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- [00:01]
Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:35]
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from historyhit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft.
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Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.
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In the summer of 1584, two men stepped onto the shore of a vast and unfamiliar continent. There they would encounter a world that would reshape English ambitions forever. They returned not with gold or booty, but with something far more powerful. Stories. Stories of fertile lands, complex societies, and peoples who seemed to English eyes both alien and full of possibility. Within months, those stories were circulating in London, helping to ignite a vision of empire that was as fragile as it was seductive. This was the moment England began to turn westward in earnest, driven by rivalry with Spain, religious purpose, and the promise of opportunity across the Atlantic. All this month on Not Just the Tudors. I'm leading up to the 250th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. declaration of Independence on the 4th of July with a short series of episodes which look at how the early encounters between Europeans in America unfolded, and, in the case of this episode, how uncertain they truly were. Today we're joined by historian Peter C. Mancall, distinguished Professor Andrew W. Mellon, professor of the Humanities, and Professor of History, Anthropology and Economics at the University of Southern California. He's the author of seven books. His latest is Contested the Struggle for North America circa 1000 to 1680. At the heart of today's stories are individuals navigating between cultures. An indigenous American named Manteo, brought to England from the Carolina coast, became a crucial intermediary, learning the language and customs of the newcomers while maintaining ties to his own people. Alongside him was Wenchesi, whose experience led him in in a very different direction. Returning home with a deep mistrust of English intentions, their stories capture a moment when the future of English America was not yet defined, when cooperation and conflict existed side by side. Back in England, figures like Richard Hakluyt were transforming these encounters into arguments for expansion, weaving together religion, commerce and imperial rivalry into a compelling case for colonisation. Meanwhile, observers such as Thomas Harriot and John White attempted to record and interpret the worlds they encountered, producing narratives and pictures that were as revealing of English hopes as they were of indigenous realities. What followed was not a straightforward march towards empire, but a series of precarious experiments dependent on fragile alliances and shaped by profound misunderstanding. Survival was uncertain, expectations were often misplaced,
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and the balance of power was far
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less clear than it would later appear. It's a story of beginnings of encounter, negotiation and the contested foundations of what would become the English Atlantic world. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and this is not just the Tudors from history hit.
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Professor Mankel, welcome to the podcast.
- [04:50]
Peter C. Mancall
Well, thank you very much for having me. I'm delighted to be speaking with you today.
- [04:54]
Susannah Lipscomb
It's wonderful to have a chance to talk about these early years of encounter. I mean, I find them deeply, deeply fascinating. And it's, as with many other parts of the sort of colonial story of Britain, not quite what one would expect. Things don't go as we would imagine it given later histories. Let's go back perhaps to the beginning of Elizabeth I's reign. When she came to the throne. Did England have any colonies?
- [05:25]
Peter C. Mancall
Well, when Elizabeth took the throne, the English presence abroad was much less than it would soon become. So the English, since the Age of the Cabots at the end of the 15th century, had sort of laid a claim to the northwest Atlantic, but those early expeditions hadn't really led to very much, and so there's not really much there other than circulation of some rather vague knowledge. When she came to the throne, she was very interested, as your listeners know. Well, she was very interested in expanding the authority of the state. And she was also, I think, and I, you know, I point this out in the book, I think she took her religious faith very seriously. And those two things, the desire to expand the power of the realm and also to spread Protestant Christianity, motivated her first to launch what historians typically called Elizabethan conquest of Ireland. And then by the mid-1570s, and then especially in the 1580s, become much more interested in what was going on on the far shores of the Atlantic Ocean. By the time she really starts to invest, there have been a lot of other Europeans who traveled along the Atlantic coast of North America and news is circulating through Europe. And I get the sense that she and her advisors, especially people like Hakluyt, really thought that the time was ripe for the English to get involved in more thorough exploration and then especially colonization or conquest and colonization. They were very jealous of the gains that the Iberians were making. And so I think for multiple reasons, she wanted to get in on the act.
