies of the King of Spain.
112

THE VOYAGERS
The whole problem of English policy is Bacon on
Sea-power.
admirably summarised by Bacon in his Con
siderations touching a War with Spain. ' For
money,' he says, ' no doubt it is the principal
part of the greatness of Spain ; for by that they
maintain their veteran army ; and Spain is the
only State of Europe that is a money grower.
But in this part, of all others, is most to be
considered the ticklish and brittle state of the
greatness of Spain. Their greatness consisteth
in their treasure, their treasure in the Indies,
and their Indies (if it be well weighed) are
indeed but an accession to such as are masters
by sea. So as this axle-tree, whereupon
their greatness turneth, is soon cut in two by
any that shaU be stronger than they by sea.'
Drake and the seamen had put this argument
into action; Raleigh, though no one better
knew the importance of sea-power, must needs
give it an original turn. It is useless, he says, Raleigh
to cripple the Spanish navy; in a year the "mpomnce
losses are repaired, and the King of Spain of gold.
* beginneth again Uke a storm to threaten ship-
wrack to us aU. . . . It is his Indian gold
H 113

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
that endangereth and disturbeth aU the nations
of Europe.' The way to defeat him is to
appropriate a richer source of gold than any in
his dominion. It seems likely that Raleigh
was already chasing the phantom of El Dorado
when he urged the settlement of Virginia.
Then stories and fables reached him from the
South American continent, and in 1595 he led
his expedition up the Orinoco, and recorded
his adventures in his tract. The Discovery of
the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of
Guiana. Guiana, printed in the foUowing year. The
tract has been condemned as being frill of
impostures and deceits. On the contrary, it is
soberly and veraciously written ; the disappoint
ing results of the expedition are accurately
recorded, but so strong is the author's belief in
his preconceived idea, that, from the title
onward, his narrative conveys the impression of
great things on the verge of achievement and
untold wealth ready at a touch to fall into
England's lap. It is the work of a poet who
bridles in his struggUng Muse with pain. The
will-o'-the-wisp of gold, which had led a thou-
114

THE VOYAGERS
sand adventixrers by devious paths about the
world, led Raleigh to the scaffold, where he
found relief from ' those inmost and soul-
piercing wounds which are ever aching while
uncured,' and expiated his pride and his dreams.
His death marks the end of the heroic age ; with The last
him the poets and architects who had prophesied venturer.
and planned pass away, and the accountants and
builders begin their long and tedious task of
erecting the fabric of the Empire.

"5

II
RICHARD HAKLUYT

II
Richard Hakluy'i, the recorder of all these Richard
matters, desired no memorial save his book.
His relics lie buried under the ' star-ypointing
pyramid ' which, by his own incessant labour,
he erected to the honour of his country.
* Master of Arts,' he caUs himself, ' and some
time Student of Christ Church in Oxford.'
Except to show that he is not unqualified for
his task, and to express his gratitude to the
learned foundations where he had his training,
he does not speak of himself. He is a Scholar,
Bibliographer, and Editor, and so has a three
fold title to modesty and self-renunciation. On
the title-page of his first book, the Divers Voy
ages of 1582, his name does not appear; in the
second and third volumes of the Voyages he
pays his tribute to the Church of which he was
a minister by describing himself as ' Richard
119

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
j Hakluyt, Preacher.' He was less of a preacher
j than was his disciple, Samuel Purchas, and his
I book is the gainer by it. No biography of him,
in any full sense of that word, is possible.
Except for a few bare facts and dates, aU that we
know of him is told us by himself, in his Pre
faces and his few extant letters. No portrait of
him has been recovered. He was buried in
Westminster Abbey, but no inscription marks
his grave, nor is it known in what part of the
Church he lies.
His There can be no doubt that this obscurity
modesty. was of his own choosing ; and belonged, as of
right, to his character and temper. He had
many famous and influential friends, and was
constantly in traffic with them for the enrich
ment of his book. They answered his questions,
gave him their help, were led to think on the
topics he had broached, and thought nothing
His further of the questioner. He acknowledges
his obligations to many ' virtuous gentlemen,'
who, partly from their private affection to him
self, but chiefly from their devotion to the
furtherance of his work, had lent him their

RICHARD HAKLUYT
assistance. Sir John Hawkins and Sir Walter
Raleigh helped him with the Western voyages.
William Burrough, Clerk of her Majesty's
Navy, and Anthony Jenkinson, the Russian
traveUer, gave him the benefit of their experi
ence for the voyages to the North East. The
Lord Treasurer, Burghley, let him have access
to a cabinet, or museum, of curiosities brought
home by travellers. Sir Robert Cecil, in 1597,
consulted him concerning the country of
Guiana, and whether it were fit to be planted
by the EngUsh. Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Francis
Walsingham, and Lord Howard of Effingham,
the Lord High Admiral of England, accepted
his dedications, approved his purposes, and
held converse with him. Mercator, Ortelius,
Thevet, and other foreign cosmographers and
scholars were his friends and correspondents.
Yet it is vain to look for traces of him among
the works and memorials of the brilliant com
pany that knew him in life. He is the silent His
man, seated in the dark corner, who is content
to Usten and remember, and whose questions,
interpolated from time to time, divert attention

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
from himself, and direct it to the moving tales
that come in answer to them.
His own aUusions to himself, though they are
not infrequent, bear curious witness to his com
plete absorption in his theme. Where he men
tions himself it is to give authenticity to the
remarks and memories which he has collected
Personal in conversation. These stray references reveal
scences. him to US as indefatigable in research, at the
Court, or on the highway, losing no opportunity
of adding a single fact or observation to his
store. We learn that at Paris he talked twice
with Don Antonio, the Portuguese Pretender,
who showed him a map of the North West
passage ; and with ' five or six of his best cap
tains and pilots, one of whom was born in East
India.' We find him ' in the Queen's privy
gallery at Westminster,' or in the King's
Library at Paris, or introduced by his friend,
the Bishop of Chichester, to Lord Lumley's
stately library, examining globes, consulting
originals, copying manuscripts. Or he is in
conversation with Mr. Jennings and Mr. Smith,
' the master and master's mate of the ship caUed
122 .

RICHARD HAKLUYT
the Toby, belonging to Bristol,' who bring him
tales from Spain concerning the natives of
Florida ; or with ' an English gentleman. Cap
tain Muffett,' who has been a prisoner in Spain,
and reports how the King of Spain fears nothing
so much as the planting of an English colony in
America ; or with a nameless sailor, ' one of
mine acquaintance of Ratcliffe,' who tells how
the French fishers attacked the Spanish fishers at
Newfoundland, and how he, the English sailor,
in the name of fair play, defended the Spaniards.
So we catch glimpses of Richard Hakluyt
wandering and enquiring without rest or remis
sion. He has friends among French sailors ;
one of them, Stephen Bellinger of Rouen, gives
him a piece of supposed silver ore, and shows
him beasts' skins, dressed and painted by the
Indians ; another shows him a piece of the tree
called Sassafras, brought from Florida, and
expounds its high medicinal virtue. Mr. Pry-
house, of Guernsey, meets him in London, and
gives him news of the French scheme for
colonising Canada; another friend, unnamed,
brings him an account of the setting up of a
123

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
saw-miU in Worcestershire, which suggests to
him that saw-mills might be set up on the
Never- Virginian coast. Among all these, his friends
research, and feUows, the Preacher moves Uke a shadow,
giving his heart to search out concerning aU
things that are done under heaven, exercised
with sore travail, and writing words of truth.
The English nation may well be proud of him,
and glad that, while its great destinies were still
in the making, there lived a man quick enough
to discern the significance of the deeds done
around him, and steady enough, in purpose and
perseverance, to encounter and overcome the
difficulties of giving to them an enduring
chronicle.
The He was born, probably in London, about the
Hakluyt. 7^^"^ ^553- -^i^ family belonged to Eyton, or
Yatton, in Herefordshire, and from the time of
Edward II onward, supplied not a few sheriffs
and members of Parliament to the service of the
country. The family was English, and the
name, in its accepted form, owes its alien sug
gestion to the preservation of archaic speUing.
It was pronounced, and sometimes spelt,
124

RICHARD HAKLUYT
Hacklewit. So Drayton, in his Ode to the
Virginian Voyage: Thy Voyages attend,
Industrious Hackluit ;
Whose reading shall inflame
Men to seek fame.
And much commend
To after times thy wit.
Richard Hakluyt was early left an orphan, and
possibly was under the guardianship of the
cousin to whom he owed his initiation and call
ing. He was educated at Westminster School, Westmin-
ster and
where he was a Queen's Scholar. Thence he Christ
passed to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1570, and ^^"¦''^'i-
proceeded in due course to the degree of
Bachelor of Arts in 1574, and of Master of Arts
in 1577. But before ever he went to Oxford
he had taken the ply that shaped his whole
life. There is something of ritual and emphasis
in the unusual detail with which he tells Sir
Francis Walsingham of his chance visit, in his
boyhood, to his cousin, also called Richard
Hakluyt, of the Middle Temple. A map of
the world lay on the table, and Master Richard
Hakluyt took occasion to give his young cousin
125

tion.

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
a lesson in geography, showing how knowledge
had been recently advanced ; explaining also
(what seems to have been his own special study)
the application of geography to commerce, and
enumerating the products and the wants of each
His country. Then, although no vows were uttered,
there followed a kind of dedication of the Prea
cher to his life's work. ' From the map,' says
Hakluyt, ' he brought me to the Bible, and
turning to the 107th Psalm, directed me to the
twenty-third and twenty-fourth verses, where I
read that they which go down to the sea in ships,
and occupy by the great waters, they see the
works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep.
Which words of the Prophet, together with my
cousin's discourse (things of high and rare
delight to my young nature) took in me so deep
an impression that I constantly resolved, if ever
I were preferred to the University, where better
time and more convenient place might be
ministered for these studies, I would by God's
assistance prosecute that knowledge and kind of
literature, the doors whereof (after a sort) were
so happily opened before me.'
126

RICHARD HAKLUYT
At Oxford, in the time he could save from His work
at Oxford.
prescribed studies, he set himself to read and
master aU the Travels and Voyages extant in
Greek, Latin, Italian, French, English, Spanish,
or Portuguese. The first five of these lan
guages he acquired ; Spanish remained long un
known to him, if we may judge from his habit
of quoting Spanish treatises in Italian, French
or EngUsh translations. Having taken his
Master's degree, he lectured, ' in the common
schools,' on the subject nearest to his heart, and
was the first, he says, to demonstrate the advance
of geography by comparing the new ' lately re
formed maps, globes, and spheres ' with the old
inaccurate representations. He mentions these
lectures but sUghtly, and we do not know who
were his audience. Thomas Lodge, the drama
tist, whose father was interested in navigation,
and who voyaged with Cavendish, may possibly
have attended them. In 1582 the first-fruits of
the Preacher's study appeared, with a dedication
to Sir Philip Sidney. The title of this book
(which has been reprinted by the Hakluyt
Society) gives a clue to the patriotic ambitions
127

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
His first of its author. It is called Divers voyages
book. ,. r .1 '
touching the dtscoverie of America and the
Islands adjacent unto the same, made first of all
by our Englishmen and afterwards by the
Frenchmen and Britons. It is in effect a pam
phlet and collection of documents in support of
England's prior claim to possess and settle the
coast of America. In the dedication the main
idea is expounded. ' The time approacheth,'
says Hakluyt, ' and now is, that we of England
may share and part stakes (if we will ourselves),
both with the Spaniard and the Portingale, in
part of America and other regions as yet undis
covered.' There is good hope, he says, that,
besides possessing America, we may find out a
short and easy passage, by the North West, to
more distant lands. And for these purposes
¦ what is chiefly necessary is a good system of
technical education in nautical affairs.
Nautical Throughout his life Hakluyt continued to
Education. , i i v i •
urge on the government and public the import
ance of sound nautical education. His scheme,
though nothing came of it, was a modest one.
A lectureship should be established ' in London
128

RICHARD HAKLUYT
or about Ratcliffe, in some convenient place ' ;
and he tells how Sir Francis Drake offered
twenty pounds a year to this end ; but forty
pounds a year was found needful to secure a fit
man, and, no other donor presenting himself,
the scheme feU through. The Spaniards, says
Hakluyt, maintain at the Contractation House,
or Exchange, in SeviUe, a learned Reader in the
art of Navigation : and no-one is given charge
of ships for the Indies until he has attended the
instructions of the Reader and has satisfied a
board of examiners who are joined with the
Reader to test theoretical and practical know
ledge. This Readership, he points out, has
aheady given to Spain the services of learned
writers on the art of navigation, as for instance
Geronimo de Chavez, and Pedro de Medina, Spanish
whose works are text-books for the navigators
of all nations.^ What Hakluyt desires, in
short, is a Nautical University or Faculty, where
men may be trained and graduated in all the
1 Pedro de Medina's Arte de Navegar ( 1 545) was translated
into English by John Frampton and published in London
in 1 58 1, a year before Hakluyt's Divers Voyages.
I 129

