rename the land the resident Indians called Tsenacomacoh after Elizabeth,
the “Virgin Queen,” Virginia. Meanwhile, he commissioned the younger of
the two Richard Hakluyts to write Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of
America and the Islands Adjacent,to assure the queen and other potential
participants of the multiple benefits to be derived from creating a colony in
Virginia. Ralegh hoped that these efforts would open the queen’s purse—
which was notoriously hard to open—but he and Hakluyt failed. Although
the idea of a base of operations for piracy strongly appealed to her,
Elizabeth was skeptical about most of Hakluyt’s arguments. If the colony
was to be established, she decided, Ralegh would have to find the means
himself.
Despite his disappointment, Ralegh moved to the next stage. In 1585,
he assembled a team of about 100 men to probe deeper into the possibili-
ties of Virginia. To the acute annoyance of the Spaniards, this group first
raided Spanish territory in the Caribbean to collect animals and plants to
be tested in Virginia’s soil. The Spaniards were impressed that “the mem-
bers of the expedition include men skilled in all trades...accompanied by
two tall Indians, whom they treated well, and who spoke English.” Ralegh
had prepared for the expedition long in advance by bringing perhaps as
many as twenty Indians to London to be taught English. He was well
aware, as Alden Vaughan has written, that knowledge of Indian languages
“was an essential instrument of empire.” Ralegh’s protégé Thomas Hariot
even compiled a dictionary of “the Virginian speache, 1585.” Ralegh set a
pattern: during his lifetime, perhaps fifty Amerindians were in England for
training, and later many others would work with the colonists in their set-
tlements.
But however skilled they were and whatever help they got from their
Indians, the early Englishmen spent a hungry winter on Roanoke Island
and were so discouraged that their chief, Ralph Lane, concluded that they
must discover either a passage to “Southsea” (the Far East) or a gold mine;
“nothing els can bring this country in request to be inhabited by our
nation.” Luckily, just at that point, the two aims of English policy came tem-
porarily into a single focus: colonist and privateer joined hands when Sir
Francis Drake sailed up from plundering Spanish cities in the Caribbean. It
was obvious, at least to Drake and Ralegh, how valuable a base in Virginia
102 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA