The focus for this final preamble to the main efforts of planting English North America is Martin Frobisher and the last of the Elizabethan “sea dogs” failing to plant viable populations in their mazed lust for precious metals and pirate loot. Early voyages to New England and Virginia will be covered in the main section. This grim search for a passage through the arctic to China is presented for three reasons:
-1. To show the development of methods and ethics in long range English voyages.
-2. To demonstrate the fact that actually settling in, clearing and transforming the wilderness of North America was, entirely, an afterthought,
-3. That the lack of Asiatic empires to conquer and rule instilled a desire to recreate an ancient style of extreme class exploitation from scratch, to make a Sumer, an Egypt, an India, a China, by Planting unwanted populations in unwanted destinations. English desired of the New World trade, plunder, and a dump to plant “rubbish” people in redemptive penal situations. It is no accident that the “penitentiary” was an American invention and that America, most prosperous nation in world history, has a higher proportion of humans locked in prisons and jails, than any of the 195 less prosperous nations on the planet. We saw the French penal system in its infancy with Sable Island, a practice that continued into the 20th Century with Devil’s Island. Frobisher and his hard men, risking life and limb mining in the arctic for fools gold, are a cautionary class of pirates with aspirations to become great lords in the Medieval Style, such as did rise in America, with Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Samuel Adams, men who had their very own John Dee/Hakluyt as alchemist/advisor, Benjamin Franklin.
Last English Phase of Pre Planting
-1546, Richard Hakluyt graduates from Trinity College as a polymath and will curate the reports of explorers. Along with Polymath John Dee, who also brought navigational science to England from Europe. Dee and Hakluyt would shape the ideals of Westward Navigation and Plantation.
-1548, Duke of Northumberland convinced Sebastian Cabot to switch allegiance from Spain to England under the boy King Edward VI.
-1551, Cabot Cartel trading with Morocco, which must have involved selling European slaves.
-1553, Cabot Cartel sends a fleet to the Grain Coast being the future Liberia in Africa, where all but 40 men and one ship are lost. Teen age Martin Frobisher, toughest and smartest of the North Atlantic explorers, is among the survivors.
-1553, Cabot elected governor [CEO] of The Merchant Adventurers of England, also called The Muscovy Company for short, the prototype plantation corporation, originally intended to find a passage north of Russia, to get to China!
-1553, Hugh Willoughby sailed north of Norway to winter in Lapland. Both ships and all men were found frozen stiff by Russian fishermen in the spring.
-1554, Richard Chancellor sailed the White Sea to Archangel and went overland to Moscow and obtained trading rights with Czar Ivan.
-1555, John Lok, with 16 year old “officer” Frobisher return from Africa with 100 pounds of pure gold.
-1558, Ascension of Queen Elizabeth sparks rush for African gold and slaves.
-1556, Chancellor wrecked off Scotland, a third expedition under Borroughs contacts Samoyeds.
-1557, Jenkinson sails to the arctic and goes overland to Persia, opening trade relations, which are squashed by a Turkish invasion.
-1560, Henry Cole begins making navigational instruments “second to none” in England, most mariners were still crossing the Ocean “by guess and by God,” and Cole’s artisan efforts aided repeated voyages.
-1561, Martin Frobisher returns from fighting Irish in Ireland, where he met patron Gilbert.
-1562, Hawkins successfully trading slaves from African Kingdoms to Spanish Hispaniola. One of his slave ships, Jesus, abducted “blackamoors” with “love.” Flying the royal flag and sailing naval ships, Hawkins was known by the device of “a demiMoor [mixed race woman] proper bound with a chord.” Frobisher jailed by Portuguese in Africa.
-1560s, Frobisher is a young pirate captain, preying on shipping with letters of marque from Dutch and French and finally did jail time in London for raiding London wine merchant ships.
-1569, The fraudulent Zeno map of Venice is still misleading mariners in Mercator’s most recent map, which Frobisher is destined to correct.
-1574, Bourne’s Regiment of the Sea published
-1567-9, Hawkins, sailing with Drake, is bested by a Spanish fleet off Vera Cruz, and is forces to maroon 100 sailors, including David Ingram, the future tavern bard. The three men who returned to England stated that they were well treated by all the tribes and that most of the men elected to stay. A hundred marooned sailors could explain a lot of Cherokee DNA.