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
sciences and crafts that are necessary to furnish
forth the complete navigator, and to make him
an efficient servant of his country. He returns
to the subject in his later dedications, pressing
it on the attention of the Lord High Admiral
and of Sir Robert Cecil. His was a voice cry
ing in the wilderness ; and to this day the naval
and military professions have no dealings with
University education. The man who should
bring these into touch, who should enlist soldiers
and sailors for the furtherance of knowledge,
and give to the Army and Navy and Merchant
service officers wide awake to the scientific oppor
tunities of their caUing, would be a benefactor
to his country and a worthy disciple of Hakluyt.
One at least of Hakluyt's ideas has had a very
Tropical recent fulfilment. In his dedication of the third
Volume of his Voyages (1600) to Sir Robert
Cecil he speaks of a short treatise, which he had
lying by him, touching The curing of hot dis
eases incident to travellers in long and Southern
voyages, by one George Watson. He intended
to include it in his book, but desisted, because
it was very defective, and a certain Doctor
130

RICHARD HAKLUYT
Gilbert promised that the whole CoUege of
Physicians should confer, and produce something
authoritative on the diseases of hot and cold
regions. So the founders of recent Schools of
Tropical Medicine are also disciples of Hakluyt.
Before the pubUcation of his first book, Hak
luyt must have moved from Oxford to London,
in what capacity we do not know. Early in
1582 we find him in correspondence with Sir
Francis Walsingham, who treats him as a recog
nised authority on Western discovery. It is a
strange thing that" he, the recorder of the voy
ages, should have taken part in none of them.
We hear of two Expeditions which he thought
of accompanying. One was Drake's West
Indies voyage of 1585. The other was the
fatal voyage of Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1583.
What detained him, or changed his purpose Hakluyt
does not appear ; in the year of Gilbert's voy
age he was appointed chaplain to Sir Edward
Stafford, Queen Elizabeth's ambassador in
Paris, and remained for five years in France.
Stafford was brother-in-law to Howard of
Effingham, so that it seems likely that in this
131

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES

case, as in others, Hakluyt's preferment came to
him from his interest in nautical affairs. He
was on terms of intimacy with the Gilberts and
His chief Raleigh; his Discourse of Western Planting,
original ^ ^ r^ • t r
work. presented to the Queen in the autumn of 1584,
was written at the request of Raleigh, and was
inspired by the reports of Captains Amadas and
Barlow. It is the longest and most valuable of
his extant original writings, though his unvary
ing modesty prevented its inclusion in his
Voyages. In Paris he devoted himself with
energy to the preparation of the book which was
now the goal of all his efforts — a collection of
the voyages undertaken by Englishmen. The
His great first edition of The Principal Navigations, in
one folio volume, appeared in 1589. Then
followed ten more years of labour, and the
second and final edition, in three folio volumes,
was given to the world in 1598 and the two
following years.
In the meantime, ecclesiastical preferment had
come to him. In 1586, while he was in France,
he became prebendary of Bristol, and, in 1590
rector of Wetheringsett in Suffolk. The date
132

Church
preferment.

RICHARD HAKLUYT
of his marriage is uncertain ; in his dedication,
to Sir Robert Cecil, of his Third Volume (1600),
he speaks of his profession of divinity and the
care of his family as having diverted him, for
some years past, from the main endeavour of his
Ufe. In 1602 he was made prebendary, and in
1603 archdeacon, of Westminster. He was
also chaplain of the Savoy; and in 1612
obtained the rectory of Gedney in Lincolnshire.
He died, seven months after Shakespeare, on His death.
the 23rd of November 161 6. He left a fair
estate to an unthrifty son, who is said to have
squandered it. His unpublished papers fell
into the hands of Samuel Purchas, who scattered
them about the four volumes of his Pilgrims,
' after his irregular and curtailed or contracted
manner,' interspersed with remarks ' often silly,
and always little to the purpose.' But the ines
timable value of his materials has given Purchas
a secure place beside his greater predecessor.
Besides the Voyages, Hakluyt was respon- Lesser
works*
sible for the publication of several other works.
He translated and published, in 1587, Laudon-
niere's account of Florida ; in the same year he
133

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
set forth an edition of the Decades of Peter
Martyr. In 1601 he published The Discoveries
of the World, a translation of a treatise by
Antonio Galvano, the Portuguese governor of
Ternate. His last work, Virginia richly valued
by the description of the maine land of Florida
her next neighbour, appeared in 1609; it is
translated from a Portuguese account of Soto's
expedition to Florida. Moreover Hakluyt
took pains for the continuance of the work he
had begun, and endeavoured to gather round
him a school of younger men. English trans
lations of accppted standard works on Africa,
China, and Nova Francia were undertaken and
completed at his suggestion and by his encour
agement.
Theapo- The quality of Hakluyt which most impressed
theosisof , . , . , . . , ^
industry. "^^ contemporaries was his enormous industry.
He often speaks of this himself, and confesses
that only an ardent love of his country and care
for her good name could have induced him to
undergo labours so tedious and exhausting. ' I
caU the work a burden,' he says, ' in considera
tion that these voyages lay so dispersed, scat-
134

RICHARD HAKLUYT
tered, and hidden in several huckster's hands,
that I now wonder at myself to see how I was
able to endure the delays, curiosity, and back
wardness of many from whom I was to receive
my originals.' And again : ' What restless
nights, what painful days, what heat, what cold
I have endured ; how many long and charge
able journeys I have travelled ; how many
famous libraries I have searched into ; what
variety of ancient and modern writers I have
perused ; what a number of old records, patents,
privileges, letters, etc., I have redeemed from
obscurity and perishing ; into how manifold
acquaintance I have entered ; what expenses
I have not spared ; and yet what fair oppor
tunities of private gain, preferment and
ease I have neglected; albeit thyself canst
hardly imagine, yet I by daily experience
do find and feel, and some of my entire
friends can sufficiently testify.' In process
of time, no doubt, his work grew easier,
as bis purpose became known to a wider circle,
and travellers of their own accord brought him
material. The raids on the West Indies yielded
135

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
Chance him, as he confesses, some good literary profit.
finds. In 1 592, off the Azores, Robert Crosse captured
the huge Madre de Dios; a Latin treatise on
China, written in the year 1590, was found
among the spoils, and given to Hakluyt. It
was ' enclosed in a case of sweet cedar-wood,
and lapped up almost an hundred fold in fine
calicut-cloth, as though it had been some incom
parable jewel.' But for all his treasure-troves,
The his labours must have been unending. His life
Hakluyt's is a notable example of how singleness of pur-
pose and dogged persistence, in a man not
endowed, so far as we can tell, with any of the
more brilliant attributes of genius, lead him, as
if inevitably, to high achievement and lasting
fame.
The His main purpose he has himself declared.
Expan- ^ ^
sion of He belongs to that stalwart race of clerics who,
England. ^^^^ ^^ ^^^ Kingdom of Heaven, love a fight ;,
but fighting is the accident of his book, not the
essential. The discovery of the world and the
expansion of England are what make his heart
beat faster ; he is a zealot of the map and of the
flag. He knows that he lives in an age of great
136

RICHARD HAKLUYT
attempts ; the reproach of sluggishness and lack
of enterprise, which was fastened on England
during the earlier years of discovery, is now
clean wiped away, and the English are at home
on every sea. ' In this most famous and peer
less government of her most excellent Majesty,
her subjects, through the special assistance and
blessing of God, in searching the most opposite
corners and quarters of the world, and, to speak
plainly, in compassing the vast globe of the
earth more than once, have excelled all the
nations and people of the earth.' They started
without those advantages of science and ancient
learning which befriended the Portuguese ; the
parts of the world that were left for them to
discover were more difficult and dangerous than
' the mild, lightsome, temperate, and warm
Atlantic Ocean, over which the Spaniards and
Portugals have made so many pleasant, pros
perous and golden voyages.' Yet they re
deemed their delay, and are become the teachers
and pilots of others. The Dutch, says Hakluyt, Pupils of
J 1 • r 1 • -KT 1 England..
deserve commendation for their Northern
voyages, ' yet with this priviso ; that our Eng-
137

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
lish nation led them the dance, brake the ice
before them, and gave them good leave to light
their candle at our torch.' Again and again his
pride in his country, and admiration for her
valorous seamen, make themselves apparent in
the warmth and eloquence of his speech.
The But the gain of these last happy years can be
founding of
Colonies, made good, he holds, in one way only, by
claiming and settling the lands of the New
World. It does not fall to Hakluyt to record
any successful English attempt at colonisation.
None the less, it is this that is the very sea-mark
of his utmost sail. The history of his active
life begins with the colonising schemes of
Gilbert, Sidney and Raleigh ; it ends with the
colonisation of Virginia achieved at last, and
the offer to himself of the living of James
Town, which he prudently supplied by a curate.
From first to last he preached the benefits of
colonising for the furtherance of trade and the
honest employment of the people. Statesmen
and economists, from Sir Thomas More on
wards, had complained of the multitude of
loiterers and idle vagabonds in England, thrown
138

RICHARD HAKLUYT
out of work by the enclosure of land. Hak
luyt adds his testimony, and offers a remedy.
' Our prisons are pestered and filled,' he says,
* with able men to serve their Country, which
for small robberies are daily hanged up in great
numbers, even twenty at a clap, out of one gaol
(as was seen at the last Assizes at Rochester).'
We should lead these people forth into the tem- Hakluyt
. . and
perate and fertile parts of America, ' which, Virginia.
being within six weeks sailing of England, are
yet unpossessed of any Christians, and seem to
offer themselves unto us, stretching nearer unto
her Majesty's dominions than to any other part
of Europe.' And, with a touch of learned
rhetoric very unusual in his writing, he invokes
the example of the Romans and Carthaginians,
and of those ' small, weak, and unreasonable
creatures,' the bees, who are led out by their
captains to seek themselves a new dwelling-
place. He lent a hand in all schemes that
might lead to colonisation, and was one of the
Company of Merchants to whom Raleigh
assigned his Virginian patent in 1588. After
the premature death of Sir Humphrey Gilbert
139

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
the man who more than any other took upon
himself the toil, and earned the credit, of estab
lishing England's first colony, was Richard
Hakluyt. There is no touch of the fanatic about him.
His for all his zeal. His reflections and advice on
practical
wisdom, every subject that he handles are shrewd, cool
and practical. He desires, for instance, the
evangelisation of the Indies, but he will be nO'
party to hasty methods. ' The means,' he says,
' to send such as shall labour effectually in this
business is, by planting one or two colonies of
our nation upon that firm,' (i.e. mainland)
* where they may remain in safety and first learn
the language of the people near adjoining (the
gift of tongues being now taken away), and by
little and little acquaint themselves with their
manner, and so with discretion and mildness
distill into their purged minds the sweet and
lively liquor of the gospel.' He keeps an open.
eye for all the material advantages that may
attend the possession of a distant colony. Chief
His zeal of these is ' the advancing of navigation, the
gation. very walls of this our Island.' Complaints
140

RICHARD HAKLUYT
have long been rife, he says, of the decay of our
navy; and the means taken to encourage our
people to a sea-faring life have met with very
partial success. Queen Elizabeth, in 1563, had
ordained that Wednesday should be ' a new fish
day,' the eating of meat being restrained to the
end that fishermen and mariners should find a
market for their takings. Yet little benefit to
shipping had followed from indirect measures
like this. 'At this day,' says Hakluyt, writing in
1584, 'I am assured that there are scarce two
ships of two hundred tons belonging to the
whole city of Bristol, and very few or none of
the like burden along the channel of the Severn,
from Gloucester to the Lands End on the one
side, and Milford Haven on the other. Now,
to remedy this great and unknown want, no
enterprise possibly can be' devised more fit to
increase our great shipping than this Western
fortifying and planting. . . . Moreover, in
the judgment of those that are expert in sea
causes, it wiU breed more skilful, cunning and
stout pilots and mariners than other belonging
to this land. For it is the long voyages (so
141

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES

Benefits of long
voyages.

