For men like Gilbert, Ralegh, and Grenville, the Gaelic Irish were regarded as uncivilized barbarians whose loyalty to the Crown was suspect and whose system of government tyrannical. This justified not only the conquest of that island, but also the brutal methods employed in the process. On Gilbert’s part, these methods included, according to contemporary witness Thomas Churchyard, the decapitation of Irish rebels so that the heads “should there bee laied on the ground by eche side of the waie ledyng into his own tente so that none could come into his tente for any cause but commonly he muste passe through a lane of heddes.” In this way, Churchyard observed, Gilbert brought “greate terror to the people.”1 As far as both Ireland and America were concerned, it was a clear case of a quite literal vicious circle. Awareness of Spanish treatment of the indigenous populations of the Americas informed the English suppression of the Irish, and in turn their subsequent cruelty toward the Irish influenced their reactions to, and treatment of, the natives that they later encountered in the New World. In both cases, what they perceived as cultural inferiority on the part of the indigenous inhabitants provided the justification for extremes of cruelty in the service of “civilization.” It also established a precedent. Over the next few hundred years, natives, blacks, Catholics, and, by extrapolation, the Catholic Irish in the New World would frequently be set apart from a society that, too often, defined itself through difference and reinforced the dominance of a white, Protestant ethnic core.
All this lay in the future. In the 1560s and 1570s, the suppression of the Irish was symptomatic of the instability of the English crown at this time, and itself absorbed resources that might otherwise have been devoted to more ambitious ventures further afield. When not wreaking havoc in Ireland, Gilbert found time to peruse the publications emanating from the New World, in particular French naval officer and navigator Jean Rib-ault’s The Whole and True Discovereye of Terra Florida (1563), which emphasized the great wealth that might be found across the Atlantic. Rib-ault had, in i562, led an expedition to the southeastern part of America with a view to establishing a settlement there for French Huguenots. In fact Ribault’s initial efforts met with setbacks similar to those that the English would later face; internal squabbles, difficulties with indigenous natives and with the Spanish, and an overly harsh disciplinary structure for the colony. Ribault initially settled on one of the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina (Parris Island), but when he returned to France for supplies, the settlement floundered and soon dispersed, with many of the original settlers returning to France. It was not until several years later that Ribault succeeded in temporarily establishing a colony at Fort Caroline near what is present-day Jacksonville, Florida, but lost his life in the process, killed by the Spanish in i565 when they, again, seized control of that part of Florida. Ribault’s experiences, however, certainly influenced England’s growing interest in American colonization. He had discussed the possibility of an American colonization venture with potential English backers and with Queen Elizabeth I herself. Naturally enough, Ribault’s reports piqued Gilbert’s interest. In 1578, he acquired a patent to colonize any part of the globe not held by a Christian monarch, and finally organized an expedition to Newfoundland in 1583. It might have seemed to the Irish, at least, that there was some justice in the fact that he was lost at sea on the way back.
Given that the recently knighted (1580) Sir Walter Ralegh had been an investor in Gilbert’s ill-starred exploratory venture, it was perhaps inevitable that when Gilbert failed to return from the New World, Ralegh acquired a patent (1584) in his stead, which permitted him to establish dominion anywhere on the American coast. In the official language of the day, he was granted leave “to discover, search, finde out, and view such remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countreis, and territories, not actually possessed of any Christian prince, nor inhabited by Christian people” with a view to settlement.2 A reconnaissance trip conducted in i584 by Arthur Barlowe and Philip Amadas reached Roanoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina. Returning to England in the autumn of that year along with two of the indigenous natives and a bag of pearls, Barlowe’s report promised a world more than suitable for settlement, a land of friendly and placid natives and unlimited natural bounties. “The soile is the most plentifull, sweete, fruitfull and wholesome of all the worlde,” Barlowe reported, and the island boasted “many goodly woodes full of Deere, Conies, Hares, and Fowle, even in the middest of Summer in incredible abundance.” “I thinke in all the world the like abundance is not to be found,” he observed, “and my selfe having seene those parts of Europe that most abound, find such difference as were incredible to be written.” The natives, too, proved more than welcoming, furnishing the expedition each day with “a brase or two of fat Bucks, Conies, Hares, Fish and best of the world,” as well as “divers kindes of fruites, Melons, Walnuts, Cucumbers, Gourdes, Pease, and divers rootes, and fruites very excellent.” The speed with which crops grew in this paradise amazed the Europeans; planting some peas they had brought with them, they were stunned to see them reach fourteen inches in ten days. The possibilities, clearly, were endless.
Barlowe’s report, although it enthused about every aspect of nature and native that he encountered, did contain a few observations of a more ominous slant. If the natives seemed peaceful in the company of their visitors, they certainly were not pacifists. The Europeans were unable to meet the king of the island, Wingina, in person as he was recovering from a wound sustained in battle, and Barlowe acknowledged that their hosts “maintaine a deadly and terrible warre, with the people and King adjoining.” He also reported the natives’ marked enthusiasm “for our hatchets, and axes, and for knives.” They would, he added, “have given any thing for swordes: but wee would not depart with any.”3
It was hardly to be expected that the English would wish to relinquish any weaponry, then or in the future. One of the main attractions of the Roanoke Island, for Ralegh at least, had little to do with its natural abundance and everything to do with its proximity to Spanish settlements in Florida. Roanoke offered a useful base from which English ships could threaten Spanish dominance, and that was Ralegh’s main ambition. Even before Barlowe and Amadas had returned, Ralegh had commissioned
Oxford geographer and friend Richard Hakluyt to produce a short work, never made public, intended to persuade Elizabeth I to support Ralegh’s New World colonization schemes. Hakluyt had, two years previously, contributed to what was becoming a burgeoning literature on exploration in the Americas with his Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America and the Islands Adjacent unto the Same, Made First of all by our Englishmen and Afterwards by the Frenchmen and Britons (1582). Now, with Ralegh’s encouragement, he produced A Particular Discourse Concerning Western Discoveries (1584), which was really a polemic for English settlement in America.
In the context of an England concerned about both poverty and overpopulation, Hakluyt’s argument struck a chord. England’s population was on the increase in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: from 2.3 million in 1520, it rose to 3.75 million in 1603 and to 5.2 million in 1690, but its economy did not keep pace. Even when Hakluyt was writing, the ill effects of this were already becoming evident. We “are grown more populous than ever heretofore,” Hakluyt observed, so many, indeed, “that they can hardly live one by another: nay, rather they are ready to eat up one another.” The resultant unemployment, he concluded, produced individuals who either threatened the social order or who were, at the very least, “very burdensome to the common wealth.” Prone “to pilfering and thieving and other lewdness, whereby all the prisons of the land are daily pestered,” these social outcasts were destined either to “pine away” or to be “miserably hanged.” Better by far, suggested Hakluyt, foreshadowing what would become a standard defense of resettlement abroad, that this surplus population be put to use in establishing and maintaining English colonies in America. He had a fairly eclectic view of what skills and trades might be considered surplus. Colonization, he argued, would