-1576, Grim pirate Captain Martin Frobisher is selected as the leader of an expedition to find the Northwest Passage to China. Lucky for the Chinese that ice breaking ship technology was over 300 years in the future. John Dee instructs the shrewd captain in the use of the most recent instruments.
-Frobisher sails June 7.
-July 11, Sighting Greenland, Frobisher is deserted by one ship, the Michael, that turns home in fear.
-July 20, Baffin Island region charted, Eskimos named after Abnaki term for “eaters of raw meat,”
-August, trading and wrestling with the Eskimos, five of the men go off to trade with the Eskimos and are never seen again. Frobisher abducts one Eskimo by “plucking” him, kayak and all out of the sea.
-September 1, Master of the Michael in London claims Frobisher was “cast away,” or lost.
-Late August, Down to 13 men and boys, Frobisher returned home in his tiny ship, to London on October 9th, with “a peace of blacke stone,” sparking two more brutal treasure hunting voyages.
-1577, Frobisher’s Second voyage, included 6 criminals to be set ashore as miners in Greenland to “civilize” the Eskimos who had made off with 5 sailors the year before! What? Artist/Adventurer John White, who was destined to be the governor of the marooned Roanoke Plantation, was an officer on the voyage and made beautiful paintings for this thuggish voyage of discovery. They abducted two women. One was so ugly they stripped her to see if she had cloven feet and let her go. The pretty one with the baby was kept. A man was taken, who was hurt in wrestling. The three would later die back in England, and were said to have behaved with dignity. The woman’s baby rode in her hood and the man had a heavy mustache.
-1577, portrait of Martin Frobisher with armor, sword and pistol, looking grim. This man would make his best efforts charting the arctic regions of what became Canada, and participated in the wars against Spain as well as a captain under Francis Drake in early planting expeditions.
-1578, Frobisher’s Third Voyage. After Frobisher left, the Eskimo released the five English hostages, who built a boat of wood left at is docks, sailed off, and died in a storm. This story, with all details accurate to Frobisher’s written account from 1578, was told by an old Eskimo woman in 1862, to explorer Charles F. Hall demonstrating the reliability of oral tradition. The last mission, landing to mine for gold ore, was separated according to class, between “Gentlemen and “the inferiour sorte.” The superior sort did work alongside their lesser men in the brutal arctic conditions.
-1578, George Best, writing in True Discourse, states that the involvement of university educated merchant princes, and learned men like Dee, were the only reason why England sailed westward. For even to get Englishmen to fish the Grand Banks rather than buy fish from Normans and Flemmish, had required laws, and that the noble mind was not curious.
-1583, Prince Lasky of Poland invites Dee to lecture and advise.
-1582, Many ships lost at sea in tough winter into 83.
-1583, Gilbert granted a charter for Maine, sails with a copy of Thomas More’s Utopia, beats his cabin boy in a rage, heroically sails in his lesser, leaking ship, and, off the Azores, is seen by the other ship to be swallowed, ship crew and all, whole by the sea.
-1584, Walter Raghly, who is awarded a deed for Virginia, pens a discourse on planting, see below.
-1585, Frobisher Vice Admiral
-1588, Frobisher distinguished in action against Spanish Armada
-1594, November, Frobisher, age 55, mortally wounded in defeating a French garrison at Brest, buried at Cripplegate London
-1675, John Seller’s Atlas Martitimus places the northwest passage explored by Frobisher in 1578 as “not yet discovered.” This passage was not possible during The Little Ice Age, where rivers froze solid from November to March as far south as Maryland.
To finish laying the extensive context for Planting America, we should consider the 7 missions assigned by Walter Raghly in his Discourse Concerning Westerne Planting, in this reader’s paraphrase:
-“To extend the Reformed Religion”
-To improve “beggarly or dangerous” English trades made hazardous by the Spanish
-Resource extraction, “to supply England’s wants”
-To use “numbers of idle men,” in an effort to relieve urban crowding
-Military bases against Spain
-To increase the Navy and enrich the Queen
-And still, to discover the Northwest Passage