Commercial Geography.

they be not too excessive long, nor through
intemperate climates, as those of the Portingales
into their West Indies) that harden seamen, and
open unto them the secrets of navigation.'
Hakluyt, in short, perceived that the supremacy
of the sea could hardly be achieved by a nation
whose ships were mainly occupied in the coast
ing trade. He is no less concerned for the
welfare of trade. From his cousin of the
Middle Temple he had early learned the value
of what is now called commercial geography.
In his Voyages are printed many papers of
minute and careful instruction for factors and
merchants visiting foreign countries. The most
remarkable of these, Remend>rances for a Factor
at Constantinople, is written by Richard Hak
luyt the elder, and contains a reasoned defence
of the practical study of beasts and fowls, herbs
and trees, their properties and uses. ' If this
care had not been heretofore in our ancestors,
then had our life been savage now ; for then we
had not had wheat nor rye, pease nor beans,
barley nor oats, pear nor apple, vine, nor many
other profitable and pleasant plants ; bull nor
142

RICHARD HAKLUYT
cow, sheep nor swine, horse nor mare, cock nor
hen, nor a number of other things that we enjoy,
without which ovir life were to be said barbar
ous; for these things, and a thousand that we
use more, the first inhabitors of this Island
found not here.' By way of example the latest
importations of strange commodities are cited,
including some of those commemorated in the
popular rhyme :
Turkeys, Carps, Hops, Pickerels, and Beer,
Came into England all in one year.
The Voyages record many great deeds ; but
their editor scorns nothing as trivial, if it is
Ukely to be of service for the material prosperity
of England.
This strong practical bent and concrete habit The
of mind served the Preacher weU in the design- Hakluyt's
ing and ordering of his book. He is not misled ^°°^-
by any encyclopaedic ambitions, or by the lust
of universality. It is a credit to him, greater
than can be readily conceived by our scientific
and empiric age, that he sets himself to record
individual observations and particular experi
ences. He had been educated after the fashion
143

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
of the time, in the vague generalities of the
scholastic learning ; and he would have none of
them. It is the story of the travels of this man
and that man, he says, which brings us to a
certain and full knowledge of the world ; ' not
those weary volumes bearing the titles of Uni
versal Cosmography, which some men that I
could name have published as their own.' He
is careful to ascertain and record the name of
the historian of each voyage, as well as the
name of the voyager, so that every man may
' answer for himself, justify his reports, and
stand accountable for his own doings.' The
Arrange- classification and arrangement of the voyages
inctit. follow a like practical method. First, as being
the oldest, come the voyages to the South and
South East ; then the North Eastern voyages,
the earliest of which were made under our
Saxon Kings ; and lastly, not without a pur
posed climax, the voyages to the West and ' the
beginnings and proceeding of the two English
Colonies planted in Virginia.' The voyages to
the South West (' whereof I think the Spaniard
hath had some knowledge ') were in fact by far
144

RICHARD HAKLUYT
the most numerous, but they are given a small
relative importance in Hakluyt's scheme. The
West Indies have a place in his epic not unlike
the place of Carthage in Virgil's poem; they
are visited by the founders of the British
Empire on the way to a greater destiny.
To estimate Hakluyt's labours as an editor, Hakluyt
it would be necessary to coUate his Voyages in
detail with the printed and manuscript originals,
where these are recoverable. A good beginning
has been made by the Hakluyt Society ; and the
complete task, however troublesome, wiU be no
more than a just tribute to those great charges
and infinite cares, watchings, toils, travels, and
wearying out of his weak body, from which the
Preacher long ago found rest. A comparison of
some of his Voyages with the fuU originals,
printed by the Hakluyt Society, reveals him as
a conscientious Editor, wholly free from the
vanity of self-assertion. He follows his autho
rities word for word and takes few liberties with His
V TT • 1 • 1 omissions.
them. He omits nothing that tends to know
ledge, though he has a ready pen to excise what
tends merely to edification. It was the habit
K 145

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
of his age to begin even a nautical diary with a
few remarks on the origin of the world, the
history of man, and the opinions of Plato. To
these excrescences the Preacher gives short
shrift. If he was as severe a critic of himself
as of other men, his sermons must have been
models of terse and pointed exhortation.
Master George Best's Discourse of the three
voyages of Frobisher begins, in the original,
with a dissertation on the sundry employments
and delights of men. ' Man is born ' — so the
overture runs — ' not only to serve his own turn
(as TuUy saith) ; but his kinsfolk, friends, and
the commonwealth especially, look for some
furtherance at his hands, and some fruits of his
labour: whereupon sundry men finding them
selves as it were tied by this bond and duty of
human society, have willingly endeavoured
sundry ways to show themselves profitable
members of tjieir commonweal.' All this, and
much more, Hakluyt omits, to get on with the
practical business of the voyage: — 'First, it
Utility may be gathered by experience of our English
men in Anno 1553,' and so forth. No doubt,
146

his aim.

RICHARD HAKLUYT
by thus stripping off the graces and ornaments
of some of his pilgrims, he has diminished the
attraction of his book for a student of our older
literature; but, on the other hand, he has con
densed within the covers of his three folio
volumes a far larger amount of valuable practical
information than could have been brought
within the same compass by a reverent modern
editor. It was utility that he valued; more
than the thanks of lovers of elegant prose he
would have esteemed the profits of the East
India Company, which occupied some part of
his later thoughts, and which, according to Sir
Thomas Smith, were, on one occasion, increased
by twenty thousand pounds through a careful
study of the ' Books of Voyages.'

147

Ill

THE INFLUENCE OF THE
VOYAGES ON POETRY
AND IMAGINATION

Ill
Here, then, in this Book of Voyages, set down The
. Voyages
in matter-of-fact fashion, one after another, with and the
no striving after beauty of form, and no care for g^^abeth.
dramatic effect, are the records of the deeds that
made England great. Over against the plays
of Shakespeare and his fellows, as their natural
counterpart, must be set the Voyages of Hak
luyt ; he who would understand the Elizabethan
age, and what it meant for England, must know
them both. ' The word,' says Chaucer, ' should
be cousin to the deed.' In a wider sense than
he intended, the word always is cousin to the
deed ; and the lives that men live express them
selves inevitably in the books that they write.
That marvellous summer time of the imagina- ?
tion, the Elizabethan age, with aU its wealth nf
flowers and fruit, was the gift to England of the
sun that bronzed the faces of the voyagers and
151

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
of the winds that carried them to the four
quarters of the world. Historians of literature
have been wont to treat the imaginative growth
of the Elizabethan age as if it were a problem
of skilful gardening, an instance of high suc
cess in the mysteries of transplanting, grafting,
forcing, and the like. But what nourished the
pale slips brought from abroad .'' They struck
their roots deep in a soil rich with the matter of
life, and breathed a genial and stimulating air.
The dramatists and poets were the children and
inheritors of the Voyagers.
The new Man's imagination is limited by the horizon
outlook on , . ,
the world, of his experience. When he attempts by guess
work to outgo the bounds assigned, his frailty
and ignorance stand apparent ; he is like a child
explaining the world by its doll's house. The
irremovable boundaries of knowledge are the
same for every age ; human sense is feeble,
human reason whimsical and vain, human life
short and troubled. But every now and then,
in the long history of the race, there is a rift in
the cloud, or a new prospect gained by climbing.
These are the great ages of the world. Crea-
152

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
tion widens on the view, and the air is alive
with a sense of promise and expectancy. So
it was in the age of Elizabeth. The recovery
of the classics opened a long and fair vista
backwards ; the exploration of the New World
seemed to lift the curtain on a glorious future.
And the English, the little parochial people, who
for centuries had tilled their fields and tended
their cattle in their island home, cut off from
the great movements of European policy,
suddenly found themselves, by virtue of their
shipping, competitors for the dominion of the
earth. It is no wonder that their hearts dis
tended with pride, and, hardening in their
strength, gloried. A new sense of exaltation
possessed the country, the exaltation of know
ledge and power. The rising tide of national
enthusiasm flooded the literature of the people,
and surprised the dwellers on many a high and
dry inland creek.
Charles Lamb, who loved all that is familiar Exotic
and ancient and homely, somewhere expresses
regret that the plays of Shakespeare and some
of his brother dramatists hardly ever choose as
153

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
their theme the simple daily Ufe of the England
of their own time, the affairs of the shop
keepers of Cheapside or of the countrymen of
Essex. Had the dramatists been of his mind,
we should have had no great English drama,
and no Shakespeare. The regret felt by Lamb
is only natural; he was a true antiquary, and
the touch of antiquity has gilded the bucolics
and citizens of Shakespeare's time. Vulgarity
and stupidity are amiable enough in dead men.
But the question at issue was a live question in
the time of Elizabeth. The men of the new
school turned impatiently away from the self-
satisfied insularity and rustic ineptitude of their
forebears, and hastened to become citizens of
the world. The infection of foreign literatures
and foreign travel changed customs and manners
so fast that many sober observers stood aghast
at the rapidity of the movement, and the
country rang with denunciations of the inno
vators. In a single generation the change was
complete. At the time of Hawkins' earlier
voyages Gammer Gurton's Needleyvus a comedy
of the newest fashion, and the highest reach of
154

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
English tragedy was stiU to be sought in the
miracle-plays; before he died Love's Labour's
Lost and Doctor Faustus had been seen on the
boards of the London theatres. Action and
imagination went hand in hand. If the The
voyagers explored new countries and trafficked in strange
with strange peoples, the poets and dramatists ^f^^^ °^
went abroad too, and rifled foreign nations,
returning with far-fetched and dear-bought
wares ; or explored lonely and untried recesses
of the microcosm of man. One spirit of dis
covery and exultant power animated both
seamen and poets. Shakespeare and Marlowe
were, no less than Drake and Cavendish, cir
cumnavigators of the world.
The influences of the voyages upon the great The
Uterature of the time has been little recognised, Poetry.
because the reflection of contemporary events
in thought and imagination is always indirect,
difficult to outline, and utterly unlike common
expectation. When exact historians complain
of a poet that he does not hold up the mirror
to his own time, they are often merely com
plaining that he is not a reporter, a retailer of
155

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
names and dates, the dupe of notoriety.
Shakespeare, it is often said, tells us more of
Italy than of England ; yet in Shakespeare's
plays only the labels are Italian, while every
type of English character, from a king to a
Shake- tinker, is drawn to the life. Othello is a Tudor
speareand the gentlemen. Petruchio, Bassanio, and a dozen
ofhisdme Others are adventurous Elizabethan gallants.
Osric is a courtly gull, Mercutio a courtly wit,
Edgar in Lear is a noble masquerading as an
Abram man, Autolycus is a cony-catcher. AU
alike are heightened portraits of the men whom
Shakespeare had met and talked to at the Court,
in the tavern, or by the roadside. It is true
that the names of the great men of his own time
seldom occur in his plays. A great living man
is celebrated chiefly by poetasters ; nor, indeed,
were these lacking to celebrate Drake and
Frobisher and Howard. A poet commonly
prefers to work with human material closer at
hand, easier to come at, not hedged around by
popular favour or on its guard against intimate
research. He will select at his own liking from
the life around him, build up his own greatness,
156

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
and borrow a name from ancient history or
fable. But whatever is most characteristic and
vital in the life and thought of an age will find
utterance in its poetry, none the less. The
impressions recorded will perhaps have no very
obvious connection with the particular facts of
history; they will be those rather that strike
the eye and fire the imagination of a child. The The
- _ . .,, • ir • sentiment
romance or sea-faring will express itself not in of t^e sea.
an account of any one notable exploit, with
due credit allotted by name to all who took part
in it, but in some such vague memory and
sentiment as that of the American poet :
I remember the black wharves, and the slips.
And the sea-tides tossing free,
And the Spanish sailors with bearded lips.
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.
Poetry speaks only that which it knows, and
testifies only that which it has seen. What did
the Elizabethan poets know and see of the
world of promise revealed by the navigators.?
Some direct and commendatory notice there
was of the most famous voyagers by name, and
many poems, some of them by good poets, were
157

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
addressed to the adventurers on setting forth.
Warner The later books of Albion's England (1602), for
Voyagers, instance, by William Warner, are much con
cerned with the achievements^'recorded by Hak
luyt, and tribute is paid in passing to Hakluyt
himself. But Warner belongs to that older
school of Protestant poets who had their educa
tion chiefly from the practice of metrical
psalmody. His zeal is great, and he gives high
praise to many of the travellers, with a full
account, especially, of the North Eastern
voyages and the deeds of Willoughby, Chan
celor, Burrough, Jenkinson, Pet, and Jackman.
But his style is less inspiring than his subject.
Except as an accompaniment to stocking-weav
ing, there are no good uses to be found for verse
of this kind :
It is no common labour to
The river Ob to sail,
Howbeit Burrough did therein.
Not dangerless, prevail.
He through the foresaid frozen seas
In Lapland did arrive,
And thence, to expedite for Ob,
His labours did revive.
158