- [07:01]
Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. And what is astonishing, I suppose, is to look at, I mean, the Spanish have been doing this for decades. By this point, the English are very late to the game. Why? I mean, had Henry vii, Henry viii, Elizabeth's father and grandfather, not been a little bit more interested in America? What had their attitude been and what changed when Elizabeth came to the throne?
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Peter C. Mancall
Yeah, that's one of the great questions that I wish I really had better answers for. I mean, when Hakluyt actually does his collection of travel narratives at the end of the 16th century, he includes a report, an alleged report of Bartholomew Columbus, Christopher's brother, going to the court of Henry VII and basically sort of saying, I'm looking for someone to support me to go across the ocean and being turned down. A decision that Hakluyt would later sort of re spin as, oh, America's sort of ours as well in this sort of indirect kind of a way. You know, my sense is always that certainly with Henry viii, he was, I think he was consumed in many ways with domestic affairs. I mean, I think that the Reformation was obviously very important to him, quite
- [08:09]
Susannah Lipscomb
literally, his domestic affairs much of the time.
- [08:11]
Peter C. Mancall
Well played. Yes, exactly. And I think he did have, you know, he did have some ambitions. I mean, he does launch expeditions heading the other way, you know, towards Bologna, sort of reclaiming what he thought believed as English territory. But during his reign, by the time of his death, deep knowledge of North America wasn't really available yet. I mean, there was some knowledge. It was very fragmentary. I mean, so the knowledge that he and his court had really had to do with what Spanish and Portuguese explorers had been finding and then colonizing in the West Indies, then to Mexico, then down into Peru and Brazil. So there is this information that's circulating, but I get the sense that his energies were elsewhere. Elizabeth seemed to have had sort of a two pronged approach. She had more interest in North America, but not to the extent that she really wanted to invest her own or state resources in it. But I think instead, what you see in the age of Elizabeth is a shift in policy towards really supporting people who would come to her saying that they will raise money if necessary, find ships that they would basically fund expansionary campaign that could help to put England on the same footing as Spain. But beyond that, deeper than that, I sort of would yield to English Historians who could probably see her sort of in more nuanced, responding to domestic affairs. I do think it was during her reign, more during her reign than what came earlier, that there's knowledge within England of sort of rising social problems, of a sense that there's a rising number of unemployed or underemployed young people, many of them men, many of them possible threats to the social order. And I think when someone like Hakluyt or the older Hakluyt presented to the court, look, here are these Iberians making all this money, advancing Roman Catholicism, that's not in our interest. And by the way, if we were to establish colonies, there are all these economic benefits, one of which would be to find work for these sort of what they sort of would think of as surplus or underemployed men and hence reduce tensions at home. I think these things all started to come together. In fact, the elder Hakluyt puts together a plan in the 1580s which lists 31 different reasons for why the Crown should support colonization. So I think it's the accumulation of knowledge, both domestically as well as news coming from abroad, that finally sort of clicks in, and the English become more interested in colonization, I would say, beginning in the 1570s, than going into the 80s.
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Susannah Lipscomb
That's really interesting. Let's come back to those reasons for colonization in due course. But one of the key things, as well as sort of concerns about vagrancy and masterless men, which is such an interesting point, is this sense of the European rivalries. I suppose the early story of English America tells us precisely about the sense of competition in Europe. And, you know, they want some of that Spanish gold, don't they?
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Peter C. Mancall
Absolutely. And that's that Spanish gold and all those other treasures which are being, you know, I thought polite, would be extracted. The more accurate term would be stolen, you know, from the Americas. You know, that wealth is making its way back to Europe and not just to Spain, you know, to the. I mean, unless the story has changed. If you take a tour of Santa Maria Maggiore, the basilica in Rome, they tell how the gold leaf paint is from gold brought over from Columbus and from those expeditions. I mean, it's not just sort of the idea that, oh, we're bringing more souls into Christendom and they're following the Pope. You could see the wealth that's coming across. And I think that Elizabeth, with her series of spies across the continent, because everybody's spying on everyone, was well aware of these gains and wanted to sort of get in on it. I Mean, I do think that early on she is consumed with other things, especially Ireland, but then her focus shifts more explicitly towards North America.
