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By Root 1249 0

– a real whiff of excitement, the sort of drive which would before long lead men and women to attempt to cross Africa, climb mountains or push towards the Poles. Part of the impulse to explore was simply that it was there. In an age when the world has been mapped and plundered it requires something of an imaginative leap to appreciate the thrill suggested in this sort of project. Perhaps the closest modern equivalents are the exploration narratives of science fiction. Gilbert was certainly a hard enough nut for this voyage into the unknown, having shown utter ruthlessness during the campaign to put down a rising in England’s first (and perhaps its last) major colony, Ireland. As a military governor he gave no quarter and accounts of the war there talk of supplicants being made to approach him through an avenue of severed heads. It was in the Irish colony, too, that Gilbert had learned the practice of ‘planting’ settler communities (the origins of the so-called loyalist community which still exists in that country, nearly a century after most of the island achieved independence).

In August 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert landed at St John’s, Newfoundland and claimed for the Crown the harbour and all the land within a radius of 200 leagues. He immediately proclaimed three laws: that the religion was to be that of the Church of England; that those who menaced the Crown would be executed for treason; and that if anyone bad-mouthed the monarch they would lose their ears. The English coat of arms was cast in lead and attached to a wooden pillar, after which Gilbert set off again. Around midnight on 9 September, his ship ran into enormous seas. The last sighting of the man later to be called ‘the father of English colonization’ was of him standing on deck with a book in his hand. According to the sixteenth-century geographer Richard Hakluyt his final words, shouted across the tempest, were ‘We are as near to heaven, by sea as by land.’

At this stage, if an empire was indeed being formed, it was a distinctively English one: the only function of the Scots and Irish was to provide some settlers. It took the arrival of a Scottish king to get the British Empire going. The invitation to the Stuart James VI to take the English throne had talked of ‘one Imperial Crown’. (A Welsh member of parliament even proposed that James should take the title of emperor and his dominions be renamed ‘Great Britain’, thereby anticipating the Act of Union of 1707 by more than a hundred years.) The suggestion was not adopted, but by the time of the Act of Union the empire had become a fact: in 1600 there were no permanent English settlements in America; by 1700 there were seventeen different jurisdictions and the clear – and clearly understood – framework of an empire. If we had to find a one-word motive for these settlements, and for most of their successors across the world, it would have to be money. In 1610, for example, a group of thirty-nine men had sailed from Bristol to found a colony at Conception Bay, Newfoundland, under the sponsorship of some London and Bristol merchants who thought there were profits to be made from the spectacular yields of cod to be found in the local waters.* Another Newfoundland scheme, near by at Ferryland, was sponsored by James’s Secretary of State, Sir George Calvert (later Lord Baltimore). Both failed to make a good enough return on investment, but left behind settlers. Newfoundland soon became England’s first permanent colony in the New World, complete with a properly organized economy, a recognizable class structure and the beginnings of its own strange politics.†

There was a precedent for these settlements, for they followed a pattern set in what George Bernard Shaw called John Bull’s Other Island. Ireland had been an anxiety to the English Crown for generations, and for a long time authority ran no further than ‘the pale’, or fence and ditch, surrounding Dublin (and even then there were times when it was little more than a convenient fiction). The new Tudor state which emerged at the end of the Wars of the Roses