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
The author gives advice which his readers Praise of
r . • 1 • n Hakluyt.
wiU gladly follow when, after touching briefly
on the voyages of Drake, Hawkins, Gilbert,
Frobisher, and the rest, he commends his
audience to the Preacher:
Omitted then, and named men
And lands (not here, indeed.
So written of as they deserve)
At large in Hakluit read.
Perhaps the best of the poems dedicated to Chap-
'^ _ _ _ ^ man s ' De
single expeditions is George Chapman's De Guiana.'
Guiana carmen Epicum (1596). It is crabbed,
like almost all Chapman's verse, but it embodies
the very spirit that sent hundreds of young
EngUshmen over sea. The dream of gold is
dreamed again in the description of Raleigh's
purposed colony :
Guiana, whose rich feet are mines of gold.
Whose forehead knocks against the roof of stars.
Stands on her tip-toes at fair England looking.
Kissing her hand, bowing her mighty breast.
And every sign of all submission making
To be her sister, and the daughter both
Of our most sacred maid.
The theme of the poem, however, is not "^^^ ^^"^
. . . ofthe
gold, nor the expected miracle of Virtue rich ; Voyagers.
159

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
it is Patriotism, Honour, and the Faith that wiU
risk all for these :
But you patrician spirits that refine
Your flesh to fire, and issue like a flame
On brave endeavours, knowing that in them
The tract of heaven in morn-like glory opens ;
That know you cannot be the kings of earth.
Claiming the rights of your creation,
And let the mines of earth be kings of you ;
That are so far from doubting likely drifts.
That in things hardest y'are most confident :
You that know death lives where power lives unused,
Joying to shine in waves that bury you,
And so make way for life even through your graves,
That will not be content with horse to hold
A thread-bare beaten way to home affairs ; . . .
You that herein renounce the course of earth,
And lift your eyes for guidance to the stars.
That live not for yourselves, but to possess
Your honour'd country of a general store ; . . .
You that are blest with sense of all things noble.
In this attempt your complete worths redouble.
The new The poem closes with a picture of the blissful
wrarld" community that is to live on the banks of the
Orinoco, and of the new golden world, where
peace and plenty reign ; where learning is
cherished and valour needs no weapons ; where
the old debate between rich and poor is closed
for ever : i6o

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
Where healthful recreations strow their meads.
And make their mansions dance with neighbourhood.
That here were drown'd in churlish avarice.
Visions like these became familiar to the
imagination of poets when every year was
enlarging hope and extending knowledge :
Discovering daily more and more about.
In that immense and boundless ocean
Of Nature's riches, never yet found out.
Nor fore-clos'd with the wit of any man.
The new-born faith of the English in their
national speech took heart of grace from the
discoveries of the voyagers. Samuel Daniel,
whose poem Musophilus (1601) is a long pas
sionate hymn in praise of the new ideals, has The Eliza-
expressed in a single couplet the two-fold bethan
aspiration of the age :
What good is like to this,
To do worthy the writing, and to write
Worthy the reading, and the world's delight ?
The re-discovered glories of the ancients had
for a time cast a damp upon national ambition.
It seemed a paltry vanity in a writer of English
to hope to win literary immortality for a speech
shut up within the limits of a single island, and
L t6i

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
cut off from close commerce with the countries
which inherited the traditions of Greece and
Rome. By way of answer to this doubt Daniel
points prophetically to the New World. The
Ancients civilised their world ; another world
The has been given to the Moderns to civilise ; the
English . -r r c ,. 1
tongue, native girts of Southern eloquence and poetry
may hereafter be ' bettered by the patience of
the North,' and may achieve a yet greater fame :
And who, in time, knows whither we may vent
The treasure of our tongue i To what strange shores
This gain of our best glory shall be sent
To enrich unknowing nations with our stores ?
What worlds in th' yet unformed Occident
May come refin'd with the accents that are ours ?
Or who can tell for what great work in hand
The greatness of our style is now ordained i
What powers it shall bring in, what spirits command ?
What thoughts let out, what humours keep restrained ?
What mischief it may powerfully withstand.
And what fair ends may thereby be attained ?
The Before the first acre of land beyond the seas had
Empire- been effectively added to the dominion of
builders England, the poets had foretold the British
Empire. The expansion of England was, in
the main, the work of the Eighteenth Century ;
162

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
but the soldiers and statesmen who planted the
Empire in India and Canada and the American
Colonies, were the successors and pupils of
Hakluyt's heroes; it was theirs to build the
fabric that had been designed and to fiilfil the
prophecies that had been uttered in the great
age of imagination.
The chief influence of the Voyages on the Influence
English imagination is not to be looked for in Voyages
special tributes or even in exalted prophecies °" ,
like these. The new ferment wrought in a
deep and hidden fashion on the temper and
habits of the mind. All preconceived notions
and beliefs concerning cosmography, history,
politics, and society were made ridiculous by the
new discoveries. The world had been opened The
up by the fanatical self-confidence of visionaries, horizon.
and had proved to be wilder than their
wildest fancies. New kingdoms were to be had
for the taking. Powers and virtues unknown
to the peoples of the Old World had perhaps
been preserved through the ages in remote
and fortunate islands. AU things became pos
sible ; credulity was wiser than experience ; and
163

argument.

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
the wonders reported were reckoned merely the
first-fruits of greater things to come. The
society of the Old World meanwhile was rent
in twain by the schism in the Christian Church.
Great monarchies were tottering to their fall.
The signs and portents of the times pointed to
the beginning of a new age, when the riches and
power of the world should be the prize of bold
adventurers, and courage the only passport to
success.
Spenser's The argument from the voyages is set forth
explicitly by Spenser in a well-known passage
of the Faerie ^eene. His fairy world, he says,
has been condemned by some as the forgery of
an idle brain.
But let that man with better sense advize,
That of the world least part to us is red ;
And daily how through hardy enterprise
Many great Regions are discovered.
Which to late age were never mentioned
Who ever heard of th' Indian Peru ?
Or who in venturous vessel measured
The Amazon huge river, now found trew ?
Or fruitfuUest Virginia who did ever vew ?
Yet all these were, when no man did them know,
Yet have from wisest ages hidden been ;
164

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
And later times thinges more unknowne shall show.
Why then should witless man so much misweene
That nothing is but that which he hath scene ?
What if within the Moones feyre shining sphere,
What if in every other starre unseene
Of other worldes he happily should heare.
He wonder would much more ; yet such to some appeare.
It is not without significance that Hakluyt Hakluyt's
himself makes use of exactly the same argu
ment. ' If any man shall object,' he says,
speaking of the Friars, ' that they have certain
incredible relations, I answer, first, that many
true things may to the ignorant seem incredible.'
And again, in praise of his own age : — ' Which
of the kings of this land before her Majesty
had their banners ever seen in the Caspian sea .''
Which of them hath ever dealt with the
Emperor of Persia, as her Majesty hath done,
and attained for her merchants large and loving
privileges.? Who ever saw, before this regi
ment, an EngUsh Ligier in the stately porch of
the Grand Signor at Constantinople? Who
ever found English consuls and agents at
Tripolis in Syria, at Aleppo, at Babylon, at
Balsara, and, which is more, who ever heard of
i6s

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
Englishmen at Goa before now.? What Eng
lish ships did heretofore ever anchor in the
mighty River of Plate.?' — and so on, passing in
review the unprecedented achievements of the
apostles of navigation. Both Spenser and Hak
luyt are right in making much of these things.
The boast of the Stoic is empty, that the mind is
its own place. The mind lives by its takings,
and a fresh experience feathers the wings of the
human spirit, and lends them scope and power.
The spirit The fantastic adventure of the age and its
venture : intimate connection with grave historical events
g°™ may be well seen in the career of the notorious
Tom Stukeley. He was a man of small
account, says Camden, ' a ruffian, a riotous
spend-thrift, and a notable vapourer,' who had
been disappointed in his hope of obtaining a
small official post in Ireland. He offered his
services to the Pope, promising to drive the
English troops out of Ireland, and to fire the
English fleet. To this end he was put in com
mand of some eight hundred Italian soldiers
levied at the charges of Spain. He set sail
from Civita Vecchia and arrived at Lisbon,
1 66

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
where he was to be joined by Sebastian, King of
Portugal. Sebastian induced him, by way of
preface to the Irish campaign, to lend his force
against the Mahomedan powers of Northern
Africa; and in 1578, at the battle of Alcazar,
where Sebastian and two Moorish kings fell,
Stukeley also was slain. By the death of the
King of Portugal without a son the way was
opened for the Spanish claim, and the attention
of King Philip was for years diverted from his
intended invasion of England. Stukeley's
romantic career was subsequently dramatised
for the London public in Peek's Battle of
Alcazar. A career like this serves to show how the life The New
of the age acted on its literature. The differ- Romantic
ences between the Romantic drama of England l^'^rature.
and the Classic drama of France can never be
understood while the question is treated only
as a conflict between two literary schools. It is
true that France, by position, history, and train
ing was from the first more under the influence
of classic Uterature and ancient theory than ever
England had been. But in England, too, when
167

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
the drama began its course, the partisans of the
classical doctrine were first in the field, and made
the bravest start. Then the new interests arose,
and overwhelmed them. The echoes of ancient
wisdom and shadows of ancient beauty which
held the attention of France were drowned and
scattered in England by loud voices and fierce
lights. Extravagant deeds fiUed the popular
imagination, and could not, by any legerdemain
of pedantry, be brought within the prescribed
critical compass. If the dramatists refused
allegiance to the rules, they were merely follow
ing the lead of the adventurers. The fatalism
of Greek Tragedy, where the end is known
before the beginning, could give no real pleasure
to a people intoxicated with the delights of
surprise, and intolerant of all limitation. In a
world where anything may happen, the fairy-
story or the romance of adventure is the safest
literary model.
Marlowe The best examplar of the new style is Mar-
Voyagers, lowe, whose Tamburlaine set the fashionfollowed
by Greene and Peele and many others. With
out the Voyagers Marlowe is inconceiviable.
1 68

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
His imagination is wholly pre-occupied with
the marvels of the world and his heart pos
sessed by the new-found lust of power. The
tasks that Doctor Faustus assigns to his service
able spirits might have been studied from the
reports of traveUers :
I'll have them fly to India for gold.
Ransack the Ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates ; ...
I'll levy soldiers with the coin they bring.
And chase the Prince of Parma firom our land
And reign sole King of all our Provinces.
Gold again is the theme of the Jew of Malta,
and conquest and kingship the inspiration of
Tamburlaine. The Scythian conqueror, like Tambur-
Shakespeare's Italian gentlemen, is at heart an
Englishman. When he tries to tempt the
Persian general into his service, his persuasions
savour of the nautical pride of the English :
Both we will walk upon the lofty cliffs
And Christian merchants that with Russian stems
Plough up hugh furrows in the Caspian Sea
Shall vail to us, as lords of all the lake.
In 1567 Hawkins fired on a friendly Spanish Historical
squadron in Plymouth Sound, to compel the
169

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
Admiral to lower his flag, and in 1570 Lord
Charles Howard of Effingham exacted a like
tribute in the open Channel from a Spanish fleet
of a hundred and thirty sail which was convey
ing King Philip's bride-elect from Holland to
Spain. Even the name of the Caspian was
reminiscent of English adventure. ' Our
nation,' says Hakluyt, writing in 1598, 'have
adventured their persons, ships and goods,
homewards and outwards, fourteen times over
the unknown and dangerous Caspian Sea.' It
The do- is the dominion of the sea, as well as of the land,
minion of ... , _, , , . i i ¦
the sea. that Marlowe's Tamburlaine covets, and his
eloquence reaches its highest when the sea is his
theme. The defeat of Bajazeth, Emperor of
the Turks, is a means to an end ; the Persian
fleet, already in Tamburlaine's control, shall
circumnavigate the earth, and join forces with
the Turkish Mediterranean squadron of men-
of-war and buccaneers. Marlowe was an early
friend of Raleigh's, and it is difficult not to read
a political meaning into these sounding lines,
written just after Drake's expedition of 1585,
at a time when Don Antonio, the Portuguese
170

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
pretender, had taken refuge at the English
Court, and was being used by Raleigh as a
counter in the great political game :
So from the East unto the furthest West Tambur-
Shall Tamburlaine extend his puissant arm. lames
The galleys and those pilling brigandines nolicy
That yearly sail to the Venetian Gulf
And hover in the Straits for Christians' wrecks.
Shall lie at anchor in the isle Asant,
Until the Persian fleet and men-of-war.
Sailing along the oriental sea,
Have fetched about the Indian Continent,
Even from Persepolis to Mexico,
And thence unto the Straits of Jubalter ;
Where they shall meet and join their force in one
Keeping in awe the Bay of Portingale,
And all the ocean by the British shore ;
And by this means I'll win the world at last.
As a naval plan of campaign this belongs to the
school of Raleigh, who complained that the
Queen did things by halves. The immense Topical
popular success of Tamburlaine, which changed «Tambur-
the fortunes of the English drama, was due not
solely to the resonance and splendour of the
verse or the magic of the strange names. The
audience Ustened to it in a temper quite unlike
the temper that Coleridge's Kubla Khan begets
171

laine.'

