until, finally, a day dawned when they realized that sufficient reinforcements had arrived for them to stand up and advance inland.
FIVE-FINGER FONDLING
The five fingers with which England cautiously caressed the great body of America were dislocated one from the other. They had neither the overarching aim nor control on activity that the Spanish head of state was able to provide for his colonists. This meant, however, that although they lacked the force of a fist, each finger could survive the painful withdrawal of another.
Newfoundland: Cabot’s Index Finger
The letters patent which Henry VII presented to John Cabot had not specified that he was to search out a new route to Cathay, although this was evidently what he desired to establish. Indeed, his landfall on the coast of Newfoundland owed much to the advice and direction he had received during his research in Bristol, whose merchants had been cautiously finding their way towards America from as early as 1480, encouraged by the more prosaic search for cod rather than Cathay. They also knew that the coast that their fishermen reported as lying over the misty horizon was not Cathay, but they were prepared to tell Cabot that it lay on the route to the Orient and its wealth. The impatient Cabot first sailed in 1496. Overhasty in its preparation, the voyage ended with a mutinous crew, a shortage of food, and energy-sapping gales. The better-planned voyage of Matthew in 1597 had a better outcome – just. Cabot did step ashore in America but lacked the courage to ‘advance inland beyond the shooting distance of a crossbow’. This by a man to whom Henry VII had donated a continent! Cabot had little option but to conduct a follow-up voyage to prove that Cathay lay along the route he had pioneered. The King provided him with one ship, London merchants, strangely, rather than Bristol ones, the other four that formed his fleet. They sailed in May 1498; one ship, storm battered, returned to Bristol. The remainder vanished.
Henry, however, felt that his seamen had a viable idea and in March 1501 letters patent similar to those issued to Cabot were granted to Richard Ward, Thomas Asshenhurst, John Thomas, João Fernandez, Francis Fernandes and João Gonzalez:
to find, recover, discover and search out whatsoever islands, countries, regions and provinces of heathens and infidels in whatever part of the world they lie . . . to set up our banners and ensigns in any town, castle, island and mainland by them thus newly found and to enter and seize these same towns and as our vassals and governors, lieutenants and deputies to occupy, possess and subdue these, the property, title, dignity and suzerainty of these same being always reserved for us.
Nothing came of the voyage and, when Henry VIII married Katherine of Aragon, the King of Spain’s daughter, government sponsorship of plans to settle in lands claimed by Spain by virtue of Tordesillas were not considered diplomatic, besides which, Henry VIII’s main interest lay in fighting the French on European soil. Atlantic crossings did take place during his reign but their horizons lay beyond his vision.
The first was undertaken by the King’ ships, the 160-ton Mary Guildford, commanded by John Rut, and her consort Samson and was sponsored by the Bristol merchant Robert Thorne, who had interested Cardinal Wolsey in the idea of the existence of a northwest passage to Cathay. The ships sailed from Plymouth on 10 June 1527 but lost contact during some fierce Atlantic gales, meaning that Rut reached Newfoundland by himself. Here he found fishing vessels a-plenty and penned the first known letter written in the new world, in which he informed the King that he had:
entered into a good harbour called St John and there we found Eleven Sail of Normans and one Britain and two Portugal barks all a fishing and so we are ready to depart towards Cap de Bras that is 25 leagues as shortly as we have fished and so along the Coast until we may meet with our fellow and so with all diligence that lies in me toward parts to that Islands that we are command at our departing and thus Jesu save and keep your Honourable Grace and all your Honourable Retinue. In the Haven of St John the third day of August written in haste 1527, by your servant John Rut to his uttermost of his power.
Squirrel would have been ideal for inshore exploration but proved too frail to withstand the great gales of the mid-Atlantic, foundering with the loss of Humphrey Gilbert and all her crew. (National Trust)
However, having encountered icebergs on the outward voyage, Rut chose to head south rather than continue into Labrador’s icy maw and returned home after sailing past the Carolina Outer Banks.
Rut’s failure to find a northwest passage satisfied the King’s curiosity and he no more showed an interest in American adventures. Public curiosity and private initiative was not, however, stifled. In 1536 a London merchant, Richard Hore, invited ‘divers gentlemen’ to sail across the sea ‘on a voyage of discovery upon the Northwest parts of America . . . to see strange things of the world’. He was not short of volunteers and thirty such gentlemen embarked in Trinity and Minion which, sailing from London at the end of April, travelled to Newfoundland, by way of the West Indies, before, finding themselves short of victuals, they resorted to cannibalism, first by stealth but then by lots, until they seized a well-victualled French ship and sailed home in it. This murderous farce ended happily for all those left alive, for:
Certain months after, those Frenchmen came into England, and made complaint to King Henry VII: the king causing the matter to be examined, and finding the great distress of his subjects, and the causes of the dealing so with the French, was so moved with pity, that he punished not his subjects, but of his own purse made full and royal recompense unto the French.
Stretching for hundreds of miles along the American coast, the Carolina Outer Banks offered so little shelter for ships heading north from Florida that the smallest inlet was seen as advantageous.
The challenge both to discover a route to Cathay and to persecute the Spanish was revived during Elizabeth’s reign by a number of propagandists and visionaries. Among these was Sir Humphrey Gilbert, whose appetite for each was shown in his two publications, Discourse of a Discovery for a New Passage to Cathay and A Discourse How Her Majesty May Annoy the King of Spain. Desirous to do both, Gilbert failed to do either, heading too far south to achieve the former and too far north to effect the latter. The result was almost an exact copy of Cabot’s ventures: a hasty first voyage that failed and a second journey, in which, having claimed Newfoundland for the Queen, much to the bemusement of the fishermen from several nations gathered as witnesses at St John’s, Gilbert sailed on to lose one ship on the rocks and then to die himself when the diminutive Squirrel foundered in the waters north of the Azores.
With northern conquest thus discouraged, the focus returned to the fish, and in 1610 a company was formed to establish a permanent presence ashore in Newfoundland which, despite the many vicissitudes of climate and dearth of arable land, they succeeded in doing. With few ambitions, none of them unrealistic, the small groups of hardy settlers who moved ashore and clung limpet-like to the coast helped to contribute to the only positive return that the English were to receive from their American ventures for many years.
Baffin Island: Frobisher’s Thumb
In 1576, 1577 and 1578 Martin Frobisher led three voyages to the supposed entrance of the (mythical) Straits of Anian, which cosmographers – with no evidence – stated led from the Atlantic to the Pacific, disemboguing close to and opposite modern-day Japan. On his first voyage Frobisher tapped cautiously at these icy portals and withdrew, but returned with some samples of rock he had picked up near Baffin Island. These were declared to be gold-bearing and this false analysis changed the whole aim of the expeditions. In 1578 Frobisher returned to his supposed gold quarries, with a prefabricated
