New World, Inc. by John Butman

Author:John Butman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History / United States / Colonial Period (1600-1775), History / United States / General, Business & Economics / Economic History
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

FOR HAKLUYT, THIS seemed to be a time of new possibilities, an opportune moment to release the first of what would be three volumes of his expanded Principal Navigations. When all three were released, the final one appearing in 1600, the new edition constituted a monumental achievement: a two-thousand page trove of more than a hundred accounts, testimonies, and commentaries on English activities of exploration, discovery, and settlement, as well as many additional narratives on foreign initiatives.2

In the dedicatory epistle to the first volume, Hakluyt honored an old stalwart of the sea war with Spain: Charles Howard, the lord admiral who had commanded the navy against the Armada. But Hakluyt chose to dedicate the second volume to Sir Robert Cecil, son of Sir William. In doing so, he signaled his belief that England was on the cusp of a new beginning. Still only thirty-six years old, Cecil was, nevertheless, uniquely influential and, Hakluyt knew, a progressive when it came to English overseas activity. In the wake of his father’s death, people whispered about the continuation of England as “Regnum Cecilianum,” Cecil’s kingdom.3 It was striking testimony to the young man’s astonishing rise to power. Unlike Elizabeth’s other favorites at court, Cecil was physically unprepossessing: small, hunchbacked, with an awkward walk. It was said that a negligent nurse dropped him as a child, although it is more likely that he suffered from inherited scoliosis.4 Elizabeth called him “my pigmy,” but he had a giant intellect and she knew his value as an administrator and adviser. Not only was he clever, he was formidably conscientious. If he owed his spectacular ascent to his father—he was a privy councillor at the age of twenty-eight—he earned the queen’s affection through diligence and dedication. He had the energy and drive that was so characteristic of second sons in England at this time. His elder brother, Thomas, had inherited Lord Burghley’s title and glorious estate near Stamford in Lincolnshire, and Robert knew he would have to follow in his father’s footsteps, building his own fortune through bureaucratic brilliance.

Hakluyt may have first met Cecil in Paris in the early 1580s, when the future royal adviser studied at the Sorbonne, as part of a broad education that included time at Cambridge and Gray’s Inn, his father’s beloved institutions. There, Cecil was hosted by Sir Edward Stafford, the ambassador and Hakluyt’s employer at the time. Later, Hakluyt expressed “no small joy” that Cecil knew so much about “Indian Navigations,” referring to America as well as Asia.5 In his dedicatory epistle in Principal Navigations, Hakluyt acknowledged Cecil’s role in the book’s publication—a sure sign that the young courtier, like his father before him, was eager to lead a second generation of English expansionists.

As always, the search for new cloth markets remained one of Hakluyt’s chief concerns. “Because our chief desire is to find out ample vent of our woollen cloth, the natural commodity of this our Realm,” Hakluyt argued, “the fittest places, which in all my readings and observations I

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