On the 20th of November 1587 Governor White having reached home apprised Raleigh of the circumstances and requirements of the Colony. Sir Walter at once ‘appointed a pinnesse to be sent thither with all such necessaries as he vnderstood they stood in neede of,’ and also ‘wrote his letters vnto them, wherein among other matters he comforted them with promise, that with all conuenient speede he would prepare a good supply of shipping and men with sufficience of all thinges needefull, which he intended, God willing, should be with them the Sommer following.’ This promised fleet was got ready in the harbor of Bideford under the personal care and supervision of Sir Richard Grenville, and waited only for a fair wind to put to sea. Then came news of the proposed invasion of England by Philip King of Spain with his ‘invincible armada,’ so wide spread and alarming that it was deemed prudent by the Government to stay all ships fit for war in any ports of England to be in readiness for service at home ; and even Sir Richard Grenville was commanded not to leave Cornwall.
Governor White however having left about one hundred and twenty men, women and children in Virginia, among whom were his own daughter and granddaughter, left no stone unturned for their relief. He labored so earnestly and successfully that he obtained two small ‘pinneses’ named the ‘Brave’ and the ‘Roe,’ one of thirty and the other of twenty-five tons, ‘wherein fifteen planters and all their provision, with certain reliefe for those that wintered in the Countrie was to be transported.’
The’ Brave’ and the ‘Roe’ with this slender equipment passed the bar of Bideford the 22nd of April, just six months after the return of the Governor, a small fleet with small hope. Had it been larger its going forth would not have been permitted. The Governor remained behind, thinking he could serve the Colony better in England. But the sailors of the little ‘Brave’ and ‘Roe’ had caught the fighting mania before they sailed, and instead of going with all speed to the relief of Virginia, scoured the seas for rich prizes, and like two little fighting cocks let loose attacked every sail they caught sight of, friend or foe. The natural consequence was that before they reached Madeira (they took the southern course for the sake of plunder) they had been several times thoroughly whipped, and ‘all thinges spilled’ in their fights. ‘By this occasion, God iustly punishing the theeuerie of our euil disposed mariners, we were of force constrained to break of our voyage intended for the reliefe of our Colony left the yere before in Virginia, and the same night to set our course for England.’ In a month from their departure they recrossed the bar of Bideford, their voyage having been a disgraceful failure, yet the doings of these two miniature corsairs are recorded in Hakluyt manifestly only as specimens of English pluck, a British quality always admired, however much misdirected. Meanwhile no tidings of the ‘Second colonie’ and worse still, no tidings or help had the Second Colony received all this long time from England. And even to this day the echo is ‘no tidings’ and no help from home. This then may be called the first and great human sacrifice that savage America required of civilized England before yielding to her inevitable destiny.
And so it was that Virginia and the Armada Year shook the fortunes of Raleigh and compelled him to assign a portion of his Patent and privileges under it to divers gentlemen and merchants of London. This document, in which are included and protected the charter rights of White and others in the ‘City of Raleigh,’ bears date the 7th of March 1589. Matters being thus settled, with more capital and new life a ‘Fifth Expedition’ was fitted out in 1590 in which Governor White went out to carry aid, and to reinforce his long neglected colony of 1587. Not one survivor was found, and White returned the same year in every way unsuccessful. He soon after retired to Raleigh’s estates in Ireland, and the last heard of him is a long letter to his friend Hakluyt ‘from my house at Newtowne in Kylmore the 4th of February 1593.’
Raleigh’s Patent, like that of Gilbert, would have expired by the limitation of six years on the 24th of March 1590 if he had not succeeded in leading out a colony and taking possession. His first colony of 1585 was voluntarily abandoned, but not his discoveries. His second colony of 1587 was surrounded with so much obscurity that though in fact he maintained no real and permanent settlement, yet it was never denied that he lawfully took possession and inhabited Virginia within the six years and also for a time in the seventh year, and therefore was entitled to privileges extending two hundred leagues from Roanoke. As long as Elizabeth lived no one disputed Raleigh’s privileges under his patent, though partly assigned, but none of the Assignees cared to adventure further. The patent had become practically a dead letter. As late however as 1603 the compliment was paid Raleigh of asking his permission to make a voyage to North Virginia. As no English plantation between the Spanish and the French possessions in North America at the time of the accession of James was maintained the patent was allowed nominally to remain in force. But no one claimed any rights under it. It has been stated by several recent historians that the attainder of Raleigh took away his patent privileges, but evidence of this is not forthcoming. It is manifest that James the First, who had little regard for his own or others’ royal grants or chartered rights in America, considered the coast clear and as open to his own royal bounty as it had been long before to Pope Alexander the Sixth. It was easier and safer to obtain new charters than to revive any questionable old ones.
