Читать книгу Sir Walter Ralegh: A Biography - W. Stebbing - Страница 13

Ralegh's persistency.

Ralegh had other calls upon his resources. For the present he could do no more for Virginia. He reckoned he had spent £40,000 on the plantation. As Hakluyt wrote, 'it demanded a prince's purse to have the action thoroughly fulfilled without lingering.' Elizabeth was not willing to play the part of godmother in the fairy-tale sense. For a substitute, the founder, being in difficulties, had recourse to the very modern expedient of a company. In March, 1589, as Chief Governor, he assigned a right to trade in Virginia, not his patent, to Thomas Smith, John White, Richard Hakluyt, and others. He reserved a fifth of all the gold and silver extracted. The Adventurers were not very active. Ralegh still felt himself responsible for the colony, if it could be described as one. Such expeditions as sailed he mainly promoted. Southey's accusation that he 'abandoned the poor colonists' is ludicrously unjust. If, as has without due cause been imputed to Bacon, the charge in the essay on Plantations of the sinfulness of 'forsaking or destituting a plantation once in forwardness' refer to Ralegh, Bacon would be as calumnious. In 1590 White prosecuted the search for his daughter and grandchild, and the rest of the vanished planters. Ralegh despatched other expeditions for the same object, and with as little success. One, under Samuel Mace, with that purpose sailed in 1602 or 1603. By the time Mace returned, the Chief Governor was attainted, and his proprietorship of Virginia had escheated to the Crown.

Ralegh never relinquished hope in his nursling. 'I shall yet live,' he wrote just before his fall, 'to see it an English nation.' In 1606 a new Reward of an idea. and strong colony was sent out, and his confidence was justified. From an old account of the career of his nephew, Captain Ralph Gilbert, a son of Sir Humphrey, it would seem he still considered in 1607 that his connexion with the country continued. In that year Ralph Gilbert is said to have voyaged to Virginia on his behalf. Though his direct exertions were confined to the region of the James and Potomac, his jurisdiction in the north was recognized. The term Virginia covered a very wide area. It included, not only the present Virginias, but the Carolinas and more besides. New England itself originally was supposed to be comprised. Captain Gosnold, Captain Bartholomew Gilbert, and others, when they planned the occupation of Martha's Vineyard in 1602, described it as 'the north part of Virginia,' and sought and obtained Ralegh's permission and encouragement. Posterity has rewarded his faith and perseverance. He never set foot anywhere in the country called generally Virginia. His expeditions by deputy were themselves confined to the part which is now North Carolina. All his experiments at the colonization of that were failures. His £40,000, his colonists, and the polity he framed for them, had disappeared before any white settlement took root. But he will always be esteemed the true parent of North American colonization. An idea like his has life in it, though the plant may not spring up at once. When it rises above the surface the sower can claim it. Had the particular region of the New World not eventually become a permanent English settlement, he would still have earned the merit of authorship of the English colonizing movement. As Humboldt has said, without him, and without Cabot, North America might never have grown into a home of the English tongue.

Ralegh's Virginian scheme cost much money, and brought in little. It gave him fame, which he craved still more, and kept the town talking. His distant seigniory excited the English imagination. He was believed to have endowed his Sovereign with a new realm. He had the glory of having enriched his country with new fruits, plants, and flowers. The nature of the man was that he could touch nothing but immediately it appropriated itself to him. Potatoes and Tobacco. He is fabled to have been the first to import mahogany into England from Guiana. He set orange trees in the garden of his wife's uncle, Sir Francis Carew, at Beddington; and he has been credited with their first introduction. The Spaniards first brought potatoes into Europe. Hariot and Lane first discovered them in North Carolina. He grew them at Youghal, and they became his. Hariot discoursed learnedly on the virtues of tobacco, and Drake conveyed the leaf to England. Ralegh smoked, and none but he has the repute of the fashion. He gave the taste vogue, teaching the courtiers to smoke their pipes with silver bowls, and supplying them with the leaf. Sir John Stanhope excuses himself in 1601 from sending George Carew in Ireland any 'tabacca, because Mr. Secretary and Sir Walter have stored you of late.' Till he mounted the scaffold, having first 'taken tobacco,' the kingdom resounded with legends, doubtful enough, of his devotion to this his familiar genius. It was told how his old manservant deluged him at Sherborne with spiced ale to put out the combustion inside him; how he won wagers of the Queen that he could weigh vapours; how he smoked as Essex died. Society stared to see him take a pipe at Sir Robert Poyntz's. His gilt leather tobacco case was a prize for a Yorkshire museum. For words, ways, and doings, he was the observed of all observers. He was active in twenty different directions at once. He was always before the eyes of the world. His name was on every lip.

