Abstract
Gilbert died as he lived: boldly. He refused his crew’s pleas to abandon the sinking Squirrel on the return voyage to England, but his outline for a voyage and self-sustaining colony survived. The alliance formed by wealthy London merchants, university-educated experts, and experienced artisans during voyages like Gilbert’s of the 1570s and 1580s gave English expansionists enthusiastic settlers and much needed financial backing. The experimental nature of Gilbert’s voyage inspired Stuart-era colonizers, who funded their colonies as joint stocks and settled the area that Gilbert had selected for his colony. Gilbert’s revolutionary use of printed advertisements, maps, and new navigational instruments and practices provided a blueprint for English colonizers who followed him. Gilbert failed to achieve his goal of creating a thriving North American colony, but his legacy was visible in England’s first successful colonies of the early seventeenth century.
Quiz non? (Why not?)
—Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 1576 (Gilbert, discourse of Cataia, title page)
Eastward from Campobello
Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed;
Three days or more seaward he bore,
Then, alas! The land-wind failed.
Alas! the land-wind failed,
And ice-cold grew the night;
And nevermore, on sea or shore,
Should Sir Humphrey see the light.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ca. 1848 (Longfellow, “Sir Humphrey Gilbert,” lines 13–20, in The Complete Poetical Works of Longfellow [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922], 105)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Hayes , “report of Gilbert,” 694; Spanish Ambassador Mendoza heard that Elizabeth intended to send Gilbert 10,000 men (not £10,000) to conquer the territory.
- 2.
Hayes, “report of Gilbert,” 694–5.
- 3.
Hayes, “report of Gilbert,” 695; Gilbert also may have been quoting Cicero. See Armitage, “Literature and Empire,” in Oxford History of British Empire, 108.
- 4.
Hayes, “report of Gilbert,” 695–7; on Gilbert’s death, see Steve Mentz, “Hakluyt’s Oceans: Maritime Rhetoric in The Principal Navigations,” in Hakluyt and Travel Writing, ed. Carey and Jowitt, 290–2.
- 5.
Gilbert, discourse of Cataia, title page, H4r.
- 6.
Among the others were luminaries like Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler.
- 7.
Mordechai Feingold, “Giordano Bruno in England, Revisited” Huntington Library Quarterly 67 (Sept. 2004): 342.
- 8.
Parry, Arch-Conjuror, 84; Harkness, Jewel House, 113.
- 9.
See Thomas Digges, “A Perfit description of the Caelestiall Orbes” in Digges and Digges, Prognostication Everlastinge, n.p.
- 10.
John Henry, “Animism and Empiricism: Copernican Physics and the Origins of William Gilbert’s Experimental Method,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 62 (Jan. 2001): 106–9.
- 11.
Dana Jalobeanu, “A Natural History of the Heavens: Francis Bacon’s Anti-Copernicanism,” in The Making of Copernicus: Early Modern Transformations of a Scientist and his Science, eds. Wolfgang Neuber, Claus Zittel, and Thomas Rahn (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 64–87.
- 12.
Wootton, Invention of Science, 83. Another well-connected Cambridge man known to Gilbert, Sir Thomas Smith, agreed, stating that the experience of university graduates, farmers, and merchants was needed to make England economically stable. See Smith, A Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England, ed. Mary Dewar (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1969), 12.
- 13.
BL, Lans. MS 98, fols. 1r–7v.
- 14.
Alden and Landis, European Americana, vol. 1, 91–266, 296–300; vol. 2, 3–29, 567–97. Similar trends appear across the decades of Elizabeth’s reign: zero “American” books in 1558 and 2 in 1559; 16 books from 1560 to 1569; 48 books during the 1570s; 108 in the 1580s; 169 during the 1590s; and 104 from 1600 to 1603.
- 15.
Tyacke, “Chartmaking in England,” 1722; Fernández-Armesto, “Maps and Exploration,” 738.
- 16.
Parry, Arch-Conjuror, 16–21.
- 17.
John Smith, A Map of Virginia. With A Description of the Covntrey, the Commodities, People, Government and Religion (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1612), *4v–*5v; John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England and the Summer Isles with the names of the Adventurers, Planters, and Governours from their first beginning An: 1584 to this present 1624 (London: Iohn Dawson and Iohn Haviland, 1624), 21–2, 40–1, 102–3.
- 18.
See S. Max Edelson, A New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017); Edney, Mapping and Empire.
- 19.
Harkness, Jewel House, 107.
- 20.
Harkness, Jewel House, 103–15.
- 21.
Henry Gellibrand, A Discourse Mathematical on the Variation of the Magneticall Needle (London: William Jones, 1635), 7.
- 22.
William Barlow, The nauigators supply (London: George Bishop, Ralph Newbery, & Robert Barker, 1597), C3r.
- 23.
Edward Wright, Certaine Errors in Navigation (London: Felix Kingston, 1610), 75–81; Simon Stevin, The Haven-finding Arte, trans. Edward Wright (London: George Bishop, Ralph Newbery, & Robert Barker, 1599), B3r.
- 24.
William Gilbert, De Magnete (London: Peter Short, 1600), 7; see Henry, “Animism and Empiricism,” 113.
- 25.
Butman and Targett, New World Inc., 269–73.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Probasco, N.J. (2020). Conclusion: The Mid-Elizabethan Transition. In: Sir Humphrey Gilbert and the Elizabethan Expedition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57258-7_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57258-7_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-57257-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-57258-7
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)