Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America (4 page)

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Authors: Giles Milton

BOOK: Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America
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Many of the prospective colonists were dismayed by the barren wasteland and felt they had been duped into signing up for a future that looked even bleaker than that from which they had fled. One group tried to steal a fishing vessel and return to England, while “a great many more of our people stole into the woods to hide themselves, attending time and meanes to returne home by such shipping as daily there departed from the coast. Some were sicke of fluxes, and many dead: and in briefe, by one meanes or another our company was diminished.”
Edward Hayes was contemptuous of such men, noting that the ships were still laden with marmalades and lemons and enough supplies to last for many months. Sir Humfrey agreed and had no intention of abandoning his colonial project. With the wind billowing his sails, he ordered his ships southwards to more temperate climes. It proved a fateful decision, for swirling mists obscured the coastline, making the voyage extremely treacherous. As the “fowle wether increased, with fogges and mysts,” the crew on the
Delight
began to be afflicted with a collective psychosis. Weird creatures were plucked from the sea with a harpoon, the wind moaned “like the swanne that singeth before her death,” and when the on-board musicians attempted to jolly the crew by striking up a tune, it sounded “like dolefull knells.” Worse still, the
Delight
began to echo with “strange voyces” like those of ghosts, “which scared some from the helm.”
To the superstitious crew, such mysterious happenings could only portend doom. That night their very worst fears were realised. “The wind rose and blew vehemently at south and by east, bringing withal raine, and thicke mist, so that we could not see a cable length before us.“The vessels soon found themselves in treacherous waters and in grave danger of running aground.
 
Experienced explorers wore fur hats and jerkins. Richard Hore’s adventurers lacked the proper clothes and equipment, and when food ran out, they ate each other
“Master Cox, looking out, discerned (in his judgement) white cliffes, crying, ‘land withall!’” Observing from an adjacent ship, Gilbert saw to his horror that the
Delight
, which was carrying all the supplies for his colony, was being driven inexorably towards the shallows. He shouted to its helmsman, urging him into deeper waters, but his words were snatched by the wind. The
Delight,
pride of the fleet, was now so close to the sandbank that her destruction was all but assured. Just a few minutes after Gilbert’s warning, “the admirall strooke aground, and had soone after her sterne and hinder partes beaten in pieces.” Stuck fast and unable to free herself, she was torn apart by the waves. Her timbers were plucked one by one from the hull and tossed into the sea. The crew clung to the wreckage, hoping that the storm would abate and allow them to swim for safety, but as the wind increased in intensity, the
Delight
’s captain—Maurice Browne—realised the end was nigh and composed himself with stoic dignity. He refused to leave the ship, telling his men that “he would not give example with the first to leave … choosing rather to die then to incurre infamie by forsaking his charge.” He had determined to die heroically and, “with this mind, hee mounted upon the highest decke where hee attended imminent death, and unavoidable. How long, I leave it to God, who withdraweth not his comfort from his servants at such times.”
Sir Humfrey, observing the unfolding tragedy from afar, was in a state of shock, not only at losing his flagship but also at witnessing the death of Browne, a dear friend whom he himself had persuaded to accompany him to America. “This was a heavy and grievous event, to lose at one blow our chiefe shippe fraighted with great provision, gathered together with much travell, care, long time and difficultie.” He searched desperately for survivors in the turbulent seas, “but all in vaine, sith God had determined their ruine: yet all that day, and part of the next, we beat up and downe as neere unto the wracke as was possible.”
As the storm continued to batter his fleet, Sir Humfrey flickered between melancholy and despair, lamenting “the losse of his great ship, more of the men, but most of all his bookes and notes.” “The remembrance touched him so deepe, as not able to containe himselfe he beat his boy in great rage.” His punishment for this act of wanton violence was to step on a nail and tear open his foot.
