minister matter for all sorts and states of men to work upon: namely all several kinds of artificers, husbandmen, seamen, merchants, soldiers, captains, physicians, lawyers, divines, cosmographers, hydrographers, astronomers, historiographers, yea old folks, lame persons, women, and young children by many means which hereby shall still be ministered unto them, shall be kept from idleness, and be made able by their own honest and easy labor to find themselves without surcharging others.
Missing from Hakluyt’s list were the clergy, which was especially telling given that he preceded his description of all other benefits to accrue from colonization with the observation that it would, above all, serve “greatly for the enlargement of the gospel of Christ whereunto the Princes of the reformed religion are chiefly bound amongst whom her Majesty is principal.” In short, it would spread Protestantism. In the process, it would spread liberty and rescue the indigenous peoples not just from the perils of heathenism, but from the “pride and tyranny” of Spain. “So many and so monstrous have been the Spanish cruelties,” Hakluyt argued, “such strange slaughters and murders of those peaceable, lowly, mild, and gentle people together with the spoils of towns, provinces, and kingdoms which have been most ungodly perpetrated in the West Indies,” that were “the Queen of England, a prince of such clemency” to rule in America to spread “humanity, courtesy, and freedom,” then the natives would certainly revolt against the Spanish.
Hakluyt's main focus, however, was colonization's immediate material benefits for England. Settlement of America would, he pointed out, produce enormous economic gains in the form of “all the commodities of Europe, Africa, and Asia.” It would, he suggested, “supply the wants of all our decayed trades,” offer employment to “numbers of idle men,” and, perhaps above all, “be a great bridle to the Indies of the king of Spain” as well as serving “greatly for the increase, maintenance and safety of our Navy, and especially of great shipping which is the strength of our realm.” In case the Queen was not convinced by all this, Hakluyt stressed that England could not afford to “procrastinate the planting” because if she did not colonize America, other nations certainly would. Nothing less than England’s honor was at stake.4
Fortunately, little in Barlowe’s report - neither his descriptions of nature’s bounties nor those of pliable if not wholly peaceful natives -directly contradicted what Ralegh, via Hakluyt, had told the Queen. Limited support was therefore offered Ralegh’s scheme in the form of one ship of the line, the Tyger. In a sense, this set the tone for the whole enterprise, and it was a martial one. Although politically more stable by the 1580s, the Tudor monarchy under Elizabeth I was not flush with funds to direct toward American settlement. No English ship could afford to venture onto the high seas without some hope of acquiring treasure, in the form of Spanish prizes, in the process. It was for this reason that the Roanoke expedition, one supposedly intended to rescue the Roanoke natives from the threat of Spanish cruelty, was from the outset placed in the hands of a group of men whose apprenticeship in the colonization line had taken place in Ireland. Men such as Richard Grenville, Thomas Cavendish, and Ralph Lane certainly possessed the military expertise necessary for threatening the Spanish, but were less suited for diplomatic dealings with the natives of Roanoke alongside who they hoped to settle.
Accompanying these men of war when the expedition set off in April 1585 was a varied assortment of sailors, soldiers, and settlers, the painter John White, the mathematician Thomas Hariot, and the two natives who had accompanied Barlowe and Amada back to England the previous year, Wanchese and Manteo.
Although they made good time across the Atlantic, the expedition encountered problems on arrival when the Tyger ran aground and the supplies intended to support the new colony were spoiled. Nevertheless, under Lane’s direction, a settlement was established and a fort constructed. Lane’s initial reports were promising, and Wingina’s people were, as before, both welcoming and generous with provisions, so the loss of the Tyger’s cargo was not, at first, the disaster it might have been. Whether it in fact caused more problems in the long run, or whether the settlers' total lack of ability to fend for themselves was intrinsic to the military nature of the endeavor, is harder to assess. What is certain is that these first settlers, as would be the case with future ones, exerted little effort toward becoming self-sufficient and relied almost entirely on the voluntary largesse of their hosts and, when that reached its limits, turned to violence to secure their survival.
At Roaonke, however, the violence was ultimately self-defeating. The English killed the goose that laid the golden egg. Lane murdered Wingina and then headed to England, just as Grenville, who had left Roanoke the previous year, was on his way back. Finding no sign of Lane or the colony, Grenville stationed a small body of men at the fort and then headed out to sea and to the prospect of seizing more Spanish ships. In July 1587, the artist John White arrived along with his family, the native Manteo, and more than one hundred prospective settlers. Leaving them there, White himself sailed with the fleet to England to secure supplies, arriving home just in time for his ship to be requisitioned as part of England's defense against the Spanish Armada (1588). On his return in 1590, he found the Roanoke colony deserted and the settlers, including his daughter and granddaughter, gone. All that remained was the word “Croatoan” carved into a tree. This was possibly a reference to the Croatan people, but whether the settlers had been rescued or murdered by them, no one knew. As far as the English were concerned, the fate of the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke could only be imagined.
This inauspicious beginning did not bode well for future English colonization efforts, but neither did it diminish the growing enthusiasm for the opportunities perceived to exist across the Atlantic. In naming the land Virginia, Ralegh had accorded it a validity it had not previously held in the English worldview. No longer terra incognita, Virginia became a place on the map, fixed in the English imagination as both location and potential property. In the English mind, it became, as Thomas Hariot would describe it, a “New Found Land” that, having been “found,” could not then be forgotten. Hariot’s study, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, first published in 1588 and then two years later with engravings by de Bry of illustrations by White, and translated into English by Hakluyt, was in every sense a composite view of the state of understanding of the New World in England when it was published. A Briefe and True Report offered a more measured assessment of the country and its population than many previous reports or propagandist works had provided and, even acknowledging the failure of the Roanoke expedition, sustained interest in the possibility of settlement in America (Figure 1.3).