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
in the modern reader. This drama of the
world at stake was to them a representation of
real affairs, and the high speeches of Tambur
laine voiced for them the defiance and the pride
of England.
The How entirely Marlowe's imagination had
of dis- been captured by the discoveries and exploits of
covery. ^.j^g navigators is clearly shown in Tamburlaine's
dying speech, which expresses all the romance
of geography and all the ambition of empire.
The Conqueror feels his vital powers failing,
and, with his sons by his side, calls for a map of
the world :
Give me a map ; then let me see how much
Is left for me to conquer all the world.
That these, my boys, may finish all my wants.
The map is brought, and he traces on it his
victorious progress through Asia and Africa,
' backwards and forwards near five thousand
leagues.' The Suez Canal is one of his unful
filled schemes :
Here, not far from Alexandria,
Whereas the Terrene and the Red Sea meet.
Being distant less than full a hundred leagues,
I meant to cut a channel to them both
That men might quickly sail to India.
172

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
Then, for a legacy to his sons, he points to that The
part of the world, better than all the rest, which Empire.
remains to conquer:
Look here, my boys, ; see what a world of ground
Lies westward from the midst of Cancer's line,
Unto the rising of this earthly globe ;
Whereas the sun, declining from our sight.
Begins the day with our Antipodes !
And shall I die, and this unconquered ?
Lo, here, my sons, are all the golden mines.
Inestimable drugs and precious stones.
More worth than Asia and all the world beside ;
And from the Antarctic Pole eastward behold
As much more land, which never was descried.
Wherein are rocks of pearl that shine as bright
As all the lamps that beautify the sky !
And shall I die, and this unconquered ?
Here, lovely boys ; what death forbids my life,
That let your lives command in spite of death.
Since the days of Ben Jonson it has been too Serious
much the habit of critics to cast ridicule or con- < Tambur-
tempt upon ' the Tamerlanes and Tamer-Chams
of the late age, which had nothing in them but
scenical strutting and furious vociferation to
warrant them to the ignorant gaper.' This last
speech of Tamburlaine's, like some others that
are given to him, is high and serious ; Hakluyt,
who knew the fascination of the map, and
173

temper.

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
Gilbert, who gave his life in the cause of
empire, might say Amen to it.
'Ey^ The sense of liberty and power, and of belief
bethan in the capacity and destiny of man, which was
quickened by the new discoveries, distinguishes
the literature of the Elizabethan age from the
great backward-looking periods of romance. It
is a literature of youth and hope, with none of
the subtle and poignant flavours that are to be
tasted in a literature of regret and memory. If
Marlowe may in some regards be fitly compared
with Shelley, there is no counterpart in Eliza
bethan literature to the melancholy of Keats.
Many old stories, it is true, were borrowed ;
mediaeval and classical fables were ransacked
for themes. But Spenser's chivalry is a con
vention, and no true revival ; he portrays his
own age, and his own contemporaries, as they
appeared to him ; he too is concerned chiefly
with the future. Plays like Dekker's Olde
Fortunatus show the temper that animates
Marlowe ; the sober moral is almost forgotten
in a maze of delightful wonders. But it would
be wrong to regard a great literature as nothing
174

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
more than the home and haunt of a thing so
evanescent as the spirit of the age. Poetic The un-
. . changing
imagination sits aloof, and studies enduring themes of
themes. Thomas Lodge wrote his gentle P°^'-'7-
pastoral romance of Rosalynd on a voyage of
discovery and pillage ; George Sandys, being
arrived off the coast of Virginia with the colon
ising expedition that succeeded at last, devoted
his spare hours to the translation of Ovid. The
New World did not obliterate the Old, and the
new discoveries did not monopolise the thought
of a century.
In the case, therefore, of the greatest poet of
all, Shakespeare, it is enough if it can be shown
that his imagination was alive to this new world
of speculation and opportunity. A poet's pre
dilections are often more truly seen in his
illustrations and digressions than in his choice
of subject. Sir Walter Raleigh, for instance, Raleigh's
in his long, dreary History of the World is kept pho
far away from almost all that had engaged his
active life. But when he is moved to passion,
his mind reverts to the sea. The greatest pas
sages of his book deal with death and mutability,
175

m eta-
dors.

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES

His
habitual thoughts.

Shakes peare and
the sea.

and continually iUustrate human life from the
experience of voyagers. ' When we once come
in sight of the port of death, to which aU winds
drive us, and when by letting fall that fatal
anchor, which can never be weighed again, the
navigation of this life takes end ; then it is, I
say, that our own cogitations (those sad and
severe cogitations, formerly beaten from us by
our health and felicity) return again, and pay us
to the uttermost for aU the pleasing passages of
our lives past.' And again : ' For myself, if I
have in anything served my country, and prized
it before my private ; the general acceptation
can yield me no other profit at this time than
doth a fair sunshine day to a seaman after ship-
wrack, and the contrary no other harm than an
outragious tempest after the port attained.'
Images like these, rising to the memory when
the thought is most spontaneous and sincere,
speak to the habitual workings of the mind, and
are more convincing than the most elaborate
descriptive sea-piece.
Though he was inland bred, it is certain that
Shakespeare knew and loved the sea. The
176

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
handling of the ship in the Tempest, and the
talk of the sailors in the storm-scene of Pericles
have excited the admiration of experienced
judges. The single grave charge brought
against his competence as a navigator is based
on the two allusions in the Tempest to the
' glasses ' formerly used as a measure of time at
sea, and now superseded by beUs. From a His single
error.
comparison of these two passages it seems that
Shakespeare believed that the glasses measured
hours, whereas they measured half-hours.-^ He
could not have made this mistake if he had been
moderately conversant with life at sea. His
^The passages are: Act I. Sc. ii. 1. 240, where, just
after the wreck, Prospero asks the time ;
Ariel. Past the mid season.
Prospero. At least two glasses. The time 'twixt six
and now
Must by us both be spent most preciously,
and Act V. 1. 223, at the close of the play, where the Boat
swain reports : Our ship.
Which but three glasses since we gave out split.
Is tight, and yare, and bravely rigged, as when
We first put out to sea.
There is a similar error in All's Well that Ends Well, Act
II. Sc. i.
M 177

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
habitual carelessness, it is true, may be invoked
to save his reputation as a seaman. But many
other passages of his writing testify rather to a
love of the sea than to a love of navigation.
Venus, when Adonis breaks away from her, is
compared to 'One on shore
Gazing upon a late-embarked friend,
Till the wild waves will have him seen no more.
Whose ridges with the meeting clouds contend :
So did the merciless and pitchy night
Fold in the object that did feed her sight.'
And his most famous descriptions, like that
which occurs in King Henry IV's lament over
the unattainable sleep, exhibit a marvellous
power of poetic imagination and diction at work
His upon the material of common knowledge. The
seamen, whom he sketches unerringly, were to
be met on shore. A real sailor's chanty, unlike
any other song in the Plays, is given to Stephano
in the Tempest :
' The master, the swabber, the boatswain, and I,
The gunner, and his mate.
Loved Moll, Meg, and Marian, and Margery,
But none of us cared for Kate.'
178

sailors.

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
This Uttle lyric, with its ' scurvy tune ' sug
gests life ashore, in the taverns of Deptford and
Wapping. There is more technical knowledge
of the sea than might have been expected in
Shakespeare's plays, but no exact inference can
be drawn from it. Allusionsto the sea.
The extent to which the sea and sea-faring
dominated the imagination of Shakespeare may
be better judged in more indirect fashion, from
his figures and aUusions. It is not merely that
in at least a dozen of his plays there are sea
faring characters, or voyages, or scenes laid on
the sea-coast. There is none of his contem
poraries whose works are so full of the senti
ment of the sea. To take one play out of many
that would serve equally well, in Othello the
scene is laid at Venice and Cyprus, so that
nautical affairs bulk largely in it. But this is
not enough to explain the frequency and the
magnificence of Shakespeare's allusions. The
height of joy and of tragic passion constantly
find their most adequate expression in metaphor
taken from the sea. So in the meeting of
OtheUo with Desdemona at Cyprus : * Othello.'
179

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
' O my soul's joy !
If after every tempest come such calms,
May the winds blow till they have waken'd death ;
And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas,
Olympus-high, and duck again as low
As hell's from heaven ! If it were now to die,
'Twere now to be most happy.'
So, again, in Othello's reply to lago's counsels
of patience :
' Never, lago. Like to the Pontic sea
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont ;
Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace.
Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love.
Till that a capable, and wide revenge
Swallow them up.'
So, again, in Ludovico's last apostrophe to
lago: * O Spartan dog
More fell than anguish, hunger, or the sea.'
In the greatness of OtheUo's passion there is
the lift and the wash of the sea ; in the inhuman
treachery of lago there is its cruelty and its
mystery.
Borrowed There is evidence enough, in well-known
passages, of Shakespeare's acquaintance with the
discoveries of the voyagers. The name Caliban
1 80

names.

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
is almost certainly a distortion of Cannibal, and
Setebos is a divinity of the Patagonians, de
scribed by Master Francis Fletcher, in an
account of Drake's great voyage, as ' Settaboth,
that is, the Divell, whom they name their great
god.' But it was the reports brought home by
the Virginian adventurers that set Shakespeare's
imagination to work. The colony was planted Virginia.
in 1 609 ; and the first Governor, Lord Dela
ware, was diligent in building towns and forts,
and in bringing the Indians under control. Sir
George Somers, deputy-Governor, was ship
wrecked on the Bermudas, which were in ill
repute as the haunt of wicked spirits and foul
weather, but were found by the castaways to be
temperate, fruitful, and pleasant. The tale of
these adventures, brought by word of mouth,
or pubUshed in The Discovery of the Barmudas,
otherwise called the He of Divels (16 10), — a
tract by Sylvester Jourdain, one of Sir George
Somers' company, — gave the finest and subtlest
wit in the world a theme for a play. The
Tempest is a fantasy of the New World. It is The
too fuU of the ether of poetry, and too many- ^ ^^^ '

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
sided to be called a satire, yet Shakespeare,
almost alone, saw the problem of American
settlement in a detached light ; and a spirit of
humorous criticism runs riot in the lighter
scenes. The drunken butler, accepting the wor
ship and allegiance of Caliban, and swearing him
in by making him kiss the bottle, is a fair repre
sentative of the idle and dissolute men who were
shipped to the Virginian colony. The situation
Miranda, of Miranda was perhaps suggested by the story
of Virginia Dare, grand-daughter of Captain
John White, the first child born in America of
English parents. She was born in 1587 and
christened along with Manteo, one of the
Indians who had visited England with Cap
tains Amadas and Barlow. That same year
she was abandoned, along with the other
colonists. In 1607, when the settlement was
next renewed, it was reported that there were
still seven of the English alive among the
Indians, ' four men, two boys, and one maid.'
The strange girlhood of this one maid, if she
were Virginia Dare, may well have set Shake
speare's fancy working. And the portrait of
182

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
Caliban, with his affectionate loyalty to the Caliban.
drunkard, his adoration of valour, his love of
natural beauty and feeling for music and poetry,
his hatred and superstitious fear of his task
master, and the simple cunning and savagery
of his attempts at revenge and escape — all this
is a composition wrought from fragments of
travellers' tales, and shows a wonderfully
accurate and sympathetic understanding of
unciviUsed man.
These travellers' tales gave a new import to The
the old fables of Arcadia and the Golden Age. ^
The poetic idea of the original simplicity and
virtue of man seemed to be confirmed by the
warrant of sober fact, and steadUy gained in
acceptance, until, in the Eighteenth Century, it
overturned the institutions and disturbed the
peace of Europe. Montaigne, in his essay Of
Cannibals, expresses the view of a philosophic
observer. ' I find,' he says, speaking of the
Indians, ' that there is nothing barbarous and
savage in this nation, by anything that I can
gather, excepting that everyone gives the title of
barbarism to everything that is not in use in his
183