But to all intents and purposes the interesting history of Virginia begins with Raleigh. Whence he drew his inspiration, how he profited by the experience of others, how he patronized his Magi and bound them to himself with cords of friendship and liberality; how by his very blunders and misfortunes he transmitted to posterity some of the most precious historical memorials found on the pages of English or American history, we have, perhaps at unnecessary length, endeavoured to show in this long essay on the brief and true Report of Thomas Hariot, his surveyor and topographer in Virginia, which must ever serve as the corner-stone of English American History, by a man who, though long neglected and half forgotten, must eventually shine as the morning star of the mathematical sciences in England, as well as that of the history of her Empire in the West.
It remains now to give some personal account of Thomas Hariot, whose first book as the first of the labors of the hercules club has been reproduced. Every incident in the life of a man of eminent genius and originality in any country is a lesson to the world’s posterity deserving careful record. Hitherto dear quaint old positive antiquarianly slippery Anthony à Wood in his Athenes Oxoniensis embodies nearly all of our accepted notions of this great English mathematician and philosopher. Anthony was indefatigable in his researches into the biography of Hariot who was both an Oxford man and an Oxford scholar. He happily succeeded in mousing out a goodly number of recondite and particular occurrences of Hariot’s life. He managed, however, to state very many of them erroneously ; and he drew hence some important inferences, the reverse, as it now appears, of historical truth. This naturally leads one to inquire into his authorities. Wood’s account of Hariot appeared in his first edition of 1691, and has not been improved in the two subsequent editions. For most of his facts he appears to have been indebted to Dr John Wallis’s Algebra, first published in 1685, though ready for the printer in 1676 ; and for his fictions to poor old gossiping Aubrey; while his inferences, in respect to Hariot’s deism and disbelief in the Scriptures, are probably his own, as we find no sufficient trace of them prior to the appearance of his Athenæ, unless it be in Chief Justice Popham’s unjust charge at Winchester in 1603, when he is said to have twitted Raleigh from the bench with having been ‘bedeviled’ by Hariot. Dr Wallis appears to have obtained part of his facts from John Collins, who had been in his usual indefatigable manner looking up Hariot and his papers as early as 1649, and wrote to the doctor of his success several letters between 1667 and 1673, which maybe seen in Professor Rigaud’s Correspondence of Scientific Men of the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols, Oxford, 1841, 8°.
Since 1784, from time to time, several other writers have partly repeated Wood’s estimate and added several new facts, as will be shown further on. But it has been reserved for the Hercules Club, now just three hundred years after Hariot left the University, to bring to light new and important contemporary evidence, sufficient, it is believed, to considerably modify our general estimate of Hariot’s life and character, and to raise him from the second rank of mathematicians to which Montucla coolly relegated him nearly a century ago to the pre-eminence of being one of the foremost scholars of his age, not alone of England but of the world. Had he been walled around by church bigotry like his friend and contemporary Galileo he would unquestionably by the originality and brilliancy of his observations and discoveries have rivalled, or perhaps have shared that philosopher’s victories in science. At all events it is believed that the new matter is sufficient to reopen the courts of criticism and revision in which some of the decisions respecting the use of perspective glasses, the invention of the telescope, the discoveries of the spots on the sun, the satellites of Jupiter and the horns of Venus may be reconsidered and perhaps reversed. It is believed that in logical analysis, in philosophy, and in many other departments of science few in his day were his equals, while in pure mathematics none was his superior.
Thomas Hariot was born at Oxford, or as Anthony à Wood with more than his usual quaint-ness expresses it, ‘tumbled out of his mother’s womb into the lap of the Oxonian muses in 1560.’ He was a ‘bateler or commoner of St Mary’s hall.’ He ‘took the degree of bachelor of arts in 1579, and in the latter end of that year did compleat it by determination in Schoolstreet.’ Nothing of his boyhood, or of his family, except a few hints in his will, has come to light.
It is not known precisely at what time Hariot joined Walter Raleigh, who was only eight years his senior. From what their friend Hakluyt says of them both, their intimate friendship and mutually serviceable connection were already an old story as early as 1587. On the eighth calends of March 1587, that is on the 22d of February 1588, present reckoning, Hakluyt wrote from Paris to Raleigh in London,