Heartily sick of their misadventures, the surviving colonists begged Sir Humfrey to let them return to England. Gilbert realised that he had no option but to agree. Genuinely moved by the pleas of his captains, he stood on deck and announced his intentions in the following words: “Be content,” he said, “we have seene enough and take no care of expence past: I will set you foorth royally the next spring, if God send us safe home. Therefore, I pray you; let us no longer strive here, where we fight against the elements.”
If he was downhearted, he was certainly not prepared to show it in front of his men. He spoke at length of how he would set sail again in the spring and assured everyone on board that the queen would lend him ten thousand pounds to finance this new expedition. The speech was Gilbert at his most optimistic. Whenever he was struck by adversity, he sought strength in the demonic energy that coursed though his Devonshire bones. Even the chronicler of the voyage, Edward Hayes, was impressed. It was, he wrote, “a demonstration of great fervencie of mind, being himself very confident.”
But not all the colonists cared for his bullish talk; a vociferous few began to make sarcastic jibes about Gilbert, mocking him for being scared of the sea and taunting him for a lack of will and resolution. Sir Humfrey was incensed. He was particularly wounded by the jest that he was afraid. To prove it nonsense, he insisted on making the homeward voyage on the diminutive
Squirrel,
which was already dangerously overloaded with firearms and fishing gear. His friends begged him to reconsider, using “vehement perswasion and intreatie,” but Gilbert refused to listen: “I will not forsake my little company going homeward,” he roared, “with whom I have passed so many stormes and perils.” Hayes, who was growing tired of Gilbert’s
insufferable pride, commented that it was typically poor judgement “to prefer the wind of a vaine report to the weight of his own life.”
The ingredients for tragedy were now in place: all that was needed was a thundering tempest, and it came soon enough. As the ships neared the Azores, “we met with very foule weather, and terrible seas, breaking short and high, pyramid wise.” As the skies darkened and the wind screamed through the rigging, the waves grew so huge that they swept over the decks. “Men which all their lifetime had occupied the sea never saw more outragious seas.” Several had terrifying visions of fire “which they take an evill signe of more tempest.”
Those on the
Squirrel
were in serious danger. She was hopelessly overloaded and sat so low in the water that the sea gushed into her hold. On the afternoon of Monday, September 9, as the storm reached its climax, the crew feared the worst. The frigate was filling with water faster than they could bail her out; it was only a matter of time before she would slip beneath the waves. The other ships realised her peril, yet when they came alongside they were astonished by what they saw. Sir Humfrey Gilbert had risen to new heights of eccentricity. With a deranged grimace on his face, he “was sitting abaft with a booke in his hand.” Every time the other ships came near, he would roar to them, “We are as neere to heaven by sea as by land.”
His end was not long in coming. “The same Monday night,” wrote Hayes, “about twelve of the clocke, or not long after, the frigat being ahead of us … suddenly her lights were out.” The lookout raised the alarm but it was too late. “For in that moment, the frigat was devoured and swallowed up of the sea.” Sir Humfrey Gilbert was never seen again.
The other ships limped back to England, arriving battered but safe some two weeks after the loss of the
Squirrel.
The men disembarked at Dartmouth and, after collecting their belongings, returned to homes they thought they would never see again. It fell to Hayes to take stock of the expedition and question why it failed. Poor leader-ship
and bad planning had dogged the expedition from the outset. So little was known about America that Sir Humfrey had set sail without any idea where he should plant his colony. He had proved a poor commander, for his wild fluctuations of temper had affected his ability to lead. “He both was too prodigall of his owne patrimony and too careles of other men’s expences, to imploy both his and their substance upon a ground imagined good.” He was “enfeebled of abilitie and credit,” “impatient,” and, in a word, “unfit.”
 
Davy Ingrams claimed to have watched in horror as the natives hacked corpses into juicy gobbets and munched ravenously on arms and legs
It was a bitter conclusion to an expedition that had set out with such high hopes. But Hayes was a realist. He knew that if England was to colonise “those north-west lands,” it would require men of a far higher calibre than Sir Humfrey Gilbert.