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
own country. . . . They are savages at the
same rate that we say fruits are wild, which
nature produces of herself and by her own
ordinary progress ; whereas in truth we ought
rather to call those wild, whose natures we have
changed by our artifice, and diverted from the
Mon- common order. ... I am sorry that Lycur-
taigne on i -ni i i
Cannibals, gus and Plato had no knowledge of them : for
to my apprehension, what we now see in those
nations does not only surpass all the pictures
with which the poets have adorned the. Golden
Age, and all their inventions in feigning a happy
state of man, but, moreover, the fancy and
even the wish and desire of philosophy itself;
so native and so pure a simplicity, as we by
experience see to be in them, could never enter
into the poet's imagination, nor could they ever
believe that human society could have been
maintained with so little artifice and human
patchwork.' Then follows the famous passage
which Shakespeare borrowed for Gonzalo's
rpjjg description of his perfect commonwealth, in the
perfect Tempest. ' I should teU Plato,' says Mon-
Common-
wealth. taigne, ' that it is a nation wherein there is no
184

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no
science of numbers, no name of magistrate or
political superiority ; no use of service, riches
or poverty; no contracts, no successions, no
dividends, no properties ; no employments but
those of leisure ; no respect of kindred, but
common ; no clothing, no agriculture, no metal,
no use of coin or wine ; the very words that
signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice,
envy, detraction, pardon, never heard of. How
much would he find his imaginary Republic
short of this perfection.?'
The humours of this ideal as a practical Shakes-
theory of colonisation tickled Shakespeare's and the
fancy; the combination of the virtues of the ^°^^^'°-Age.
Golden Age with that extension of trade and
of sovereignty which was aimed at by the
explorers made a delightful paradox; and he
interrupts Gonzalo's speech with a running fire
of scornful comment from the two men of sin.
Yet he, too, came under the speU of the Golden
Age, and, for aU we know, would have been
wiUing to say with Montaigne, ' I am some
times troubled that we were not sooner
i8s

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
acquainted with these people, and that they were
not discovered in those better times when there
were men much more able to judge of them than
we are.' He had always coveted a retreat from
the struggles and clamour of the Court and
city ; but the retreats pictured in his later plays
have a primitive simplicity which is lacking in
the pleasure-gardens of the King of Navarre
and the masquerading of the forest of Arden.
Perdita, who, like Miranda, is prompted in all
her words and actions by a plain and holy inno
cence, is something of a devotee of Nature.
She will have no flowers in her garden, not the
fairest of the season, if Art has had a share in
their production ; and she is deaf to the
The reproofs of experience. The religion in which
nature. Belarius, the upright banished courtier in
Cymbeline, educates his adopted sons is a pure
religion of naturalism ; their brief ritual is
performed as they come out from the cave
where they house:
Belarius. Stoop, boys : this gate
Instructs you how to adore the heavens, and bows you
To Morning's holy ofiice : the gates of monarchs
Are arch'd so high, that giants may jet through
186

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
And keep their impious turbans on, without
Good morrow to the Sun. Hail, thou fair Heaven
We house i' the rock, yet use thee not so hardly
As prouder livers do.
Guiderius. Hail, Heaven !
Arviragus. Hail, Heaven !
Belarius. Now for our mountain sport.
In these rocks Belarius has lived, he says, for
twenty years, and during that time has paid more
pious debts to heaven than in all the fore-end
of his Ufe. A kind of weariness of institutions
pervades Shakespeare's later plays ; and it is
easy to beUeve that the fascinating tales told
by the voyagers quickened his longing for a
simpler society, and contributed something to
his magical descriptions of innocence and
kindliness, whether in the wizard's cell on the
island, or on the shepherd's lawn in Bohemia,
or in the cave among the mountains of Wales.
There is no catching Shakespeare in the act of Influence
theft; his creative power transforms and in- Voyages
spires aU that it touches, and brines it obedient °" .'*^^ ,
° national
to his own thought. It is certain that he was a imagin-
poet; and there certainty ends. But whether
it count for much or little in the history of his
187

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
thought, the great fact of the Voyages can never
be neglected, nor its influence on the national
imagination denied. In the partial and naked
record preserved for us by Hakluyt are in
scribed the deeds which for half a century
excited wild emotions, kindled emulation in
the young, provided strange food for the intel
lect, and gave strength and purpose to the
activities of a nation. What this scholar or that
learned we can only guess ; but here was the
The school of the people. It was a great training-
of the ground, and gave noble exercise to those quali-
peope. ^jgg q£ strenuousness, high carelessness, and
almost braggart magnanimity which are the
distinguishing mark of the Elizabethans. In
those days the prudential virtues hid their heads,
to wait for a less stormy season, when coasting
voyages for profit should come into fashion
again. The poets and men of action vied with
each other in the effort to outshine deeds with
• words, and to impoverish words with deeds.
Both were fantastic and extravagant, but the
morbid literary extravagance which refuses the
test of action, and claims to be judged as a
1 88

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
thing apart, in a filigree world of its own crea
tion, belongs to ages less full-blooded and
vigorous and sane.
This great background and seminary of The
action gave its colour and character to the litera- EHzabeth
ture of the Elizabethan age. The later and and the
. Age of
lesser outburst of Romantic poetry at the begin- Revived
ning of the Nineteenth Century had origins
curiously different. As the Voyagers were the
begetters of the Elizabethan age, so were the
Encyclopaedists of the age of revived Romance.
The later movement had its impulse and inspira
tion from the long labours of critical thought
and the hopes of awakening science. The
poetry of the Nineteenth Century, unlike the
poetry of the Elizabethans, began in reaction
and protest. For three generations and more
before William Blake struck the note that was
to dominate Romantic poetry, the disciples of
positive knowledge had been busy at their
work of questioning, examining, undermining,
condemning, without hesitation or remorse ; -pjjg
and the poets of the new aee were the rebel- poetry of
' ° reaction
lious children of the destroyer. Some of them, and escape.
189

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
taking advantage of the conquests of critical
knowledge in the domain of history, flung
themselves back into the Middle Ages, and
attempted to live as pensioners on the faith of
a bygone time. Others, fired by the hope of
a new happiness to be achieved by experimental
science and philanthropy, lived in their dreams
of the future, built cloud-castles of wonderftil
tenuity and beauty, and peopled bubble-worlds
with phantoms of men. Almost all the poetry
of the age is ' sicklied o'er with the pale cast of
thought.' Those of the poets who, like Keats,
celebrate the joys of the moment, for the most
part regard these joys as a paUiation only, a
brief respite and escape from the prevailing
melancholy. They glut their sorrows ' on a
morning rose, or on the rainbow of the salt
sand-wave.' It is the distinction of Words
worth that he alone among the greater poets
did not renounce or blaspheme the age and the
world, but found in it room enough for hope
Diseases of and faith and lasting joy. But the poetry of
the age, taken as a whole, is disaffected — out
of sympathy with the main motives that stir
190

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
men to action, and liable to all the diseases
generated by abstract thought. The worst of
these, which attack only weak constitutions,
producing kinks in the brain, and making men
the fevered and querulous slaves of ideas they
are not strong enough to master, may be dis
covered in not a few of the later followers and
adherents of the Romantic movement. It was
the misfortune of the age that, struggling in the
meshes of thought, it found no sufficient oppor
tunity for clear, united, whole-hearted, and
decisive action. Some of its poets were ardent Godwin
students of Godwin's Political Justice, a book Hakluyt.
alert and blind, fiiU of vaporous casuistry, giving
ample exercise to the logical faculty, and abso
lutely ignoring those passions, desires and
powers, which are the breath of human life.
The Elizabethan poets were happier in their
teachers^-they had Hakluyt's Voyages.
When all is said, the chief influence of Hak
luyt and his noble company must not be looked
for in literature. Literature is only one expres
sion of the imaginative life of a people, and not The value
of deeds.
the most important. It is true that poetry can
191

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
taking advantage of the conquests of critical
knowledge in the domain of history, flung
themselves back into the Middle Ages, and
attempted to live as pensioners on the faith of
a bygone time. Others, fired by the hope of
a new happiness to be achieved by experimental
science and philanthropy, lived in their dreams
of the fiiture, built cloud-castles of wonderful
tenuity and beauty, and peopled bubble-worlds
with phantoms of men. Almost all the poetry
of the age is ' sicklied o'er with the pale cast of
thought.' Those of the poets who, like Keats,
celebrate the joys of the moment, for the most
part regard these joys as a palliation only, a
brief respite and escape from the prevailing
melancholy. They glut their sorrows ' on a
morning rose, or on the rainbow of the salt
sand-wave.' It is the distinction of Words
worth that he alone among the greater poets
did not renounce or blaspheme the age and the
world, but found in it room enough for hope
Diseases of and faith and lasting joy. But the poetry of
the age, taken as a whole, is disaffected — out
of sympathy with the main motives that stir
190

POETRY AND IMAGINATION
men to action, and liable to all the diseases
generated by abstract thought. The worst of
these, which attack only weak constitutions,
producing kinks in the brain, and making men
the fevered and querulous slaves of ideas they
are not strong enough to master, may be dis
covered in not a few of the later followers and
adherents of the Romantic movement. It was
the misfortune of the age that, struggling in the
meshes of thought, it found no sufficient oppor
tunity for clear, united, whole-hearted, and
decisive action. Some of its poets were ardent Godwin
students of Godwin's Political Justice, a book Hakluyt.
alert and blind, full of vaporous casuistry, giving
ample exercise to the logical faculty, and abso
lutely ignoring those passions, desires and
powers, which are the breath of human life.
The Elizabethan poets were happier in their
teachers — they had Hakluyt's Voyages.
When all is said, the chief influence of Hak
luyt and his noble company must not be looked
for in literature. Literature is only one expres
sion of the imaginative life of a people, and not The value
, . of deeds.
the most important. It is true that poetry can
191

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES
impression of excitement or emulation upon our
minds as so many almanacks.' But they held
in them the promise of Empire. The ideas of
colonial expansion and of the command of the
sea had captured the nation ; the seeds had been
scattered, and were germinating in tens of
The thousands of minds. From the sea England
island and , , , 1,1 ¦ r
the sea. had been peopled by successive waves of con
quest or immigration ; to the sea, after a long
interval, she gave back a race who had learned
that there and there alone could her safety be
made good and her name upheld. As a people
— to borrow a phrase from the poetry of com
mon speech — ^we follow the sea ; it will be an
ill day for us when the tides that wash the world
run their ancient courses, and we may not
follow.

INDEX.

Albion, Nova, account of the
discovery of, by Sir Francis
Drake (1578), 94.
'Albion's England,' by Wm.
Warner (1602), 158.
Alcazar, battle of, death of
Thomas Stukeley at, 167.
Aleppo, English Consul at,
165.
Alexander VI., Pope, Bull of
Partition of (1493), 12.
Alva, Duke of, in the Low
Countries, 39, 79.
Amadas, Captain Philip, sent
to Virginia by Sir Walter
Raleigh, 60 ; and Manteo,
1S2.
Ambassador, English, at
Constantinople, 165.
America, known to Plato as
Atlantis, 40.
Antonio, Don, and Richard
Hakluyt in Paris, 122 ; in
England, 170- 171.
Armada, Spanish, Drake and,
97,98-
Azores Islands, settlements
on, by the Portuguese
(1448), 4-5 ; Madre de Dios
captured off (1592), 136.
Babylon, English Consul at,
165.
Bacon, Francis, one of Queen
Elizabeth's great men, 38 ;
quotation from, 6$, 99,

107-108; 'Considerations
touching a War with Spain'
by, 113.
Baffin Bay, Captain Davis
in, 44.
Bajazet, Emperor, defeat of,
170.
Barlow, Arthur, Captain, sent
to Virginia by Sir Walter
Raleigh, 60 ; and Manteo,
182.
Bellinger, Stephen, of Rouen,
and Hakluyt, 123.
' Bermudas, Discovery of the,*
etc. (1610), by Sylvester
Jourdain, its influence on
the 'Tempest,' 181-182.
Best, George, 'Discourse*
by, 146.
Blake, William, 189.
Bojador, Cape, discovery of,
by Prince Henry the Navi
gator (1439), 4-5-
Borough, William (1536-99),.
and Hakluyt, 121.
Brazil, Villegagnon's voyage
to, 50 ; Southampton mer
chants traders to (c. 1 540)^.
73-
Bristol, Richard Hakluyt,
prebendary of (1586))
132.
Buccaneers, religion of Eng
lish, 53.
Burghley, see Cecil, Sir
William.