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Susannah Lipscomb
It's interesting you mention Ireland again, because the relationship between England's campaigns in Ireland and colonization in America is fascinating. Could you tell me a bit about how these two colonial ventures, cultures, influence each other?
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Peter C. Mancall
I'll do my best. I mean, the English, or whatever we call those people in the 11th and 12th century, had been interested in things going on in Ireland since then. And then they launched this invasion under strongboat. They have the sense that they were going to bring these, as they would sort of say, this sort of wild population under the fold into English civilization, English culture. The experience turns out to be the opposite. The English men, primarily men who go to Ireland instead, intermarry into Gaelic society and become part of the society. And Ireland sort of trundles along on its own narrative. When Elizabeth comes in, when Elizabeth succeeds to the throne, I think she looks at that experience. She sees that there's great advantage to Ireland. I think she's very sincere about spreading Protestant faith, very frustrated that that did not go well in Ireland. Also sees, I think, some economic gain to be had. Also sees Ireland as a possible place to send some of these otherwise underemployed people. And I think she takes very seriously the idea that they should bring Ireland into the fold. What differentiates her from that earlier conquest is that the military invasion that they launch is much more serious, much bloodier. And in the age of print, the stories that are coming from Ireland are, you know, are there for everyone to read. You know, we read them now as tales of, you know, incredible barbarity. You know, I think that they read them as sort of, you know, celebrations. And look what we're doing, and we've. We're learning how to sort of bring this population to heal, as it were. And they do so quite explicitly by trying to terrorize the native population. So in one celebrated example, and I was not the first historian to find this, of course, it's foundational to the historian Nicholas Canny's early work on the Elizabethan conquest. But in one celebrated example, the military commander Gilbert has his men go out into the field at the end of the day and decapitate the bodies and have them brought to his tent so that people coming through would, as the chronicler puts it, have to walk through a lane of heads to get to him, knowing that there would be a psychological terror to this. So this level of willingness to use violence is far different than what had happened earlier. And it does, I think, signal a shift on the part of the English state towards expanding the realm.
- [15:07]
Susannah Lipscomb
That's interesting. And let's go back to those arguments you mentioned. You mentioned that the Hakla's writings are hugely influential. How does the sort of vision that we see in things like the discourse of Western planting shape English attitudes towards empire, the prospect of colonization?
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Peter C. Mancall
Yeah, that's a great question. So there are two hacklets, both named Richard, so it always gets a little confusing. And the elder one, who's a lawyer at the Middle Temple one day, is entertaining the younger one. The younger one is the famous one. And he claims he's, you know, the younger one would later write, in 1589, he would write that he walked into the rooms of his. Of his cousin and saw a map of the world, expressed an interest in it. And the older cousin says, starts to point, like literally with his wand, point where he can, where various resources can be found. And this sparks the younger one. He tells the story years later, but sparks this interest sometime late 1570s. And then the younger one gets sort of more interested in what's over there. He's sort of looking, settling on his life's purpose. And he decides that one of the things that needs to happen is the English need to learn more, know more about what's going on abroad. And so he works with a linguist based in Oxford named John Florio to translate part of Jacques Cartier's narratives of early trip to Canada, what's modern day Canada. And then he starts to gather more travel accounts, look at old maps and begin to put together an argument leading in 1584 to the document that we call the Discourse on Western Planting, in which he lays out rather systematically the many reasons that the English should get involved in overseas colonization. They start with the grand general thing that we need to spread Christianity. I think they took that very seriously. They want to spread the glory of the Queen. They can motivate people who know that individuals who do certain things will become famous. They'll be able to. They anticipate that they're going to extract wealth like the Spanish and the Portuguese had extracted wealth from the colonies. They by that time can enumerate various commodities that can be found in eastern North America. He weaves in the argument about people looking for work. And by the time you get through it all, you get this very powerful argument. And you can just imagine the Queen or Sir Francis Walsingham, principal advisor, reading this and thinking, why are we not already doing this? Right? I mean, it's page after page of this very detailed thing. One of the more interesting things about the discourse is it's not published at the time. It's actually not published until the 19th century. But the ideas behind it do fuel the younger Hakuz publishing agenda. And those really start to come out powerfully in 1589 in a big collection of travel narratives called Principal Navigations. And in the Principle of Navigations, Hakluyt lays out an argument that says, we are an exploring people, a seafaring people. There's a wider world out there. Look at all the things that English people have done in the past. And then he describes English exploits across the world, basically reprinting travel narratives from across the world. And he's doing it. By the time he gets to part three, which is on the Western Hemisphere, he's doing it. I have argued to build the case that we've gone to Africa, we've gone to Asia, we've gone to these places. It is now time to really go to North America. We've started, we have not gotten very far. Now we need to do much more. I think that's the thrust of both the discourse and the Principal Navigations.