The Jolly Tribesman
Sir Humfrey’s death sparked off a fierce debate as to who would inherit his American project. The most obvious person to pick up the baton was his brother, Sir John, who had not sailed with the 1583 expedition; but he had been dissuaded by the scale of the disaster and showed even less enthusiasm to get involved when he learned that America was a land of “hideous rockes and mountaines.” He preferred the rolling pastures of south Devon, and he headed to the family home of Compton Castle near Dartmouth, where he devoted himself to recouping the losses sustained by the sinking of the
Delight.
The adventurer Sir George Peckham showed a great deal more enthusiasm, even though he, too, had lost his investment. Eager to meet his Indian tenants, he began planning an expedition on a truly epic scale. He expressed his intention of teaming up with England’s greatest mariners, and espoused grand dreams of leading an armada of ships across the Atlantic. But Peckham’s ideas proved rather too ambitious. When he staged a public meeting for prospective merchants and investors, only seven men bothered to turn up. They offered him a mere £12 10s., and even the plucky Peckham was forced to admit that they were “adventurers in the second degree.”
For a time, it seemed as if Gilbert’s proposed colony was doomed.
No one had the adventurous spirit—backed by the requisite fortune—that was necessary to embark on a voyage across the Atlantic. But in the spring of 1584, the young Walter Ralegh stepped forward and boldly announced his intention of taking over the leadership of his half-brother’s abortive project.
That he was in a position to do so was due to his dazzling rise through the ranks of Queen Elizabeth’s court: a progress so meteoric that the lords of the realm felt they had been caught off guard. Soon after Walter was introduced to the court he was an intimate of the queen, and their noble lordships were so taken aback that their initial response was to mock him as a vulgar parvenu.
There was, on the surface, plenty to joke about in young Walter. He “spake broad Devonshire” and came from such straitened circumstances that his family did not even own their own dwelling. But although the Raleghs were a family in decline, they came from good stock. Previous centuries had produced a distinguished bishop and a judge, and a Ralegh had helped England to victory on the battlefield of Agincourt.
The fighting spirit had been broken by misfortune and, by the time young Walter came into the world, in about 1554, much of the family’s ancestral land had been sold. The only reminder of their illustrious pedigree was to be found in the names of south Devon villages—Combe Ralegh, Withycombe Ralegh, and Colaton Ralegh.
Despite their fall in the world, the Raleghs still married into powerful Devon families—the Carews, Grenvilles, and Champernownes—and Walter’s father retained the privilege of occupying the front pew in East Budleigh Church, where his coat of arms was (and still is) carved into the polished oak. Old Walter had been twice married when, in 1548, he found himself in a position to make a most advantageous match. Katherine Champernowne came from a prosperous Devon family that could count among their immediate relations the vice-admiral of the county and a tutor to the future Queen Elizabeth. Her first marriage, to Otho Gilbert, had produced three brilliant sons—John, Humfrey, and Adrian—
while her second, to the older Ralegh, would give her two more boys, Carew and Walter.
Young Walter displayed all the arrogance and ruthlessness of his half-brothers, but he combined it with such cavalier gallantry that it was clear from an early age that he was destined for greatness. He was still in his teens when he joined a band of hot-blooded Devon adventurers in a swashbuckling crusade against French Catholics. Fighting under the black standard of the Compte de Montgomerie, they adopted his motto as their rallying cry: “Let valour end my life.” Walter next headed to Ireland, where he fought the native warlords with a gritty determination. In his spare time he lambasted his commanders with such withering contempt that they would have dismissed him from service had he not been related to Sir Humfrey Gilbert. “I like neither his carriage nor his company,” wrote Lord Grey, his commanding officer, “and, therefore—other than by direction or commandment—he is not to expect [promotion] at my hands.”
