Bartholomew Gosnold Discoverer and Planter by Warner F. Gookin and Phillip Barbour Table of Contents NORUMBEGA .............................................................. 3 SCION OF THE GOSNOLDS ....................................... 7 NEIGHBORS AND COUSINS .................................... 12 LADY STAFFORD AND HAKLUYT ........................ 17 THE JUDDE FAMILY ................................................ 23 BURY ST. EDMUNDS ................................................ 28 A VOYAGE INTENDED ............................................ 32 THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON .............................. 39 GENTLEMEN OF THE VOYAGE ............................. 45 ANCHORS AWEIGH .................................................. 52 A NEW LANDMARK ................................................. 57 CAPE COD .................................................................. 62 AN EXPOSITORY INTERLUDE ............................... 69 MANY FAIR ISLANDS .............................................. 78 ELIZABETH'S ISLE .................................................... 88 COMMODITIES .......................................................... 99 SIR WALTER RALEGH ........................................... 106 A NARRATIVE AND MORE ................................... 112 PRIME MOVER OF JAMEWTOWN........................ 120 NORUMBEGA In the year 1582 English lads of the generation of eleven-year-old Bartholomew Gosnold could read for the first time a true tale of the North American Indians. It was told in a sixty year-old document translated by the Reverend Richard Hakluyt for his first printed collection of mariners' narratives of voyages to America. This document was a letter, written by one Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian from Florence in the service of King Francis I of France. In it, Verrazzano gave the king an account of a voyage up the coast of North America. Highly colored and somewhat fanciful, this was designed to stir the imagination of the King rather than to give specific geographical information. Nevertheless, it contained the first useful account of a place recognizable as located in the region we know as New England. From Verrazzano's "Letter" one learned that the explorer's vessel, entering a large harbor, had been welcomed by natives of the land, who approached the ship in twenty small boats. Trifling gifts of small bells and glass beads enticed these people to board the great vessel. Among them were two Kings, one older and one younger, both clad in deerskins, and ornamented with chains of many-hued stones. Verrazzano describes his Indian visitors as the goodliest and fairest natives they had found on the voyage. "They exceed us in bigness," he wrote: "they are of the colour of brasse, some of them incline more to whitenesse; others are of yellow colour, of comely visage, with long and blacke haire, which they are very careful to trim and decke up; they are blacke and quicke eyed, and of sweete and pleasant countenance . ." And he added that during his two-weeks' stay great numbers of these people came often to the ship, their faces "all bepainted with divers colours, shewing us that it was a signe of joy." Among their ornaments were plates of wrought copper which they esteemed more than gold. The rich red copper appealed to them; the pale yellow of gold made it seem to them the basest of metals. They showed no interest whatever in silk or embroidered fabrics. The utility of articles of iron and steel was beyond their comprehension. Glass baubles, azure and red, were treasures to them. The voyagers journeyed fifteen or more miles into the interior and saw treeless plains twenty-five leagues broad, fit for planting. They entered a thick wood of oak, cypress, and other trees bearing varieties of nuts and fruit. They saw deer and other fur-bearing animals, which these people took with nets or shot with their bows and arrows. There were numerous other details to interest boys of Bartholomew's age. They read that the Indians' arrows were tipped, not with iron but with points of flint, jasper- stone, or hard marble, and that with other sharp stone tools they cut down huge trees to make their boats of one whole piece of wood hollowing them out with wonderful art. The largest of these hollowed logs could carry ten or twelve men. The houses of these people were made with half-rounds of trees set in a circle ten or twelve paces in circumference and covered with mats of straw "wrought cunningly together, which save them from the wind and raine." There was no order in the arrangement of these separate lodges. Taking off the mats, they moved these houses according to their convenience and the season. They planted "pulse" [peas, beans, etc.], but lived mostly by hunting and fishing. Verrazzano found these Indians kindly and hospitable, generous in supplying the voyagers with stores of food for their ship. They were the same people who, over a century later, were to give asylum to Roger Williams when he fled to the Narragansett region from the face of his persecutors. And thus