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Susannah Lipscomb
It's so interesting to consider the ways in which that idea of Englishness as a seafaring, as an exploratory people shaped identity for centuries thereafter. It really sets the tone, which I don't think was part of the narrative of Englishness 60 years earlier at all.
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Peter C. Mancall
Really.
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Susannah Lipscomb
One of the explorations at the time that is happening is the search for the Northwest Passage. How is that relevant to America?
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Peter C. Mancall
Yeah, well, I'm really glad you asked that, because the Northwest Passage is central to what the English want to do. And it's not just the Northwest Passage, it's also the Northeast Passage. So the English looked at the most up to date maps that they could find and they could visualize. Anybody in Europe who saw these maps could see that there were these alleged water routes that ran north of Russia, on the one hand, the Northeast Passage, and north of what we think of as Canada, the Northwest Passage. They believe that they existed. They were right. They do exist. But they believed that they existed at a time when these passages were frozen over because of the Little Ice Age, this colder couple of centuries in climate history. But the search for the Northeast Passage and the search for the Northwest Passage had the same goal. People in England, like people across much of Europe, were desperate to get to the southwest Pacific Ocean to find spices, to find cinnamon and cloves and pepper and nutmeg. And we tend to think of these things as things that we put in our food, which is true. But they really thought of them as part of medicine, of materia medica, things that really could be integrated to improve human health. And they knew about the spices because there had been an old spice route that brought spices from the southwest Pacific Ocean all the way to northwestern Europe, a very long couple of years journey through the Indian Ocean, around Africa, then finally north. A lot of risks along the way. An overland journey like the Silk Road, also long, also filled with all kinds of risks. And so when Hakluyt is quite literally looking at maps, he basically says, here we are perched at the northwest edge of the Europe. We are this fabulous maritime nation, and we are closer to the openings of the Northwest Passage than anybody else, or by extension, the Northeast Passage, he hoped. And so it made a certain logical sense to say, well, if we can make it to the Northwest Passage, if we can find the opening to this body of water, we will be able to get to the southwest Pacific much more quickly. Now, what he doesn't know, because Europeans only have dim awareness, is how large the Pacific Ocean is or how wide North America is. So on their maps, it looked like a relatively easy jaunt, almost. You find your way into the passage, you'll get through relatively quickly. You'll sail south, and you'll get to the Spice Islands. The English and other Europeans held to this idea about the relative narrowness of North America for quite a long time. So they never quite understood how long it would take to get through the passage. In some sense, that conversation didn't matter because they couldn't find the passage. So it just kept motivating them. And so sailor after sailor, explorer after explorer, knew, I'm going to be the one that finds it. And so you see, in the Elizabethan period, various Europeans sort of making it to North America and trying to figure out, oh, that body of water looks wide. That must be the opening to the passage. And that logic would motivate people for decades how to find it, because they knew that the one who found it would bring glory to the queen and riches to the realm. The goal was so great that it was worth the risk.
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Susannah Lipscomb
So everyone is attempting to be the one to come off, to succeed in this quest. Is there a moment under Elizabeth in which this is formalized that colonization as a goal becomes sort of encodified?
