Elizabethan Pioneers in North America
Except that the ships of Bristol still no doubt continued to resort to
the banks of Newfoundland for fishing, and that even the captains of
these ships were occasionally elected admirals of the French, Basque,
Portuguese, and English fishing fleets during the summer, the English,
as a nation, took no part in claiming political dominion over North
America after the voyage of Captain John Rut in 1527. This was the
fault of Sebastian Cabot, the son of the man who founded British
America, and who had returned to England long afterwards as the Grand
Pilot appointed by Edward VI to further the discovery of a northern
sea passage to China. Through him the attention of adventurers for a
time was diverted from America to the "discovery" of Russia (as it has
been called). The efforts of Sebastion Cabot were directed towards the
revelation of a north-east passage by way of Arctic Russia to the
Pacific, rather than past Newfoundland and Labrador and across Arctic
America.
But as soon as Elizabeth came to the throne the sea adventurers of
Britain, freed from any subservience to Spanish wishes, developed
maritime intercourse between England, Morocco, and West Africa on the
one hand, and Tropical and North America on the other. Once more the
discovery of the North-west Passage across America to China came into
favour. MARTIN FROBISHER[1] offered himself as a discoverer, and the
Earl of Warwick found the means which provided him with two small
sailing vessels of 25 and 20 tons each, besides a pinnace of 10
tons.[2] Queen Elizabeth confined herself, in the way of
encouragement, to waving her lily hand from her palace of Greenwich as
these three little boats dropped down the Thames on the 8th of June,
1576. She also sent them "an honourable message", which no doubt
reached them at Tilbury.
[Footnote 1: The name was also spelt Furbusher, and in other ways. He
became Sir Martin Frobisher over the wars of the Armada, and died Lord
High Admiral of England in 1592.]
[Footnote 2: It may be of interest to set forth the kind of rations
shipped in those Elizabethan times for the food of the sailors.
According to Frobisher's accounts these consisted of salted beef, salt
pork, salt fish, biscuit, meal for making bread, dried peas, oatmeal,
rice, cheese, butter, beer, and wine, with brandy for emergencies. As
regards beer, the men were to have a ration of 1 gallon a day each.
Altogether it may be said that these rations were superior in
variety--and no doubt in quality--to the food given to seamen in the
British merchant marine in the nineteenth century.]
But the pinnace was soon swallowed up in the high seas; the seamen in
the vessel of 20 tons lost heart and turned their ship homewards.
Frobisher alone, in his 25-ton bark, sailed on and on across the
stormy Atlantic, past the south end of Greenland, and over the great
gulf that separates Greenland from Labrador. He missed the entrance to
Hudson's Bay, but reached a great "island" which he named Meta
Incognita[3]. Here he gathered up stones and, as he believed,
minerals, besides capturing at least one Eskimo, and then returned.
[Footnote 3: We now know Meta Incognita to be the southernmost
peninsula of the vast Baffin Island.]
One of his stones was declared by the refiners of London to contain
gold. There was at once--as we should say in modern slang--a boom for
these Arctic regions. Queen Elizabeth took part in it, and on the 27th
of May, 1577, a considerable fleet, under the command of Frobisher,
sailed past the Orkneys for the south end of Greenland. It did not
reach as far as Meta Incognita, but it brought back large heaps of
earth and pieces of rock, probably from northern Labrador, which
almost certainly contained mica schist, and were therefore believed
to be full of gold. The following year 1578, Frobisher started on his
third American voyage with a fleet of fifteen vessels, mainly financed
by Queen Elizabeth, and manned to a great extent by the sons of the
aristocracy, besides a hundred persons who were going out as
colonists. For this region of ice and snow which was believed to be a
mass of gold-bearing rocks! But the result was one of bitter
disappointment. The captains were bewildered by the immense icebergs,
"so vast that, as they melted, torrents poured from them in sparkling
waterfalls". One iceberg toppled over on to a ship and crushed it,
though most of the sailors were picked up in the sea and saved. In the
thick mists the greater part of the fleet blundered into Hudson's
Straits, yet did not realize that they had found a passage into the
heart of Canada. At last, disgusted with this land of bare rocks, ice,
and snow, they filled up the ships with cargoes of stones supposed to
contain gold, and straggled back to England. No gold was extracted,
however, from these cargoes, and much discouragement ensued.
SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT, one of the brilliant figures of Elizabeth's
reign--scholar, poet, courageous adventurer, and man of
chivalry--stimulated by the discoveries of Frobisher, obtained a
patent or charter in 1578, and, after several unsuccessful attempts,
led an expedition of small sailing ships to Newfoundland, where he
entered St. John's Bay, and in the presence of the Basque, Portuguese,
and Breton fishermen took formal possession of the country for Queen
Elizabeth, raising a pillar on which the arms of England were engraved
as a token. He then proceeded to grant lands to the fishermen to
reassure them, and loaded his ships with rocks brought from the
interior mountains and supposed to contain minerals. But in his
further explorations of the southern coast of Newfoundland one of the
ships was lost and nearly a hundred men intended as colonists were
drowned.
Gilbert then determined to return to England in his small frigate of
10 tons named the _Squirrel_. He was accompanied by a larger vessel,
the _Golden Hinde_, but refused to leave the men on the _Squirrel_ to
their fate. Consequently, between the Azores and the north coast of
Spain, when the _Squirrel_ was overwhelmed by the heavy seas, Sir
Humphrey Gilbert perished together with all on board.
In spite, however, of the disappointing results of Gilbert's attempt
to found a colony in Newfoundland, the importance of the cod fishery
and the ivory tusks and oil of the walruses drew ever more and more
ships from Bristol and Devonshire to the coasts of that great island
and to the Gulf of St. Lawrence beyond. In 1592 the English
adventurers got as far west as Anticosti Island (in a ship from
Bristol), and in 1597 there is the first record of English ships (from
London--the _Hopewell_ and the _Chancewell_) sailing up the St.
Lawrence River, perhaps as far west as Quebec.
In 1602, stimulated by Sir Walter Raleigh,[4] Bartholomew Gosnold
sailed direct to the coast of North America south of the Newfoundland
latitudes, and anchored his bark off the coast of Massachusetts on the
26th of March, 1602. Failing to find a good harbour here, he stood out
for the south and definitely discovered and named Cape Cod, not far
from the modern city of Boston. From Cape Cod he made his way to the
Elizabeth Islands in Buzzard's Bay, and here he built a storehouse and
fort, and may be said to have laid the foundations of the future
colony of New England. He brought back with him a cargo of sassafras
root, which was then much esteemed as a valuable medicine and a remedy
for almost all diseases.
[Footnote 4: In 1584, Sir Walter Raleigh, the half-brother of Sir
Humphrey Gilbert, financed an expedition to sail to the coast of North
America in a more southerly direction. In this way was founded the
(afterwards abandoned) colony of Roanoke, in North Carolina. It was to
this region that Queen Elizabeth applied the title of Virginia, which
some years afterwards was transferred to the first English colony on
the James River.]
Subsequent expeditions of English ships explored and mapped the coast
of Maine, and took on board Amerindians for exhibition in England.
Their adventures, together with those of the colonists farther south,
led to the creation of chartered companies, and to the great British
colonies of New England, New York, Virginia, the Carolinas, and
Georgia, which were to become in time the United States of America--a
vast field of adventure which we cannot follow farther in this book.
As regards Newfoundland, James I, in 1610, granted a patent to a
Bristol merchant for the foundation there of a colony, and although
this attempt, and another under Sir George Calvert (Lord Baltimore) in
1616, came almost to nothing through the attacks of the French and the
dislike of the crews of the fishing vessels to permanent settlers who
might interfere with the fishing industry, the English colonization of
Newfoundland to some extent caught hold, so that in 1650 there were
about two thousand colonists of English descent along the east and
south-east coasts of the island. But settlement was prohibited within
six miles of the shore, to please the fishermen, and this regulation
checked for more than two hundred years the colonization of
Newfoundland.
