But politics were not the interests which he cultivated in the distracted country. He devoted his energies there to the pacific pursuits of poetry and of gardening, and to social intercourse with congenial visitors. The passion for colonisation, for colonisation of territory further afield than Munster, was the dominant influence on Ralegh's mind. It was his half-brother Gilbert's discovery of Newfoundland, and the grant to Gilbert of permission to take, in the Queen's name, possession of an almost infinite area of unknown land on the North American Continent, that led to the episode which gave Ralegh his chief claim to renown in the history of the English Colonies. Gilbert's Gilbert's ship was wrecked; he was drowned death, 1583. returning from Newfoundland, and the Queen was thereupon induced to transfer to Ralegh most of the privileges she had granted to his half-brother. The opportunity was one of dazzling promise. Ralegh at once fitted out an expedition to undertake the exploration which Gilbert's death had interrupted. 1 on But Ralegh had meanwhile become a favourite of the Queen.1 He had exerted on her all his charm of manner and of speech. He had practised to the full those arts 1 The well-known story that Ralegh first won the Queen's favour by placing his cloak over a muddy pool in her path is not traceable to any earlier writer than Fuller, who in his Worthies, first published in 1662, wrote: 'Captain Ralegh coming out of Ireland to the English court in good habit (his clothes being then a considerable part of his estate) found the queen walking, till meeting with a plashy place, she seemed to scruple going thereon. Presently Ralegh cast and spread his new plush cloak on the ground; whereon the queen trod gently, rewarding him afterwards with many suits, for his so free and seasonable tender of so fair a foot cloth> Thus an advantageous admission into the first notice of a prince is more than half a degree to preferment.' This incident was carefully elaborated by Sir Walter Scott in his novel Kenilworth, chap. xv. familiar to all the courts of the Renaissance which gave a courtier's adulation of his prince the tone of amorous passion. In the absence of his Love's Queen' or Ralegh and of the Goddess of his life' Ralegh declared him Elizabeth. self, with every figurative extravagance, to live in purgatory or in hell; in her presence alone was he in paradise. Elizabeth rejoiced in the lover-like attentions that Ralegh paid her. She affected to take him at his word. His flatteries were interpreted more literally than he could have wished. She refused to permit her self-styled lover to leave her side. He was ordered to fix his residence at the court. Reluctantly Ralegh yielded to the command of his exacting mistress. The expedition that he fitted out to North America left without him. Virginia. Ralegh's agents, after a six weeks' sail, landed on what is now North Carolina, probably on the island of Roanoke. The reports of the mariners were highly favourable. A settlement, they declared, might readily be made. At length Englishmen might inhabit the New World. The notion presented itself to Ralegh's mind to invite the Queen's permission to bestow on this newly discovered territory, which was to be the corner-stone of a British colonial empire, a name that should commemorate his fealty to the virgin Queen, the name of 'Virginia.' It was a compliment that the Queen well appreciated at her favourite's hand. It gave her a lease of fame which the soil of England alone could not secure for her. For many years afterwards all the seaboard from Florida to Newfoundland was to bear that designation of Virginia. It was a designation which linked the first clear promise of the colonisation by Englishmen of the North American Continent with the name of the greatest of English queens. Ralegh's project of planting a great English colony in North America had arisen in many other minds before it took root in his. He had heard, while fighting with the Huguenots in France, of their hopes of founding in North America a New France, where they should be free from the persecution of the Roman Catholic Government. He had studied the ambitious designs of Coligny, the leader of the French Huguenots, and the tragic failure which marked the first attempt of Frenchmen to colonise North America. It was probably this knowledge that fired Ralegh's ambition to make of Virginia a New England. In that hope he did not himself succeed, but his failure was due to no lack of zeal. Two years after he had received the report Grenville's of his first expedition, he sent out his cousin, Sir expedition. Richard Grenville, with a band of colonists whom he intended to settle permanently in