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Peter C. Mancall
Well, I'm not sure there's a single moment. And trying to sort of figure out exactly what she and her court think about all this exploration can Be a little. A little tricky. So she is well aware that she is giving permission to people, and she is laying claim based on the explorations of the Cabots from the late 15th century. She is laying claim to parts of North America, to large parts of North America. And during her realm, the idea became that we, the English, could claim territory that is not already claimed by their words, a Christian prince, which meant they could claim territory south of the French claims to what is modern day Canada, and north of the Spanish claims to what is modern day Florida, basically. So that broad area in the middle, most of the east coast of the modern United States, the English laid claim to. And Elizabeth and her court granted patents to people like to Sir Walter Raleigh to say, okay, this is my territory. I give you permission to go there. And the court offers a series of patents that sort of encourage exploration. One of the people who they support, who would become really the greatest hero of the age in some sense, was Sir Francis Drake. You know, Drake is also trying to get to the Southwest Pacific also, as this claim famously goes, through the Straits of Magellan, up the west coast of the United States. And what I find one of the most revealing moments in my very long book, you know, one of the revealing moments is when Drake is somewhere probably on the modern California coast, maybe slightly north. There's a big debate among archaeologists, but whatever, let's call it the California coast for the sake of argument. And he sets up camp and he meets this native population. And they can't speak to each other. There's no common language that they can talk. And so through a series of signs, he seems to believe that these people who had never seen him before, never seen a sailing ship like his before, never seen people who look like him before, dressed like him, act like him. He interprets their gestures, which were probably gestures of hospitality. He interprets their gestures as, we are giving you America. We're giving you this part of America. We accept that we'll be subjects of the Queen. I mean, on some level, that's just ridiculous, right? But it speaks to sort of the Elizabethan posture, the Elizabethan attitude that if her subjects are the first to see a certain population and they make some effort to negotiate with them, then that can be part of the realm. And that claim to California lasted for decades in sort of the English colonial mind.
- [26:01]
Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, that's so interesting. And it's. It's absolutely kind of an echo of the sort of things that Columbus had said when he came back about the native people that he had met there. You know, I could tell from what they were saying that they were offering me the land. We do have also expedition by sort of the other person we mention in the same breath as Drake, at least on his behalf, Sir Walter Raleigh, or Raleigh, as perhaps it's called at the time. And this is to parts of the Americas where we have, you know, modern day Carolinas, where we have the Algonquian people live. Do we have. This is a strange question to us because of course, we only reach many of our conclusions about these peoples from colonial accounts. But what can we tell about Algonquin Society before the English arrived?
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Peter C. Mancall
I think we know quite a lot. I mean, it's not just from historical accounts. There are sort of descendant communities and
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Susannah Lipscomb
archaeology, I presume as well.
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Peter C. Mancall
Well, there's a lot of archaeological evidence and there is some surviving oral testimony amongst certain populations. And there are people who are the descendants who are still living in these areas. So Algonquian speaking peoples lived across much of eastern North America. Right. And so the people who become the center of the focus of the English in the Lisabian period are these Carolina Algonquians. They're the people on the Outer Banks and in North Carolina. And fortunately for us, in 1584, 85, a series of expeditions start to go from England to explore this area. And really fortunately for us who are trying to understand this hundreds of Years later, the 1585 voyage has on it young mathematician Thomas Harriot and a painter, John White. And White does a series of watercolors, probably does them there, although we don't actually know that for a fact. He's certainly sketching while he's there. And Harriet writes an account which becomes published when he comes home as a brief and True Report of the Newfoundland of Virginia, arguably the most important work describing native peoples since Columbus's initial report of 1493. And Harriet really goes into much detail. Now. He benefits from the fact that he knows Montteo and Monchese, who you had referred to in your elegant opening. And he is starting to learn their language and they are certainly starting to learn English. Now, how much they know of each other is hard to know. But in the brief and true report, Harriet integrates Algonquian words that they call tobacco this or they call maze that. And it does show that he has a certain familiarity. And it certainly, certainly when he starts to talk about the customs of the peoples who are there, he seems to be having real conversations. I mean, conversations about the nature of the soul and who gods are and things like this. I mean, really quite specific, I mean, and quite detailed. He tells stories about how they believe when someone dies, their soul goes off to a place called Papaguso, and he tells other sorts of stories. And then in one very revealing moment, one of the really central moments of this text, he says, let's paraphrase some religion they have already, and though it be far from the truth, they'll be this sooner reformed. Right. So he understands that the people he's meeting have a fairly in depth sense of religion, spirituality, faith, whatever word we want to attach to it. So they don't need to be taught the concept of the divine. They just need to be taught, as he would say it, that they're doing it wrong, that they need Anglicanism basically to move forward. He is, at the same time that he's learning about the customs of these people, he's also describing the physical things, what's in that environment, and he's listing them out as what he calls merchantable commodities. Here are things that we can take. Now, that idea does go back to Columbus, when Europeans thought one way or another they were going to be able to take whatever they wanted from the Americas back to Europe. And so we have in Harriet, we have in Harriet's text descriptions of the people, descriptions of the environment, and then we have this parallel set of information in John White's watercolors. And in the watercolors, White depicts the people who they meet. And those line up pretty well with the descriptions in Harriet's book. And so White and Harriet bring this material back to England, they get into the Hakluyt circle, they make various connections, and all of a sudden this material ends up in the hands of this Flemish engraver, Theodore de Bray, who then creates this very important illustrated edition of Harriet's book in four languages. The first time that had been done sort of simultaneously, in which they wed together the text of Harriet and the images, engraved versions, they're not identical. Watercolors, engraved versions of White's paintings. And then somebody, possibly Hakluyt, invents captions for the pictures which really sort of then cement the. The ties between the images and the text. So to answer your question, which I know it took a while to get to the answer, but to answer your question, the amount of information we have is actually fairly abundant for this one population. We have more information about them than we do about many other native peoples from the 16th century because the survival of documents and because the place was still important to English colonization.
- [32:04]
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- [32:54]
Susannah Lipscomb
There's so many things of interest in what you've just said. So let's think a little bit about those images perhaps, and the reprinting of those images, because, I mean, that's fairly new. We've, we print is just over a century, a century and a half old. But using images to illustrate things is starting to really become important in how people understand new ideas. So these engravings of the watercolors by John White, how influential do you think they were to shaping English perceptions and ambitions?
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Peter C. Mancall
So I have argued that the engravings are very important. If you were a student in the United States, you would pick up an American history textbook and it would show you probably one of the watercolors because they're vivid and four color and, you know, they're very. They seem on the spot. Most people didn't have access to those watercolors. Almost no one had access to them. What people could really see were the engraved versions that came out of the Debry workshop. And the engravings do a lot of visual work. White, sort of like a classically trained painter, had. Had painted his subject when he painted humans, sort of against a blank background. And you could see that in the watercolors, sometimes with some words added, but basically blank. The engravers who understood sort of the economy of print knew that they wanted each page to do more work. And so they created actual backgrounds. So you can see in the foreground the figures that White had painted. And in the background, people, you know, hunting deer, or in the background, fields which are being tended by people. And so the engravings send a message, a very powerful message, that here is a landscape that we, that is the English or other Europeans, published in multiple languages, that we can control. Here is a landscape where the soil is fertile, where the woods are filled with game animals, where the waters are almost stocked with a vast variety of fish and shellfish. Right. And the tone of the engravings, the tone of the book is if these people, who we, the English think are less civilized than us, can create this economy, imagine what we can do. And among the engravings are two depictions of towns the palisaded village of Pumiuk, which literally, which has a series of buildings within it, which the caption tells us what happens in them, including one place where they practice their faith, and then the town of Sokota. And if you look at the image of Sokota, if you're an English person, look at the images of Sokota or someone on the continent looking at this, what you see is a very orderly town, which I would argue more orderly than most English or continental villages at the time. A perfectly straight street with each house along it and each having their own function. And sending to me, I think, sending to readers, I should say, a very clear message. This has already created the foundation upon which we can build our civilized society. We don't have to do the hardest work. It's already done. We can succeed here. And as the text also suggests, and as Harriet suggested, the people who live here are going to embrace us. They are going to want our technology, they're going to want our faith. They are going to want to become subjects of the Queen. They're going to become like us. They have this optimistic faith that they'll do this. And for them, for these people in the 1580s who had heard stories about the bloody conquest that the Spanish had unleashed in the Americas, had heard stories of the bloody conquest of what had happened in Ireland. Here was a place where it looked like there could be great success at lower risk. And it starts, in the opinion of people like Hackett. It seems obvious this should be the next field for us to try to plow.
