English Overseas Ventures in the Sixteenth Century

The English in the sixteenth century were late to the overseas scramble. By 1500 the Portuguese had reached India, the Spanish had crossed the Atlantic, and the Atlantic islands had been divided. The English were still a regional power, with a small navy, modest capital, and no obvious overseas ambition. Over the course of the sixteenth century — through the Cabot voyages, the Elizabethan privateers, the failed North American colonies, and the founding of the East India Company — England acquired a foothold in three continents and the habits of mind that would, within a generation, make it the dominant power in the Atlantic. The ventures of the 1500s were small in scale and often disastrous in execution, but they mattered because they happened at all. England, the backward kingdom of the western periphery, became an imperial nation.

Cabot, Bristol, and the English Claim to North America

The first significant English overseas venture was the 1497 voyage of John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), a Genoese mariner based in Bristol who sailed under letters patent from Henry VII. Cabot’s Matthew, a small three-masted ship, made landfall in June 1497 somewhere on the North American coast — most likely Cape Breton Island or southern Newfoundland. The voyage established the English claim to North America, a claim that would later be invoked to justify the Newfoundland fisheries and, eventually, the seventeenth-century colonial ventures.

The English claim was, for more than half a century, almost entirely theoretical. Henry VII had no money for overseas ventures, and his successors, absorbed by the French and then the Spanish marriages and the European power struggles, were no better. The real work of English overseas expansion did not begin until Elizabeth.

The Elizabethan Adventurers

Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558 with a serious problem. England was a Protestant state surrounded by hostile Catholic powers; its economy was over-dependent on the cloth trade with Antwerp; and its navy was small. The solution she and her advisers settled on was, in effect, the privatisation of overseas expansion. The queen would grant patents to favoured courtiers — Raleigh, Gilbert, Drake, Hawkins — and let them find the money, ships, and risk. If the ventures succeeded, the crown would take a share of the profits and a portion of the glory. If they failed, the crown could disclaim responsibility.

The pattern was set by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who in 1578 received a patent authorising him to settle “heathen and barbarous” lands in the New World. Gilbert’s 1583 expedition to Newfoundland, where he claimed the territory for Elizabeth, ended in his death in a September storm — he is said to have cried out to his crew, “We are as near to heaven by sea as by land.” His half-brother Walter Raleigh took up the patent and dispatched the Roanoke colonies in 1585 and 1587, both of which failed. Other ventures of the period were more practical: Martin Frobisher’s three voyages to the Arctic in 1576, 1577, and 1578 (in search of a Northwest Passage and, in vain, of gold); John Davis’s voyages of the 1580s; the systematic attacks on Spanish shipping by Francis Drake, who between 1577 and 1580 became the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe.

The Lost Colony of Roanoke

Roanoke was the most famous failure of the Elizabethan age, and remains one of the great mysteries of American colonial history. The colony was established on Roanoke Island, off the coast of present-day North Carolina, in 1585, and re-established in 1587 with 117 men, women, and children. The 1585 settlement was a military garrison that returned to England in 1586. The 1587 settlement was meant to be permanent: John White, the governor, returned to England for supplies and was delayed by the 1588 Armada crisis. When he finally reached the island in August 1590 the colonists had vanished. The single word “CROATOAN” carved into a post was the only trace.

No one has ever satisfactorily explained what happened. The colonists are not known to have left any other record. The most likely answer, on the evidence of later Algonquian oral tradition, is that they were absorbed into local communities — but a people who lose an entire colony and cannot find it decades later have left a deeper kind of failure behind them. Roanoke demonstrated both the difficulty of English settlement in the New World and the persistence of the English overseas vision. The two were often the same thing.

The Challenge to Spain and the Armada Crisis

The 1588 Armada crisis was the decisive military confrontation of the Elizabethan age. Philip II of Spain had been preparing the invasion of England since the 1580s. In May 1588 a Spanish fleet of 130 ships, around 18,000 soldiers, and perhaps 30,000 sailors sailed from Lisbon for the English Channel. The English navy under Lord Howard of Effingham, with Vice-Admiral Francis Drake in the rear, used fireships, long-range gunnery, and the bad luck of the Spanish to break up the Armada in a week of confused engagements off the French coast. A subsequent storm, scattering the surviving ships around the coasts of Scotland and Ireland, completed the destruction.

The English victory was not as total as English propaganda insisted. The Spanish rebuilt their navy in the 1590s and launched further invasion preparations in 1596 and 1597. But the Armada campaign marked the end of Spanish maritime supremacy in the Atlantic, and the beginning of the period in which English ships could operate more or less at will in the Caribbean and along the Spanish Main. As the Spanish ambassador complained, the English had been “lords of the sea” since 1588.

The Foundation of the East India Company

The most consequential Elizabethan venture in Asia was the chartering of the East India Company on 31 December 1600. The company was given a fifteen-year monopoly on English trade with the East Indies, and it would become the principal instrument of English commercial and eventually political power in India for the next 274 years. Its 1600 charter is one of the founding documents of the British Empire.

The East India Company was not the only Elizabethan venture in Asia. The Levant Company, chartered in 1581, traded with the Ottoman Empire; the Virginia Company, chartered in 1606, would attempt English settlements on the North American mainland. None of these had the durability of the East India Company, which would eventually govern a larger territory than any single European state of the early modern period. Its dissolution in 1874 marked the end of a unique experiment in corporate imperialism.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of English overseas expansion in the sixteenth century has been shaped by the question of when, exactly, the English became “imperial” in their self-conception. The older view, going back to J. R. Seeley’s The Expansion of England (1883), treated the Elizabethan period as the conscious beginning of British imperialism, in which Tudor and Stuart statesmen pursued a sustained strategy of overseas expansion. The revisionist view, associated with C. H. Williams and with the economic historians of the 1950s and 1960s, treated the Elizabethan ventures as essentially private — a series of courtier-led adventures of which the state took little notice. The more recent scholarship, by David Armitage, Brendan Kane, and others, has tried to split the difference: there was no grand strategy, but there was a developing sense among Elizabethan administrators, sea captains, and propagandists that England had a providential role to play in the world. The propaganda of the period — Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589), the various accounts of Drake’s circumnavigation, the literature of the Virginia colony — is unusually rich evidence for this emergent imperial self-conception.

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