The triumphant return of Gama from Hindustan, in the summer of 1499, turned all men's eyes to southern routes, and little heed was paid to the wild inhospitable shores visited by John Cabot and his son. The sole exception to the general neglect was the case of the fisheries on the banks of Newfoundland. From the beginning of the sixteenth century European vessels came almost yearly to catch fish there, but at first Englishmen took little or no part in this, for they had long been wont to get their fish in the waters about Iceland, and it took them some years to make the change. On the bright August day of 1527 when Master John Rut sailed into the bay of St. John, in Newfoundland, he found two Portuguese, one Breton, and eleven Norman ships fishing there. Basques also came frequently to the spot. Down to that time it is not likely that the thought of the western shores of the Atlantic entered the heads of Englishmen more frequently than the thought of the Antarctic continent, discovered sixty years ago, enters the heads of men in Boston to-day.
Earliest English references to America.
The lack of general interest in maritime discovery is shown by the fact that down to 1576, so far as we can make out, only twelve books upon the subject had been published in England, and these were in great part translations of works published in other countries. The earliest indisputable occurrence of the name America in any printed English document is in a play called "A new interlude and a mery of the nature of the iiii elements," which was probably published in 1519.[5] About the same time there appeared from an Antwerp press a small book entitled "Of the newe landes and of ye people found by the messengers of the Kynge of Portugal;" in it occurs the name Armenica, which is probably a misprint for America, since the account of it is evidently taken from the account which Vespucius gives of the natives of Brazil, and in its earliest use the name America was practically equivalent to Brazil. With the exception of a dim allusion to Columbus in Sebastian Brandt's "Ship of Fools," these are the only references to the New World that have been found in English literature previous to 1553.
The Muscovy Company.
Richard Eden.
The youthful Edward VI., who died that year, had succeeded in recalling Sebastian Cabot from Spain, and under the leadership of that navigator was formed the joint-stock company quaintly entitled, "The Mysterie and Companie of the Merchant Adventurers for the Discoverie of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places unknown." It was the first of that series of sagacious and daring combinations of capital of which the East India Company has been the most famous. It was afterwards more briefly known as the Muscovy Company. Under its auspices, on the 21st of May, 1553, an English fleet of exploration, under Sir Hugh Willoughby, set sail down the Thames while the cheers of thronging citizens were borne through the windows of the palace at Greenwich to the ears of the sick young king. The ill-fated expedition, seeking a northeasterly passage to Cathay, was wrecked on the coast of Lapland, and only one of the ships got home, but the interest in maritime adventure grew rapidly. A few days before Edward's death, Richard Eden published his "Treatyse of the Newe India," which was largely devoted to the discoveries in America. Two years later, in 1555, Eden followed this by his "Decades of the Newe World," in great part a version of Peter Martyr's Latin. This delightful book for the first time made the English people acquainted with the results of maritime discovery in all quarters since the great voyage of 1492. It enjoyed a wide popularity; poets and dramatists of the next generation read it in their boyhood and found their horizon wondrously enlarged. In its pages doubtless Shakespeare found the name of that Patagonian deity Setebos, which Caliban twice lets fall from his grotesque lips. Three years after Eden's second book saw the light the long reign of Queen Elizabeth began, and with it the antagonism, destined year by year to wax more violent and deadly, between England and Spain.
John Hawkins and the African slave-trade.
Meanwhile English mariners had already taken a hand in the African slave-trade, which since 1442 had been monopolized by the Portuguese. It is always difficult to say with entire confidence just who first began anything, but William Hawkins, an enterprising merchant of Plymouth, made a voyage on the Guinea coast as early as 1530, or earlier, and carried away a few slaves. It was his son, the famous Captain John Hawkins, who became the real founder of the English trade in slaves. In this capacity Americans have little reason to remember his name with pleasure, yet it would be a grave mistake to visit him with unmeasured condemnation. Few sturdier defenders of political freedom for white men have ever existed, and among the valiant sea kings who laid the foundations of England's maritime empire he was one of the foremost. It is worthy of notice that Queen Elizabeth regarded the opening of the slave-trade as an achievement worthy of honourable commemoration, for when she made Hawkins a knight she gave him for a crest the device of a negro's head and bust with the arms tightly pinioned, or, in the language of heraldry, "a demi-Moor proper bound with a cord." Public opinion on the subject of slavery was neatly expressed by Captain Lok, who declared that the negroes were "a people of beastly living, without God, law, religion, or commonwealth,"[6] so that he deemed himself their benefactor in carrying them off to a Christian land where their bodies might be decently clothed and their souls made fit for heaven. Exactly three centuries after Captain Lok, in the decade preceding our Civil War, I used to hear the very same defence of slavery preached in a Connecticut pulpit; so that perhaps we are not entitled to frown too severely upon Elizabeth's mariners. It takes men a weary while to learn the wickedness of anything that puts gold in their purses.
Hawkins and Laudonnière.
It was in 1562 that John Hawkins made his first famous expedition to the coast of Guinea, where he took three hundred slaves and carried them over to San Domingo. It was illicit traffic, of course, but the Spanish planters and miners were too much in need of cheap labour to scrutinize too jealously the source from which it was offered. The Englishman found no difficulty in selling his negroes, and sailed for home with his three ships loaded with sugar and ginger, hides and pearls. The profits were large, and in 1564 the experiment was repeated with still greater success. On the way home, early in August, 1565, Hawkins stopped at the mouth of the St. John's River in Florida, and found there a woebegone company of starving Frenchmen. They were the party of René de Laudonnière, awaiting the return of their chief commander, Jean Ribaut, from France. Their presence on that shore was the first feeble expression of the master thought that in due course of time originated the United States of America, and the author of that master thought was the great Admiral Coligny. The Huguenot wars had lately broken out in France, but already that far-sighted statesman had seen the commercial and military advantages to be gained by founding a Protestant state in America. After an unsuccessful attempt upon the coast of Brazil, he had sent Jean Ribaut to Florida, and the little colony was now suffering the frightful hardships that were the lot of most new-comers into the American wilderness. Hawkins treated these poor Frenchmen with great kindness, and his visit with them was pleasant. He has left an interesting account of the communal house of the Indians in the neighbourhood, an immense barn-like frame house, with stanchions and rafters of untrimmed logs, and a roof thatched with palmetto leaves. Hawkins liked the flavour of Indian meal, and in his descriptions of the ways of cooking it one easily recognizes both "hasty pudding" and hoe-cake. He thought it would have been more prudent in the Frenchmen if they had raised corn for themselves instead of stealing it from the Indians and arousing a dangerous hostility. For liquid refreshment they had been thrown upon their own resources, and had contrived to make a thousand gallons or more of claret from the native grapes of the country. A letter of John Winthrop reminds us that the Puritan settlers of Boston in their first summer also made wine of wild grapes,[7] and according to Adam of Bremen the same thing was done by the Northmen in Vinland in the eleventh century,[8] showing that in one age and clime as well as in another thirst is the mother of invention.