Verrazzano gave Englishmen their first glimpse of Norumbega, the land that was to become New England. Bartholomew Gosnold, who read Verrazzano's letter, grew up to be the first Englishman to search this place, discovering instead another bay -- Buzzards Bay -- only a few miles east of the one visited by Verrazzano three quarters of a century before him. The land, said Verrazzano in conclusion, was in the parallel of Rome, forty-one degrees and two-thirds; "the mouth of the Haven lieth open to the South half a league broad." Within, he added, it extended twelve leagues, increasing in breadth to form a gulf twenty leagues in compass. In this gulf werre five small islands full of trees. There were hills on both sides of the southern entrance, with many rivers flowing into the sea. In the midst of the entrance there was a natural rock of freestone suitable for fortification, which Verrazzano might have added had he been in a flippant mood, "try to find it." For the readers of this publication of 1582, called Divers Voyages, touching the discoverie of America, Hakluyt printed in the margin opposite Verrazzano's account of the kingdom at 41º 40' N., this note: "The Countrey of Sir H.G. voyage." Even so young a reader as Bartholomew would understand that the initials were those of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, for all England was talking of this Knight's plans for a great expedition to Norumbega. The family tutor would occasionally suspend, we imagine, the parsing of Latin in the manorial schoolroom at Otley (where the walls were frescoed with scenes from the classics) to repeat for the small group of Gosnold scions the latest report of England's progress toward empire. It was high time that England had colonies of her own in America. Sir Francis Drake had recently been assaulting and pillaging Spanish colonies and Spanish ships in Central and South America, to the tune of 600,000 pounds of a single voyage -- but after all he was, in modern slang, a hijacker, victimizing the Spanish racketeers themselves of their own American plantations amongst Indians who regarded gold as a worthless metal, whence, by trade and development of the land's natural resources, wealth would be brought continuously to England! But the merchants of the guilds, supporters of the established trade routes through the northern seas and the Mediterranean, ever willing to fit out a vessel for piracy and plundering in the tropical Atlantic, were not ready to invest the large sums needed to maintain a colony until it became productive of wealth. Sir Humphrey Gilbert had obtained in 1578 a patent from the Queen broadly giving him the right to establish a colony in North America at any place not already in possession of another Christian nation, meaning, of course, that he was to avoid localities pre-empted by France in the north and Spain in the south. His maritime activities in the first years under this patent are not recorded in such a way as to make them comprehensible in purpose or in accomplishment. In 1582, however, Gilbert began to appeal to knights and gentry who for one reason or another were interested in a new life beyond the seas. He conveyed to them by assignment rights to about ten million acres in exchange for their financial support of his expedition. These acres were located on or near the Dee River, according to Gilberts agreement with Sir George Peckham, but this river in not shown on Dee's own map. Rumors of these things must have made even the landed gentry of Otley, Suffolk, perk up their ears, for to every country gentleman the easy acquisition of more land and forests was the best of all reasons for colonization overseas. After interminable delays, word finally came that Sir Humphrey had sailed on June 11, 1583, with five vessels. This was followed immediately by the disquieting news that one of them, fitted out by Sir Walter Raleigh, Gilbert's younger half-brother, had been forced to turn back by a sick or hungry crew on the second day out. The expedition, it was explained, had sailed to Newfoundland because of the lateness of the start, to replenish its supplies from the well-stocked fishermen assembled there before sailing on south to Norumbega. Late in the summer another one of the fleet, the Swallow, was reported back in England, having returned with some of the sick and fearful, under the command of Captain William Winter. How amazed young Bartholomew Gosnold would have been had he been shown, by some occult art, that twelve years later he was to become by marriage a near relative of this Captain Winter. Even less could Gosnold know that Gilbert's visionary adventure was shaping his own destiny. The Golden Hind (named for Sir Francis Drake's famous ship, then on exhibition in the Thames hard by the palace at Greenwich), owned and commanded by Captain Edward Hayes, returned late in September, the sole survivor of Gilbert's fleet, with a tale of disasters. Gilbert had attended to certain matters of government in Newfoundland on behalf of the Queen, then, as planned, had sailed south with his three remaining ships fully provisioned.