195

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES

Burton, Robert, quotation
from, 59.
Bussorah, English Consul at,
165.
Buts, Thomas, and Richard
Hakluyt, 31.
Cabot, John, discoveries
(1497), 13-
Cabot, Sebastian, voyages of,
30-35-
Cacafuego, the, Spanish ship,
taken by Sir Francis Drake,
94.
Cadiz, harbour, 98, 104.
Caliban, 180, 181.
California, coasted by Drake,
94- . .
Camden, William, quotations
from, 79, 80, 95, 99; on
Tom Stukeley, 167.
Canada, expeditions to, 14.
Canary Islands, Amadas and
Barlow at, 60.
Cannibals, essay of Mon
taigne on, 183, 184.
Carthagena (West Indies),
sacked by Sir Francis
Drake (1586), 96-97 ; bom
barded by Drake and
Hawkins, 76 ; Spanish
ship captured by Drake
at (1570), 81.
Cartier, Jacques, of S. Malo,
discoveries of, 14-15.
Caspian Sea, description, 170.
Cathay, North-east passage
to, 34 ; Sir Humphrey Gil
bert and, 26, 39, 40.
Cavendish, Thomas, of Trim-
ley, Suffolk (1560-92), 44,
106-112.
Cecil, Sir Robert, dedication
to, 130 ; and Richard
Hakluyt, 121.

Cecil, Sir William, Lord
Burghley, Lord Treasurer
of England, policy of, 65,
70; and Drake, 87, 90;
and Hakluyt, 121.
Chancelor, Richard, his dis
covery of S. Nicholas in
Moscovy, 35, 158.
Chapman, George, ' De
Guiana Carmen epicum'
by (1596), 159-
Chaucer, Geoffrey, quotation
from, 151.
Chavez, Hieronymo or Gero
nimo de, Spanish Professor
of Navigation, 129.
Chichester, Anthony Watson,
bishop of ( 1 596-1605), and
Richard Hakluyt, 122.
Chiozza, surrender of the
Genoese fleet at (1380), 4.
Christ Church, Oxford, Hak
luyt at (1570), 125.
Civita Vecchia, Tom Stuke
ley at, 166.
Clifford, George, Earl of
Cumberland (l 558-1603),
voyages by, 105.
Colonising, plan for, of Sid
ney and Raleigh, 138.
Columbus, Bartholomew, and
Henry VIL, 8.
Columbus, Christopher, story
of, 6.
Constantinople, English Am
bassador at, 165.
Contractation House, or Ex
change, at Seville, 129.
Cooke, John, narrative in
' The World Encompassed,'
92 note.
Corbett, Julian, ' Drake and
the Tudor Navy, by, 71-72.
Cosmas, ' Universal Chris
tian Topography,' by, 16.

196

INDEX

Countries, Low, Sir Hum
phrey Gilbert in the, 39.
Crosse, Sir Robert, boards
the Madre de Dios, 136.
Cuba, conquest of, 11.
Cumberland, Earl of, see
Clifford, George.
Cumberland's Island, see
Meta Incognita.
Cumberland Sound, explored
by Captain Davis, 44.
' Cymbeline,' quotation from,
186-187.
Daniel, Samuel, ' Muso
philus,' by (1601), 161.
Dare, Virginia, 182.
Darien, Gulf of, Sir Francis
Drake at, 81 ; colony of
Vasco Nunez de Balboa, 14.
Davis Strait, discovered by
John Davis or Davys, 44.
Davis, John (1550-1605),
story of, 42, 46.
' Decades, Book of,' by Peter
Martyr, translated by
Richard Eden (1555), 54 ;
published by Hakluyt
(1587), 134-
Dekker, 'Olde Fortunatus,'
by, 174-
Delaware, Lord, first gover
nor of Virginia (1609), 181.
Delight, the, flagship of Sir
Humphrey Gilbert, lost, 58.
Deptford, Drake knighted at,
70.
'Diseases, Curing of Hot,'
etc., by George Watson, 1 30.
Doughty, Master Thomas,
judgment on and execution
by Sir Francis Drake, 87.
Drake, Edmund, naval chap
lain, father of Sir Francis,
75-

Drake, Sir Francis, at Nova
Albion, 94 ; in S. Juan
d'Ulloa, 7y ; voyage of to
the West Indies (1595),
100 ; death of (1596), 103 ;
and Thomas Doughty's
judgment and execution
(1578), 87 ; and the King
ship of Nova Albion, 94 ;
in the Spanish Indies, 36;
treasures brought home
by, 43 ; and the Virginian
Colonists, 64 ; nickname
of, 70 ; ' Drake and the
Tudor Navy,' by Julian
Corbett, 72 ; captain of the
Judith, 75 ; exploits of, 81 ;
spoils of, in West Indies
(1572), 81,97; 'Sir Francis
Drake revived,' by Philip
Nichols (1626), 83 ; the
Armada and, 98 ; Lisbon^
99 ; ' Sir Francis Drake,
his voyage, 1595,' by
Thomas Maynarde, loo-i -,.
Warner on, 159.
Drayton, Michael, quotation
from, 54, 125.
Eden, Richard, preface to-
his translation of Peter
Martyr's ' Decades,' 54.
Edward VI. of England and.
company of merchant ad
venturers, 34.
El Dorado, Sir Walter
Raleigh and his plans
about, 65, 112.
Elizabeth, Queen (i 533-1 603).
and Martin Frobisher, 42 ;
her letters patent to Sir
Humphrey Gilbert for colo
nising America (1578), 57 ;.
her men, 38 ; her policy^
67 ; her navy, 68.

197

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES

Elizabeth, the, of Sir Francis
Drake's fleet, 85 ; return
of, to England, 94.
Enriquez, Don Martin, new
viceroy of Mexico (1567),
at San Juan d'Ulloa, 77.
Esquimaux, Captain Fro
bisher's first acquaintance
with, 42.
Essex, Robert Devereux, Earl
of, gentleman adventurer,
106.
Eyton, or Yatton, in Here
ford, Richard Hakluyt,
Esquire of, his family and,
124.
Fenner, Thomas, Captain,
and the Armada, 104.
Fenton, Edward, death of
(1603), 38.
Fletcher, chaplain of Sir
Francis Drake's fleet, 51,
88.
Florida, Soto's expedition to,
134-
'Fortunatus, Olde,' by Dek
ker, 174.
Frampton, John, 'Arte de
Navegar,' translated by
(1581), 129 note.
Frobisher, Sir Martin (1535-
94), voyages by, 36-42 ;
vice-admiral in Drake's
fleet (1585), 96; death of
(1594), 104.
Frobisher's Straits, dis
covered by Captain Fro
bisher, 42.
Froude, J. A., and the Eng
lish voyages, 29.
Gabriel, the Captain Fro
bisher in, looking for the
fleet, 42.

Galvano, Antonio, ' Dis
coveries of the World,' by,
134-
Gama, Vasco da, through
the Indian Ocean (1497), 5.
Gedney, in Lincolnshire,
Hakluyt rector of (1612),
133-
Genoa, surrender of the fleet
of, at Chiozza (1380), 4.
Gilbert, Doctor, and George
Watson's work, 131.
Gilbert, Sir Humphrey (1539-
83), and the north-west
passage, 39.
Goa, English at, 166.
Godwin, William, 'Political
Justice,' by, 191.
Gold, in the Philippines,
32-
Golden Hind, the, in Sir
Humphrey Gilbert's ex
pedition (1583), 57.
Golden Hind, Drake's ship,
see Pelican.
Good Hope, Cape of, dis
covered by Bartholomew
Diaz (1494). 5-
Granada, 103.
Greenland, coasted by Davis,
44- .
Grenville, Sir Richard, colony
in Virginia founded by, 64 ;
39, io6-
Guayaquil, town in Peru,
94-
Guiana, Sir Walter Raleigh's
attempt at colonising, 112;
'The Discovery of the
Large, Rich, and beautiful
Empire of Guiana,' by Sir
Walter Raleigh, 114.
' Guiana Carmen Epicum,
De,' by George Chapman
(1596), 159-

198

INDEX

Guinea, Portuguese posses
sion, 23.
Hakluyt, Richard (1552-
1616), in correspondence
with Sir Francis Walsing
ham, facsimile of, 131 ; and
Thomas Buts,of thevoyage
to Labrador, 31 ; and the
Catholic missions, 50; 'Dis
course on the Western
Planting,'by, 50 ; character
and works of, 1 19 ; at Paris,
and Don Antonio, 122 ;
friends of, 123 ; life of, 124 ;
first work of, 1 27 ; chaplain
of Sir Edward Stafford,
ambassador in Paris(i583),
131 ; ecclesiastical prefer
ment of, 132 ; literary
works of, 133-134 ; quota
tion from, 134-135, 140-
141, 142-143 ; living of
James Town, Virginia,
given to, 138; method of
his works, 143 ; 'Voyages
of,' 151 ; reprint of the
'Voyages of,' 192.
Hakluyt, Richard, of the
Middle Temple (cousin of
the author), 125.
' Hakluyt Society,' work done
by the, 145.
Hawkins, Sir John (1532-
1 595), in the Spanish Indies,
36 ; on the coast of Guinea,
39 ; head of the English
Navy (1580), 70 ; voyages
by, and his ancestors,
73 ; at San Juan d'Ulloa
(1567), n ; last voyage of
Drake and (1595), 100;
death of, at Puerto Rico,
103; and Hakluyt, 130-1 ;
Warner on, 158 ; and the

Spanish Squadron (1567),
169.
Hawkins, William (d. 1554?),
of Plymouth, father of Sir
John, 73.
Hayes, Edward, captain and
owner of the Golden Hind,
58-59.
Henry VIII. of England, his
interest in naval matters,
Henry the Navigator, son of
John I., King of Portugal,
discoveries of (1410), 4-5.
Hispaniola Island, Mount
Sopora in, 23 ; successive
names of, 26 ; Sir John
Hawkins and the negro
trade in (1562), 74.
Hore, Master, voyage of, to
Newfoundland and Cape
Breton (1536), 31.
Howard, Lord Charles, of
Effingham, Earl of Not
tingham (1536- 1624), 104;
and Hakluyt, 121 ; and the
Spanish ships, 170.
Hudson's Straits, discovered
by Captain Frobisher,
43-
Indies, West, first voyage of
Sir John Hawkins to (i 562-
3), 74 ; Sir John Hawkins
and Sir Francis Drake at,
36-
Italy, navy of, 4 ; navigators
of, 12.
Jackman, Charles, North
east voyage by (1580), 35-
36-
James Town, Virginia, living
of, offered to Hakluyt,
138.

199

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES

Jenkinson, Anthony (d. 1611),
and the overland route- to
Cathay (1558), 35 ; and the
North-east passage, 39 ;
and Hakluyt, 121.
Jennings, Master ofthe Toby,
and Hakluyt, 122.
Jesus, the, of Lubeck, lent by
Queen Elizabeth to Sir
John Hawkins (i 564), 74 ;
taken at S. Juan d'Ulloa,
78.
Jourdain, Sylvester, ' Dis
covery of the Bermudas,'
etc., by (1610), 181.
Judith, the, of Sir John
Hawkins' fleet (1567), 75,
78.
Keats, 118, 174, 190.
' Kubla Khan,' by Coleridge,
171.
Kublai, or Kubla Khan's
Court, described by Marco
Polo and Odoric, 19.
Lamb, Charles, and the Eng
lish drama, 154.
Lancaster, Sir James, his
voyage to the East Indies,
105.
Lane, Ralph, governor of
Virginia, 64.
Lapland, death of Sir Hugh
Willoughby. in (1553), 34-
35-
Las Casas, Bartholomew de,
Spanish Bishop, work of,
in the Spanish Indies,
52.
Laudonniere, Captain Ren6,
his account of Florida,
translated by Hakluyt
(1587), 133-
Leon, in West Indies, 103.

Leon, Juan Ponce de, gover
nor of Puerto Rico, in
Florida (15 1 2), 18.
Licence, granted to Fro
bisher and Davis by Queen
Elizabeth (1575), 42.
Linschoten, John Huighen
van, of Enkhuizen, quota
tion from, 107.
Lisbon, the English army
under Drake and Sir John
Norris at (1589), 99;
Thomas Stukeley at, 166.
Lock, Michael, agent for the
Muscovy Company, and
Frobisher's North-west
voyages (1575), 42.
Lodge, Thomas, and Hak
luyt, 127; 'Rosalynd' by,
175.
Lumley, Lord, and Hakluyt,
122.
Madeira Island, discovered
by Prince Henry the Navi
gator (1417), 5-
Madre de Dios, the, captured
by Sir Robert Crosse, 136.
Magellan, Fernando, at Port
S. Julian, and the execu
tion of his captain, 87.
Magellan, Strait of, Sir
Francis Drake in, 93 ; dis
covery of by Magellan, 14.
' Maine Historical Society,'
and the Hakluyt MS.
(1877), 50-
Malabar, Vasco de Gama at
(1498), 5-
' Malta, Jew of,' 169.
Manteo, Indian of Virginia,
brought to England, 182.
Marigold, the, ship of Sir
Francis Drake, 89 ; lost
sight of, 93.