Among his constant motives of action was a fiery indignation at the spectacle of the Spanish monopoly of the New World. No sentiment could stir more of English sympathy. The people heartily shared his determination to rival Spain, and to pillage Spain. He had the Viking spirit, and he burnt with a freebooter's passion for the sea. But he had an intuition also of Pioneer and Privateer. the national capacity for colonization, in which the purest patriot must have concurred. He was resolved to direct the maritime enthusiasm of his countrymen and their age to that definite end. He succeeded, though destined to the lot rather of Moses than of Joshua. His outlay on Virginia did not bound his expenditure in these ways. Adrian his half-brother, and his habitual associate, had resumed Sir Humphrey Gilbert's old project for the discovery of a North-West Passage to India and China. A patent was granted him in 1583. He established a 'Fellowship' to work it. Ralegh joined. Captain John Davys was appointed commander, and two barks were equipped. Davys discovered Davis's Straits. Mount Ralegh, shining like gold, he christened after one of his most celebrated patrons. Hakluyt in 1587 stated that Ralegh had thrice contributed with the forwardest to Davys's North-West voyages. From a mixture of patriotism, maritime adventurousness, and the love of gain, he employed his various opportunities to engage in privateering as a regular business. Privy Council minutes for 1585 mention captures by him, through his officers, of Spanish ships, with 600 Spaniards, at the Newfoundland fisheries. He sent forth in June, 1586, his ships Serpent and Mary Spark, under Captains Jacob Whiddon and John Evesham, to fight the Spaniards at the Azores. In a battle of thirty-two hours, against twenty-four Spanish ships, they failed to capture two great caracks which they coveted. They brought home three less valuable, but remunerative, prizes. Don Pedro Sarmiento de Genaboa, Governor of the Straits of Magellan, and other captives were worth heavy ransoms. Ralegh repeats in the History, 'a pretty jest' told him 'merrily' by the worthy Don Pedro, on whom he clearly did not allow thraldom to weigh heavily, how the draftsman of the chart of the Straits invented an island in them at his wife's instance, that she might have something specially her own in the chart. In the same year, 1586, he contributed a pinnace to a plundering expedition of the Earl of Cumberland's to the South Sea. Though he was not allowed to be often at sea in person, he vindicated by his eager promotion of maritime adventures a full right to be entered, as we find him in January, 1586, in an official list of 'sea captains.'

As Vice-Admiral of the South-West, he possessed advantages beyond most for private raids upon Spanish commerce. When he was not on the spot, his faithful and affectionate deputy in Devonshire, Sir John Gilbert, was at hand to look after his ships' stores. Doubtless outrages were committed Charges of Piracy. under shelter of his Court favour. He joined the evil experiences of the sailor with those of the soldier and courtier in his dying regrets. Occasionally the Privy Council had to expostulate energetically. In 1589 a ship of his took two barks of Cherbourg. He and his officers were charged to minister no cause of grief to any of the French king's subjects. In the same year, Albert Reynerson was lodging complaints against Ralegh's captain of the Roebuck. Another of his captains, John Floyer, in 1592, was accused of having captured a ship of Bayonne with a load of cod, beside a waistcoat of carnation colour, curiously embroidered. Filippo Corsini sued him in that year for a ship his people had seized. In 1600 the Republic of Venice was aggrieved at the capture of a Venetian merchantman by Sir John Gilbert, junior, eldest son of Sir Humphrey, in command of one of Ralegh's vessels. At other times Venice claimed the surrender of Venetian goods in Spanish bottoms, though Ralegh stoutly argued against the claim. Sometimes the Government could not but interfere when neutrals had been pillaged. It was always reluctant to discourage the buccaneering trade, which it knew to be very lucrative. For instance, Ralegh and eleven other adventurers in 1591 equipped, at a cost of £8000, privateers which brought home prizes worth £31,150. The profit to the partnership was £14,952, which must be multiplied five times to express the present value. In high places no repugnance to the pursuit was felt. The Queen not rarely adventured, and looked for the lion's share of the spoil. Robert Cecil, after he had succeeded to his father's ascendency, was willing to speculate, if his association might be kept secret: 'For though, I thank God, I have no other meaning than becometh an honest man in any of my actions, yet that which were another man's Pater noster, His Defence. would be accounted in me a charm.' Ralegh's views and character obliged him to no bashful dissimulation of the practice. To him privateering seemed strictly legal, and unequivocally laudable. He boasted in 1586 that he had consumed the best part of his fortune in abating the tyrannous prosperity of Spain. He acted as much in defence and retaliation as for offence. He stated in the House of Commons in 1592 that the West Country had, since the Parliament began, been plundered of the worth of £440,000. In 1603 he wrote that a few Dunkirk privateers under Spanish protection had 'taken from the West Country merchants within two years above three thousand vessels, beside all they had gotten from the rest of the ports of England.' He himself, as the State Papers testify, had often to lament losses of ships through Spanish and French privateers. Public opinion entirely justified the vigour with which he conducted his retaliation. If he were unpopular among his countrymen, or any section of them, the fact is not to be explained by the employment of his riches and influence in onslaughts upon foreign commerce. As he has written in his History, Englishmen never objected to the most fearful odds, when 'royals of plate and pistolets' were in view. They might have been expected to be grateful to a leading promoter of lucratively perilous enterprises; and in the West they were.