• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1212 0

historian Sir John Seeley is his claim that ‘We seem … to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.’ Seeley delivered the lectures of which this half-truth was part at a time when the empire was in its late nineteenth-century pomp. That line about ‘absence of mind’ comforts the post-imperial generation almost as much as it comforted the Victorians, for it suggests that the British had never really wanted an empire at all, had had it somehow forced upon them. But while piracy may have been part of no great design, the ‘absence of mind’ line simply will not do. If there was nothing quite so precise as a single plan in the early stages, there was certainly an ambition, which showed itself in a series of schemes, haphazard, opportunistic and changeable as they may have been. By Seeley’s time there had come talk of national destiny and a ‘civilizing mission’ to the world, but the empire grew at the hands of men who had multiple motives. Some would plant the flag because they had won battles, others in the name of science and discovery, still others because they were merely obeying orders. Often British power spread because it offered profit, sometimes it did so in the name of freedom, sometimes by mistake and at other times simply to stop someone else seizing land. The makers of empire were aristocrats, merchants, sailors, soldiers, missionaries, speculators, hard-cases, criminals. Some went to start a new life, others to escape an old one. The description ‘Jack the Lad’ would fit many of them.

One of the first people to use the term ‘British Empire’ seems to have been Queen Elizabeth I’s astrologer, a clever and rather deluded Welshman called John Dee, in 1577. Dee advised the queen that she was entitled to claim large tracts of North America, because the place had been ‘discovered’ by a Prince Madog ab Owain of Gwynedd in 1170, some 300 years before Christopher Columbus clapped eyes on the place. Documentary proof to support this claim is no more readily available than is evidence to validate Dee’s other convictions, such as his belief in the existence of a Philosopher’s Stone which could turn base metals into gold, or his assertion that he could hold conversations with angels.

But it was a Devon man, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who persuaded Elizabeth to let him cross the Atlantic to found the first English colony in North America. The characteristics of this founder of empire – visionary enthusiasm and slippery opportunism – occur time and again in the people who brought so much of the world under British rule. Gilbert’s proposal was that he set out to find a route to China through a north-west passage, above the North American landmass. The motive was commercial – ‘to possesse ye welth of all the East partes of the worlde’, and ‘through the shortnesse of the voyage, we should be able to sell all maner of Merchandize, brought from thence, far better cheape, then either the Portingal, or Spaniarde doth, or may doe’. Gilbert laid out the goods with which he might return – gold, silver, silks, spices and precious stones. And it would not be a one-way traffic. God, he said, had reserved all the territory north of Florida for the English to ‘plant a Christian habitation’. In a scheme which would later become a staple feature of British penal policy, he proposed to use the lands he discovered as a dumping ground for ‘such needie people of our Countrie which now trouble the common welth, and through want here at home are inforced to commit outrageous offences, whereby they are dayly consumed with the Gallowes’. As well as the opportunity to offload individuals who would otherwise be a burden on the state, there was the additional pleasure of biffing the Spanish. In 1577 he proposed to the queen his scheme ‘to annoy the King of Spayne’ by attacking his fishing fleets off the coast of Newfoundland. The following year, Elizabeth gave him authority to seek out ‘remote heathen and barbarous lands’.

There is about Humphrey Gilbert’s proposal – as about many later pitches to potential sponsors of imperial expansion