his country of Virginia. But difficulties arose which baffled his agent's powers. There were desperate quarrels between the settlers and natives. Food was scanty. The forces of nature conquered the settlers. Most of them were rescued from peril of death and carried home a year later by Sir Francis Drake. Ralegh was not daunted by such disasters. He refused to abandon his aim. Further batches of colonists were sent out by him in later years at his expense. The results of these expeditions did not, however, bring him appreciably nearer success. Mystery overhangs the fate of some of these earliest English settlers in America, Ralegh's pioneers of the British empire. They were either slain or absorbed past recognition by the native peoples. In 1587, one band of Ralegh's emigrants, consisting of eighty-nine men, seventeen women, and two children, were left in Virginia, while their leaders came home for supplies, but when these emissaries arrived again in the new continent, the settlers had all disappeared. What became of them has never been known. Ralegh's relations with Ralegh was never in his life in Virginia. He was never near its coast line. His project, the fruit of idealism, was not pursued with much regard for practical realisation. The difficulty of settling a new country Virginia. with Europeans he hardly appreciated. He is reckoned to have spent forty thousand pounds in money of his own day-about a quarter of a million pounds of our own currency-in his efforts to colonise Virginia. So long as he was a free man his enthusiasm for his scheme never waned, and he faced his pecuniary losses with cheerfulness. Despite his failures and disappointments, his costly and persistent efforts to colonise Virginia are the starting-point of the history of English colonisation. To him more than to any other man belongs the credit of indicating the road to the formation of a greater England beyond the seas. Two subsidiary results of those early expeditions to Virginia which Ralegh organised, illustrate the minor modifications of an old country's material economy that may spring from colonial enterprise. His sailors The potato and tobacco. brought back two new products which were highly beneficial to Great Britain and Ireland, especially to Ireland. Englishmen and Irishmen owe to Ralegh's exertions their practical acquaintance with the potato and with tobacco. The potato he planted on his estates in Ireland, and it has proved of no mean service alike to that country and to England. Tobacco he learnt to smoke, and taught the art to others. Tobacco-smoking, which revolutionised the habits, at any rate, of the masculine portion of European society, is one of the striking results of the first experiments in colonial expansion. The magical rapidity with which the habit of smoking spread, especially in Elizabethan England, was a singular instance of the adaptability of Elizabethan society to new fashions. The prac Spread of tobacco smoking. tice of tobacco-smoking became at a bound a well-nigh universal habit. Camden, the historian of the epoch, wrote a very few years after the return of Ralegh's agents from Virginia that since their home-coming 'that Indian plant called Tobacco, or Nicotina, is grown so frequent in use, and of such price, that many, nay, the most part, with an unsatiable desire do take of it, drawing into their mouth the smoke thereof, which is of a strong scent, through a pipe made of earth, and venting of it again through their nose; some for wantonness, or rather fashion sake, or other for health sake. Insomuch that Tobacco shops are set up in greater number than either Alehouses or Taverns.' 1 VI Captain Smith in In more imposing ways Ralegh's early endeavours bore fruit while he lived. Early in the seventeenth century Captain John Smith, a born traveller, considered somewhat more fully and more cautiously than Ralegh the colonising problem, and reached a workable solution. In 1606 Smith took out to Virginia 105 emigrants, to the banks of the James river in Virginia. His colonists met, like Ralegh's colonists, with perilous vicissitudes, but the experiment had permanent results. Before Ralegh's death he had the satisfaction of learning that another leader's colonising energy had triumphed over the obstacles that dismayed himself, and the seed that he had planted had fructified. Smith was a harder-headed man of the world than Ralegh. Idealism was not absent from his temperament, but it was of coarser texture, and was capable of answering to a heavier strain. It was stoutly backed by a rough practical sense. He took the work of colonising to be a profession or handicraft worthy of any 1 Camden, Annales, 1625, Bk. 3, p. 107. Colonial of Ralegh's |