Grey had made a mistake that was to be repeated by many of the queen’s courtiers: misjudging Ralegh’s single-mindedness and underestimating his attraction. His first meeting with the queen—recorded by the antiquarian Thomas Fuller—is vintage Ralegh, even though the account may be apocryphal: “[He] found the queen walking till, meeting with a plashy place, she seemed to scruple going therein. Presently Ralegh cast and spread his new plush cloak on the ground; whereon the queen trod gently, rewarding him afterwards with many suits, for his so free and seasonable tender of so fair a foot cloth.” Such chivalry was not uncommon in the courts of Spain and France, but it was unheard of in England. Elizabeth’s doting courtiers were stunned by the theatricality of the gesture.
Having gained the queen’s attention, Ralegh wooed her with honeyed words. “He had gotten the Queen’s ear in a trice, and she began to be taken with his elocution, and loved to hear his reasons to her demands. And the truth is, she took him for a kind of oracle, which nettled them all.” At this first meeting Ralegh was just twenty-six
years old. His behavior was outlandish—sheer coquetry—but he knew that he had to strike while he had the chance.
He was fortunate to have arrived in London at a time when the leading courtiers were losing their sparkle. Elizabeth’s favourite in earlier years had been the swaggering Robert Dudley, her “sweet Robin,” who had come within a codpiece of depriving the Virgin Queen of her much-vaunted epithet. But their flirtatious antics had come to nothing. The crude chattermongers of London had concluded that although the queen might open her legs to Robin, she had “a membrane on her which made her incapable of men.” Anything but sweet, Robin was a portly and ruddy individual whose saccharine charm had been transferred to his new love, Lettice Knollys.
The harmless love games were still eagerly pursued by young blades like Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Christopher Hatton, men who doted on the queen even though she was no longer the fragile maiden of her youth. At the time of Ralegh’s first meeting, she was already in her late forties and was betraying the first signs of the wizened harridan she would become in her later years. She was “well-favoured but high-nosed” and her skin was rather pale, but her eyes were still “lively and sweet” and flashed with a mischievous sense of fun. When dignity was required, she was “of such state in her carriage as every motion of her seemed to bear majesty,” but when she was among friends at Hampton Court, Richmond, or Nonesuch, her more playful nature emerged. She swore like a trooper, picked her teeth with a gold toothpick, and delighted in coarse jokes. She was playful, theatrical even, and was never one to fight shy of melodrama. When she learned that her physician was involved in a plot to take her life, she “tore open her garment, exposing her breasts, exclaiming that she had no weapon to defend herself, but was only a weak female.” But while she could scream abuse at the Spanish ambassador and duff her groom of the Chamber about the ears, she was dutifully conscientious about matters of state, and read even the small print of official documents. She was cultivated as well. She spoke French and Italian, read Greek tolerably well, and was confident in Latin. In her later years, she astonished her court by berating the Polish ambassador with a torrent of Latin, after which she chuckled with laughter. “God’s death, my Lords! I have been forced this day to scour up my old Latin!”
 
Walter Ralegh spent vast sums on clothes and accessories. At his first meeting with Queen Elizabeth, he cast his cloak over a puddle to save her shoes. Ralegh’s son Wat (right) was killed in Guiana in 1617
Into Elizabeth’s magnificent court walked the youthful Walter Ralegh. He cut an imposing figure, especially among the older generation, who paid scant regard to their dress and even less to their hair. Some still sported the old “Christ cut” or pudding basin, which gave them the look of “an old Holland cheese.” Ralegh, by contrast, wore his locks “long at the ears and curled” and perfumed them with civit, musk, or camphor. His customary cartwheel ruff was his most extravagant gesture to foppishness, spreading peacocklike from his neck in dentilated lace. It was a perfect complement to his satin pinked vest and gauche doublet cut from finely flowered velvet and embroidered with pearls. The most shocking element of his dress was the accessories: he wore a dagger with a jewelled pommel, a black feather hat held at a jaunty angle by a ruby-and-pearl drop, and buff shoes tied with white ribbons. The expense of such attire was truly staggering. In 1584, a certain Hugh Pugh was charged with stealing items from Ralegh’s wardrobe which included a jewel worth £80, a hatband of pearls worth £30, and five yards of silk worth £3. The total was more than the yearly cost of a household, including servants.