Nova Scotia as a British colony also came into being as another result
of these adventurous British expeditions to North America in the reign
of James I. Under the name of Acadie this region had been declared to
be a portion of New France by De Monts and Champlain in 1604-14. But
the English colonists in 1614 drove the French out of the peninsula of
Nova Scotia on the plea that it was a part of the discoveries made by
the Cabots on behalf of the British Crown. In 1621 James I gave a
grant of all this territory to Sir William Alexander under the name of
Nova Scotia, and both Charles I and Cromwell encouraged settlement in
this beautiful region. When Charles II ceded it to France in 1667 the
English and Scottish colonists who were residing there, and the
English settlers of New England, refused to recognize the effects of
the Treaty of Bréda, and so harassed the French in the years which
followed that in 1713 Nova Scotia was, together with Newfoundland,
recognized as belonging to Great Britain. The French colonists were
allowed to remain, but during the course of the eighteenth century
they combined with the Amerindians (who liked the French and disliked
the British) and made the position of the British colonists so
precarious that they were finally expelled and obliged to transfer
themselves to Louisiana and Canada. This was the departure of the
Acadians so touchingly described by Longfellow.
The British had become tenacious of their rights over the east coast
of Newfoundland, because from the middle of the seventeenth century
onwards they were becoming increasingly interested in the whale
fisheries and the fur trade of the lands bordering on Hudson's Bay,
and would not tolerate any blocking of the sea route thither by the
French.
In the explorations of Arctic America, Frobisher's expeditions had
been succeeded by those of JOHN DAVIS, who in the course of three
voyages, beginning in June, 1585, passed the entrance of Hudson's
Straits and reached a point as far north as 72° 41', a lofty granite
island, which he named Sanderson's Hope. He saw beyond him a great
sea, free, large, very salt, and blue, unobstructed by ice and of an
unsearchable depth, and believed that he had completely discovered the
eastern entrance of the North-West Passage.
[Illustration: ICEBERGS AND POLAR BEARS]
HENRY HUDSON, the great English navigator, who had made two voyages
(1607-8) for the English-Moscovy Company to discover a north-east
passage to India, past Siberia, commanded a third experiment in 1609
at the expense of the Dutch East India Company. He was to discover the
North-West Passage. For this purpose he entered the river now named
the Hudson, but soon found it was only a river; though he returned to
Holland with such an encouraging account of the surrounding country
that the Dutch a little later on, founded on the banks of the Hudson
River their colony of New Amsterdam (afterwards the State of New
York). In 1610 Hudson accepted a British commission to sail beyond
where Davis and Frobisher had passed, and once more seek for the
north-west passage to China. Instead he found the way into Hudson's
Bay. Here his men, alarmed at the idea of being lost in these regions
of ice and snow, mutinied against him, placed him and those who were
faithful to him in a boat, and cast them off, themselves returning to
England with the news of his discovery. Hudson was never heard of
again, and, strange to say, the mutineers apparently received no
punishment.
Between 1602 and 1668, English adventurers from London and Bristol,
notable amongst whom were WILLIAM BAFFIN, LUKE FOX, and CAPTAIN JAMES,
mapped the coasts of Hudson's Bay and Baffin's Bay and brought to the
notice of merchants in England the abundance of whales in these Arctic
waters, and of fur-bearing beasts and fur-trading Indians in the
region of Hudson's Bay.
This last point was most forcibly presented to Charles II and his
Government by a disappointed French Canadian, Pierre Esprit Radisson,
whose adventures will later on be described. Radisson, conceiving
himself to be badly treated by the French Governor of Canada, crossed
over to England with his brother-in-law, Chouart, and the two were
warmly taken up by Prince Rupert of Bavaria, the cousin of Charles II.
They were sent out by Prince Rupert in command of an expedition
financed by him and a number of London merchants, and in 1669 the New
England captain, Gillam, returned to England with Chouart and the
first cargo of furs from Hudson's Bay. This cargo so completely met
the expectations of those who had promoted the venture that it led in
1670 to the foundation of the Governor and Company of Adventurers of
England trading into Hudson's Bay, a company chartered by Charles II
and presided over by Prince Rupert, and an association which proved to
be the germ of British North America, of the vast three-quarters of
the present Dominion of Canada.