IV

PEDRO SARMIENTO

69

complete his voyage round the world. round the world. It has generally been assumed that Sarmiento was brought home by Whiddon and Eversham, but there can be little doubt that the credit should be given to Grenville, for the time of his capture coincides with the arrival of the latter at the Azores, and Sarmiento especially mentions in his narrative that between Terceira and San Jorge he encountered three English vessels, the exact number of the Virginia squadron, while he makes no reference to a heavy action such as was fought by the Serpent and the Mary Spark. Don Pedro complained of rough handling received on board the Capitana, where it was assumed that he and his men were concealing the knowledge of treasure. After their arrival at Plymouth, however, he was conveyed to Windsor, and handed over to the care of Raleigh, who conversed with him in Latin and showed him every regard and attention. By Sir Walter's influence he obtained an audience of the Queen, during which Elizabeth displayed the elegance of her Latinity for two hours and a half. Conversations with the Lord-Treasurer and the Lord High Admiral followed, and Sarmiento was apparently entrusted with some official message for the King of Spain, which may have been intended to serve as a basis for negotiation. At any rate a passport was issued to him, with permission to proceed to Spain and return once more to England should the object in view render it desirable. Not only was no ransom demanded, but a present of a thousand escudos was bestowed upon him, and he took his leave after receiving great courtesy from all sorts of people. On his arrival in France, however, he was once more made a prisoner, and detained there until

1589, after the Armada had sailed and had been destroyed, so that the message remained undelivered.

The failure of a first attempt in no way abated Raleigh's enthusiasm for the Virginia enterprise, and after the publication of Hariot's report on the country he had no difficulty in enlisting fresh volunteers for a settlement. A new expedition was despatched in the spring of 1587 under Captain John White, with whom were associated a board of twelve members, under the title of the Governor and assistants of the city of Raleigh in Virginia. On his arrival at Roanoke White could find no trace of the fifteen Englishmen whom Grenville had left behind. The whole band had fallen victims to the treachery of the Indians, as they afterwards learned from the faithful Manteo, who was now created a chief and became influential in restoring friendly relations. This little unrecorded tragedy, far away and long ago, was perhaps even at the time too remote to stir profoundly the imagination of their countrymen at home, whose minds were preoccupied with graver issues. And yet the massacre of those fifteen pioneers, the protomartyrs of Imperial expansion, cut off from hope on the edge of the great unexplored continent, has the peculiar pathos, after all this lapse of years, which ever belongs to the first to fall in a great cause, greater than themselves suspected. How many a time the round world over has the tale been told again; how many a despairing cry of the forsaken and forgotten has gone out on the west wind, since they fought their last fight on those shores, where teeming millions now load the freight ships of the nations with the harvest of prosperity and peace! Already the

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71

wild growth of tropical vegetation had invaded the ruins of the fort which sheltered the dwellings of the first colonists, and the zeal of the new settlers was damped by a profound sense of discouragement. Dissensions arose among them, and when White was persuaded against his better judgment to return to England for further supplies, things went from bad to worse. The impending struggle with Spain for a time rendered all undertakings in distant seas impossible, and no shipping was allowed to leave England without a special authorisation from the Council. Only after the defeat of the Armada was Raleigh able to obtain permission for three ships to sail to the Indies, and he contracted with their owners for the transport of stores and passengers to Virginia. The contracts, however, were not carried. out, and the voyage only ended in disaster. Still he never relaxed his efforts nor abandoned faith in the destiny of his nursling. Five expeditions to Virginia were equipped by him between 1587 and 1602. With his attainder his interests passed to the Crown, but even from his prison he still devoted to colonial enterprises what he could save from the wreck of his estate. "I shall yet live to see it an English nation," he wrote to Cecil just before the great eclipse of his fortunes; and he did live to see his vast dream realised in part, by the permanent establishment of his countrymen in Virginia.

Baffled again and again in his early endeavours, cut off at last, in the full vigour of his manhood and his powers, from active co-operation with the scheme, he clung with the tenacity of genius to the great design which has since become the inheritance of his countrymen and received a development beyond his own most

sanguine anticipations. Whatever judgment may be passed upon the achievements of this remarkable man, whose errors like his gifts were great, he was at any rate the first who dared to conceive the expansion of England, and he adhered with a passionate faith to the conviction that the unpeopled shores of earth were the inevitable inheritance of his own hardy race. To him his countrymen, accepting their high mission and proud of their world-wide dominion, must ever gratefully look back as the pioneer and prophet of empire. To him the great kindred people, blood of his own blood, whose genius of energy has quickened the vast northern continent from sea to sea, must ever pay due honour as the first who opened to civilising influences the threshold of their limitless domain.

CHAPTER V

THE ARMADA

1588

THE Queen and her far-seeing statesmen had long realised that war with Spain must be the inevitable outcome of the growing rivalry between the two countries, which typically represented the opposing forces of progress and reaction. The genius of Elizabeth for temporising had secured for her people a long period of peace in which to develop their material resources, but this end once gained, she sanctioned a policy which could hardly fail to end in war. While the people of England were genuinely convinced that the real grounds of quarrel with Spain were religious, and that Philip was the chosen instrument of the Catholic League for reimposing on this country the fetters of a spiritual domination which they had endured so much to shake off, there were in reality other and more substantial grounds of dispute, clear enough to the enlightened spirits of the age, working inevitably towards a crisis. The exclusive mercantile monopolies enforced by Spain in the new regions thrown open to human enterprise throughout a century of discovery, had naturally led