Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America Read Free Page A

in skins and headdress. Instead, he arrived with a band of sick and emaciated men who had experienced an adventure they would try hard to forget. Hore himself was saddled with debt and, worse still, the owner of the Trinity was demanding compensation for the loss of his ship. Far from exciting public enthusiasm for America, Hore’s expedition killed off all interest in the land over the water. The king, too, had lost his enthusiasm. For the next quarter of a century, there were no officially sanctioned voyages of discovery to America.
    The “new founde lande” had been abandoned to its “savages.”

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    Sir Humfrey and the Cannibals
    On a brilliant summer’s evening in 1582, Maurice Browne and Thomas Smythe could be seen strolling down Red Crosse Street, a prosperous quarter of London that lay just a stone’s throw from the River Thames. Browne was a close friend of Queen Elizabeth’s secretary of state, Sir Francis Walsingham. Smythe was the son of Customer Smythe, who had amassed an immense fortune from farming customs duties. Although both men were still in their twenties, they had already made an impression at court.
    They were dressed in considerable splendour, sporting foppish doublets and jaunty hats, yet their presence passed almost unnoticed by the hawkers who were accustomed to loiter in the neighbourhood. Courtiers were among Red Crosse Street’s most regular visitors, for this gabled thoroughfare was home to a number of important merchants and adventurers.
    These two men were to be the guests of Sir Humfrey Gilbert. He had invited them to his imposing dwelling to show them his “charte” of America in the hope that it would convince them to accompany him on his greatest adventure. They had scarcely reached the porch of one of the grander houses when the door was flung open by a striking gentleman, a dozen or so years older than his visitors. Gilbert was a familiar figure in the Elizabethan court
and a man of such dynamic energy that he was doomed never to be content in the parochial atmosphere of Elizabethan England. “He is not worthy to live at all,” he once wrote to his brother, “that for fear or danger of death shunneth his country’s danger or his own honour.”
    Ever since he was a child, Gilbert had thirsted for adventure, dreaming up overseas schemes and projects—many of them fantastical—which he nonetheless tried to put into practice with a foolhardy determination. He was so reckless and boastful that his contemporaries were unable to decide whether to stand in awe of him or to be repulsed. To his friends he had a “verie pregnant wit” and “excellent vertues,” but his enemies at court saw a darker and less savoury aspect to his character: “unsound and brimful of fickleness, and bragging and overflowing with vanity.”
    If his portrait is at all honest, Sir Humfrey carried himself with a suitably buccaneering swagger, his pranked ruff forcing him to walk with his head bolt upright. He had jet-black hair and a cold, calculating expression that would have been sinister were it not for his flamboyant moustache, clipped, frounced, and brushed back in such a way that it looked as if he had two doormice stuck to his face. In later portraits he is shown caressing a globe, a suitable pose for one of the leading spirits in that group of intrepid Elizabethans, the gentlemen of the West, who looked towards the horizon—the Americas—for glory, riches, and adventure.
    Sir Humfrey had already attempted to land men in America in 1578, the first Atlantic voyage of exploration for many a year. He had persuaded the queen to grant him a licence to discover “such remote, heathen and barbarous landes, countries and territories not actually possessed of any Christian prince.” He had then furnished a little flotilla and set sail across the ocean with a motley crew of pirates and criminals, trusting to fair winds and good luck. He was blessed with neither. Most of his vessels limped home