Queen Elizabeth was enchanted by Ralegh and his risque flirtatiousness. At one of his earliest audiences, he had removed his diamond ring and scratched a half-finished couplet into one of the palace’s latticed windows: “Fain would I climb, yet I fear to fall.” Quick as a trice, the queen took the ring and rejoined: “If thy heart fail thee, climb not at all.”
But Ralegh had no intention of halting his climb. An accomplished poet, he began writing sonnets to his queen, creating a whole new language of devotion as he struggled to describe his feelings towards her. She was Gloriana, emanating light and beauty; Diana, the chaste goddess of the moon; and Venus, “her pure cheek like a nymph.”
Elizabeth’s less eloquent courtiers despised this West Country genius with his
faux
airs and graces. They found him so “damnable proud” that they hit back with their own rhyming couplets that contained puns on his name: “The enemie of the stomach [i.e., raw] and the word of disgrace [i.e., lie] / Is the name of the gentleman with the bold face [i.e., Ralegh].” It was a poor attempt at a jest and the queen was not amused. She preferred to tease him about his West Country accent, jestingly calling him “Water.” When she was at her most coquettish, she would joke that she was thirsting for “Water.”
She soon began showering her young favourite with gifts, beginning, in 1583, with the lease of two estates belonging to All Souls, Oxford. She also granted him the right to charge every vintner in the country one pound a year for the privilege of selling wine. This was the foundation of Ralegh’s enormous fortune, gaining him a huge income that was further augmented when he was given a lucrative licence to export woollen broadcloth. It was not long before the gifts came with titles. Ralegh was made vice-admiral of the West and then given the additional posts of lord-lieutenant of Cornwall and lord warden of the Stanneries, the latter giving him command of the Cornish tin mines. A man with such powers needed a suitably magnificent home, and even here the queen did not fail Ralegh. She offered him the use of Durham House, a rambling edifice that sprawled along the northern bank of the Thames. At the age of thirty, Walter had a London mansion of his own.
Like so many gifts bestowed by Elizabeth, Durham House was something of a white elephant. It was an ancient building whose crumbling charm held little appeal in stormy weather when the leaded gutters flooded and the towers moaned in the wind. It looked picturesque enough from the exterior: it rested on bulky Norman foundations and was adorned with crenellated battlements that rose sheer from the Thames. But this waterside hulk was a mildewed place whose medieval charm was not appreciated by the army of servants who found themselves living there. In the rain, it looked as if it had risen dripping from the subaqueous depths.
Yet it retained the vestiges of its former splendour. It had once been an ecclesiastical palace belonging to the bishops of Durham and it occupied one of the finest positions in the capital—downstream from the Palace of Westminster, close to Whitehall, and just a stone’s throw from Leicester House, Arundel House, and York House. It had a watergate with steps leading down to the river and a huge, steep-roofed hall which was “stately and high [and] supported with lofty marble pillars.” Indeed, the roof of the great hall was one of the landmarks of London, with a panorama that encompassed the entire capital.
Ralegh went to considerable expense to make Durham House habitable. Tapestries were hung from stone corbels and braziers were kept burning in the principal chambers. Visitors were impressed with the speed with which he had converted the palace into a home befitting the queen’s suitor. “His lodging is very bravely furnyshed with arrace,” wrote one, “the chamber wherein hymself doth lye hath a feild-bed, all covered with greine velvett … [and] set with plumes of whit feathers with spangles.” It was furnished in the very latest Elizabethan fashion, and there had been no concessions to cost. Bolsters and hassocks cut the chill of the flagstone floors and damask hung from the embrasures. It was as comfortable as it could be.

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