INDEX

Marlowe, ' Tamburlaine,' by,
1 68 ; Shelley compared to,
174.
Martin V., Pope, Bull of,
and the discovered lands
(1444), 5-
Martyr, Peter, ' Decades '
by, translated by Richard
Eden (1555), 54; pub
Hshed by Hakluyt (1587),
133-4-
Maynarde, Thomas, ' Sir
Francis Drake, his voyage,
1595,' 100 ; quotation from,
103.
Medina, Pedro de, ' Arte de
Navegar,' by (1545), 129.
Mercator, Gerard, and Hak
luyt, 121.
Merchant Adventurers, Com
pany of, 34.
Merchants, Company of, and
the Virginian patent of Sir
Waher Raleigh ( 1 588), 1 39.
Meta Incognita, or North
west, discovered by Fro
bisher, 42.
Mexico, conquered by Spain,
3':
Mexico Bay, EngHshmen
landed at, by Sir John
Hawkins, 78.
' Miranda,' or Virginia Dare,
born in Virginia, 182.
Missionaries, Franciscan, dis
coveries of, 17-19.
Moluccas, the. Sir Francis
Drake at, 94.
Monson, Sir William (1569-
1643), author of 'Naval
Tracts,' 105.
Montaigne, essay of, on
'Cannibals,' 183.
Monte Corvino, John de,
travels of, 18-19.

More, Sir Thomas, 138.
Moscow, Richard Chancelor
and his company at the
court of, 35.
Muffett, Captain, and Hak
luyt, 123.
' Musophilus,' by Samuel
Daniel (1601), 161.
' Navegar, Arte de,' by Pedro
de Medina (1545), 129.
' Navigations, Principal,' by
Hakluyt, 132.
Navy, English, of Queen
Elizabeth, 68-9.
Negroes, trade in, and Sir
John Hawkins, 74.
Newfoundland, intended co
lony in, by Sir Humphrey
Gilbert (1583), 58.
Nicaragua, lake of, 103.
Nichols, Philip, preacher,
' Sir Francis Drake re
vived,' by (1626), 83.
Nile, river, sources of the,
explored by Nero, 23.
Nombre de Dios, voyage of
Sir Francis Drake to
(1572), 81 ; taken by Sir
Francis Drake (1595), 103.
Norris, Sir John (1547?- 1 597),
and Drake, at Lisljon, 99.
Nottingham, Earl of, see
Howard.
Nova Zembla, Sir Hugh Wil
loughby at, 33 ; Stephen
Burrough at, 34.
Nunez, Vasquez, de Balboa,
Pacific Ocean sighted by,
13-14-
Odoric, Friar, of Pordenone,
and Kublai Khan at Pekin,.
19 ; Kublai Khan's Court
described by, 19-20.

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES

Oppenheim, ' Administration
of the Royal Navy,' by
(1509-1660) (1896), 69.
Orinoco river, mouths of,
Christopher Columbus at,
16; Sir Walter Raleigh
at (1595), 114-
Ortelius, Abraham, and Hak
luyt, 121.
Oxenham, John, of Plymouth
(d. 1575), on the Pacific
Ocean, 104.
Oxford, University of, Christ
Church, Hakluyt at, 125.
Pacific Ocean, Drake in,
93-
Palmas, Las, Hawkins and
Drake repulsed at (1595),
103.
Panama, products of Peru
vian mines brought to,
81 ; Drake and Hawkins
beaten off, 103.
Paradise, site of the earthly,
16-17.
Paris, Hakluyt at, and Don
Antonio, 122.
Parmentier, discoveries of
the brothers, 14.
Passage, North-west, the. Sir
Humphrey Gilbert on, 39,
40, 26 ; voyages to, 37, 40,
44; 'Discourse to prove
a passage to Cathay,' by
Sir H. Gilbert, 40.
Peele, ' Battle of Alcazar,'
by, 167,
Pelican, the, flagship of Sir
Francis Drake (1577), 85.
Pert, Sir Thomas, and the
North-west passage (15 17),
31-
Peru, conquered by Spain,
31 ; produce of the mines

of, brought to Nombre de
Dios, 81-82.
Pet, Arthur, North-east voy
age by, 35.
Philip II., King of Spain,
becomes King of Portugal,
96.
Philippine Islands, death of
Magellan at, 14 ; Drake
at, 94.
Philipps, SirThomas, Richard
Hakluyt's MS. in posses
sion of, 50.
Pius v.. Pope, and Queen
Elizabeth's enemies, 80.
Piano Carpini, John de, tra
vels of, 18.
'Planting, Western,' 'Dis
course on the,' by Richard
Hakluyt (1584), 50, 132.
Plate, River, English ships
on the, 166.
Plato, America known to, as
Atlantis, 40.
Polo, Marco, the Venetian
( 1 2 54- 1 324), accounts of the
travels of, 19.
Portugal, discoveries of the
Kings of, 4, 23 ; Philip IL,
King of Spain, becomes
King of, 96.
Portuguese, early conquests
of the, 23.
Prester John, 19.
Pryhouse, Mr., of Guernsey,
and Hakluyt, 123.
Puerto Bello, Spanish West
Indian Port, death of Sir
Francis Drake between
Escudo Island and (1596),
103.
Puerto Rico, Island of, death
of Sir John Hawkins off, 103.
' Purchas His Pilgrims,' by
Samuel Purchas, 133.

INDEX

Purchas, Samuel, compared
to Richard Hakluyt, 1 20 ;
and the unpublished papers
of Hakluyt, 133.
Quibian, Cacique of Veragua,
27-
Raleigh, Sir Walter (1552-
1618), training of, 39 ; in
Sir Humphrey Gilbert's
expedition (1578), 57 ; and
Virginia (1587), 64; and
El Dorado, 65 ; on the
wealth of Spain, 82 ; 'His
tory of the World,' by,
no ; character of, i lo-il i ;
in El Dorado and Guiana,
112; 'Discovery of the
large, Rich and Beautiful
Empire of Guiana,' by,
114; and Hakluyt, 120;
Virginian Patent of, and
the Company of Merchants
(1588), 139-
Raleigh, the bark. Sir Walter
Raleigh, Vice-Admiral in
(1583), 57.
* Remembrances for a Factor
at Constantinople,' by
Richard Hakluyt the Elder,
142.
Revenge, the fight of, 107.
Ribault, Captain John, minis
ters in his voyages to
Florida, 50.
Ridolfi, plot of, in London,
.79-
Rio de la Hacha, taken by
Sir Francis Drake and
Hawkins, 76 ; burnt, 103.
Roanoke Island, taken pos
session of in Queen Eliza
beth's name by Amadas
and Barlow, 60.

Roberval, John Francis de la
Roche, Lord de, discoveries
of, 15.
Rochester Assizes, 139.
' Rosalynd,' by Thomas
Lodge, 175.
Rouen, Stephen Bellinger of,
and Richard Hakluyt, 123.
Rubruquis, Friar William de,
sent by S. Louis to the
Tartar chiefs, 18.
S. Augustine, fort in Florida,
sacked by Sir F. Drake,
97-
Santiago, sacked by Drake,
96.
S. John Harbour, Drake's
attempt to reach (1596),
103.
S. Juan d'Ulloa, Sir John
Hawkins and Drake in,
76 ; fight in the port of,
ijetween Enghsh and
Spaniards, 77-8.
S. Julian, Port, Sir Francis
Drake at, execution of
Doughty at, 87.
S. Paul's Cathedral, the
Canon of, and the ships
for Labrador (1527), 31.
5. Philip, the, and the Re
venge (1591), 108.
S. Vincent, Cape, seized by
Drake, 98.
Sailors, English, character of,
9- , .
Sandys, George, and his
translation of Ovid, 175.
Sassafras bark, found in
Florida, 123.
Savoy, Hakluyt, chaplain of
the, 133.
Sea-Apostles, the, Spanish
ships, 108.

203

THE ENGLISH VOYAGES

Sebastian, King of Portugal,
and Tom Stukeley, 167.
' Secrets, the Seaman's,' by
John Davis (i 594), 45.
Setebos, or Settaboth, god of
the Patagonians, 181.
Shakespeare, plays of, 151 ;
characters of the plays of,
1 56 ; alleged nautical error
of, in the 'Tempest,' 177.
Shelley, compared to Mar
lowe, 174.
Sidney, Sir Henry, Sir Hum
phrey Gilbert with, in Ire
land, 39.
Sidney, Sir Philip, death of,
at Zutphen (i 586), 63 ; and
Hakluyt, 121 ; dedication
of Hakluyt to, 127.
Sierra Leone, Hawkins and
the capture of negroes at
(1562), 73-4.
Smith, master's mate of the
Toby, and Hakluyt, 122-3.
Smith, Sir Thomas, and the
East India Company, 147.
Solomon, ships of, 23.
Somers, Sir George, ship
wreck of, on the Bermudas,
181.
Soto's ' Expedition to Florida,'
translated (1609), 134.
Southampton, voyages to
Brazil by some merchants
of, 73-
Spenser, Edmund, quotation
from the 'Faerie Queene,'
164-5 > and his works, 174.
Spices, in Philippine Islands,
32-
Squirrel, the, of Sir Hum
phrey Gilbert's expedition
(1583), 57 ; loss of, in a
storm, 59.
Stafford, Sir Edward (1552-

1605), Queen Elizabeth's
ambassador at Paris, 131.
Stow, John, quotation from,
70, 66.
Stukeley, Thomas, adven
tures of, 167.
Suez Canal, 'Tamburlaine'
and, 172.
Swallow, the, of Sir Hum
phrey Gilbert's expedition
(1583). 57.
'Tamburlaine,' by Marlowe,
168 ; success of, 170 ; and
the Suez Canal, 172.
Tamerlane, Drake compared
to, 104.
Ternate, Antonio Galvano
governor of, 134.
Thevet, Andrew, cosmo
grapher, and Hakluyt, 121.
Thorne, Robert, Treatise on
the Northern Passage by
(1527), 31-
Tiger, the, ship of John
Davys (1605), 46.
Toby, the, Bristol ship, 123.
' Topography, Universal
christian,' by Cosmas, 16.
Torres, Antonio de, letter
from Christopher Colum
bus to, 26-7.
'Tracts, Naval,' by Sir
William Monson, 105.
Traders, Enghsh, in Spain,
religious observances re
quired of, 52.
Tripolis (in Syria), English
consul at, 165.
Ulloa, Francis de, tale of,
about the discovery of the
North-west Passage, 41.

Venice, sea power of, 4.

204

INDEX

Verde, Cape, discovery of
(1446), s.
Verrazzano, John de, dis
coveries of, 14.
'Virginia richly valued,' etc.,
last work of Hakluyt( 1 609),
134-
Walsingham, Sir Francis
(i 530-1 590), and Hakluyt,
121, 125, 131.
Warner, WiUiam, 'Albion's
England,' by (1602), 158;
on the English Voyages,
157,159-
Watson, George, ' Curing of
Hot Diseases,' etc., by,
130.
Westminster Abbey, Hakluyt
buried in, 120; Hakluyt,
prebendary of (1602), 133 ;
archdeacon of (1603), 133 ;
School, Hakluyt educated
at, 125.
Wetheringsett in Suffolk,
Richard Hakluyt, rector of
(1.590). 132-
White, John, colonists of
Virginia under (1590), 64;

Virginia Dare, grand
daughter of, 182.
Willoughby, Sir Hugh (d.
1554), and the English
expedition to the North
(1553), 34-
Wocoken Island, taken pos
session of in the Queen's
name by Amadas and
Barlow, 60.
Wolfall, chaplain in Captain
Frobisher's fleet, 51.
Wordsworth, 190.
' World, Discoveries of the,'
by Antonio Galvano, pub
lished by Hakluyt (1601),
134-
'World Encompassed, The,'
by John Cooke, 92.
'World, History of the,' by
Sir Walter Raleigh,! 10,175.
'World's Hydrographical De
scription,' by John Davis,
45-
Youth, fountain of, 18.
Zutphen, death of Sir Philip
Sidney at (1586), 63.

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