Week 3: Richard Hakluyt

There was little to no support from the Queen to venture to the New World. The first two attempts by Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh, failed. The main reason the English wanted to colonize the new world was to continue to raid Spanish ships. “Three years later, Raleigh dispatched a fleet of five ships with some 100 colonists to set up a base on Roanoke Island, off the North Carolina coast, partly to facilitate continuing raids on Spanish shipping. But the colonists, mostly young men under military leadership abandoned the venture in 1586 and returned to England” (Liberty 54). After failing many times, Raleigh realized that “to establish a successful colony, it seemed clear, would require more planning and economic resourced than any individual could provide” (Liberty 55).

The English did much the same as the Spanish did. “National glory, profit, and religious mission merged in early English thinking about the New World” (Liberty 55). However, since Catholic Spain became England’s mortal enemy the English soon changed their views on the New World. “Just as Spain justified its empire in part by claiming to convert Indians to Catholicism, England expressed its imperial ambitions in terms of an obligation to liberate the New World from the tyranny of the Pope.” “English translations of Bartolome de Las Casas’s writings appeared during Elizabeth’s reign. One, using a common Protestant term for the Catholic Church, bore the title, “Popery Truly Displayed” (Liberty 55).

Richard Hakluyt gives many reasons for colonization in the New World, twenty-three to be exact. “Among them was the idea that English settlements would strike a blow against Spain’s empire and therefore form part of a divine mission to rescue the New World and its inhabitants from the influences of Catholicism and tyranny. “Tied and Slaves” under Spanish rule, he wrote, the Indians of the New World were “crying out to us…to come and help” They would welcome English settlers and “revolt clean from the Spaniard,” crying “with one voice, Liberta, Liberta, and desirous of liberty and freedom” (Liberty 56).

His argument is a good one to convince the Queen to colonize the New World because he uses the Spanish, their mortal enemy as a reason to go. He says that they are going to liberate the Indians, but in reality when they got there, they did mostly the same things as the Spanish rule had done. Hakluyt used words to get what he wanted, that was the support of the Queen, to supply men for the colonization. He thinks that the Indians will welcome the English as bearers of liberty because they were treated horribly by the Spanish; he thinks that anything other then the Spanish rule would be welcomed as being liberating. He claims that the English will treat the Indians with "humanity, courtesy, and freedom" (Freedom 27-28).