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Susannah Lipscomb
It's so interesting to hear about that optimism, but also those images, because, am I understanding you correctly, to summarize it as those landscapes are fictionalized in that they're based on what the engravers knew. Fields, woods, rivers flowing, beautifully stuffed, full of fish like it's paradise. They're not necessarily coming from the American landscape because they're just using the figures. Is that correct, or have I misunderstood you?
- [37:53]
Peter C. Mancall
I think what they're saying, I mean, I do want to be clear on this, on this point. The white watercolors primarily focus on individuals. He has others, but I mean, focus on individuals. The engravers take them, especially the portraits, and invent backgrounds for them. Those invented backgrounds, I think, are drawn from their reading of the text of their reading of Harriet. Oh, Harriet describes hunting. White didn't do a painting of hunting. Let's put hunting in the background, hunting deer in the background. So what's in the engraver's mind is probably the landscapes that they knew in Europe, and they're looking at these words. I mean, this is one of the classic problems that engravers, that illustrators have had about the Americas throughout the 16th century. They get these verbal reports and they're trying to communicate them visually in part because they realize that visual images can reach people who can't necessarily read, especially if they're printed. And so you see, so this goes back to the very end of the 15th century, the struggle to how do you depict a place that you haven't seen with your own eyes? So they trust the words of the explorer. And by the time someone is creating a, an engraving, they are not necessarily talking to an explorer. The explorer has talked to people who sponsored, presumably his mostly men, his mission back at the docks. That person has gone to find someone who can print a pamphlet to say, basically, I paid for this, I'm laying claim to this. Then those pamphlets or short books would maybe make their way through the intervention of someone like Hacklet to an engraver, right? So by the time you get to the engraver creating the background for these images, it's not even necessarily first hand information. Harriet's book is as close as anyone could get to sort of first hand information because he was there and it was printed. And it's printed actually before Hakluyt prints it again in 1589. Harry has it printed first in a small pamphlet in 1588. Those words are presumptively accurate. All of that said words can only go so far. And when an engraver is creating the set, literally the set upon which the actors are going to walk, right, some element of imagination has to come into it. They're visualizing it because they're visualizing it in part, not only say, okay, this is what we believe is going on there, but they're visualizing using visual tropes that are intelligible to their audience. One of the persistent problems that Europeans had when it came to understanding Americas is they could not capture the color of the Americas, the colors of things. The great historian John Elliot wrote about this in a wonderful book called the Old World and the New. How to capture the vividness of certain colors, the greens, the reds of animals, of plants. That problem lasted for a very long time. You know, it's sort of a sub theme in the, in the history of collecting, in the history of science. How do we know we're getting it right? Because part of the problem is that even though Europeans are extracting physical things from the Americas, here's a bird. Because they captured birds. Here's an animal. Here are these plants by the Time they made it back to England, made it back to Europe. The colors have faded, some of these things have degraded, and it's very hard to capture it. So I think there's a challenge that any engraver had to sort of get this accurate.
- [41:52]
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- [42:41]
Susannah Lipscomb
One other thing from Thomas Harriet's account that historians have noticed is the invisible bullets. So as long with the optimism about how these people are going to respond to the English, there's also, it turns out, something mysterious going on. Can you talk us through that?
- [43:03]
Peter C. Mancall
Yeah. So in the midst of Harriet's narrative, he encounters people, encounters stories of people who seem to die in large numbers after the arrival of the English. And they talk. These Carolina Gonkwins tell Harriet that there must be invisible people, invisible entities that have come with the English and they are shooting invisible bullets into these people. So one way to sort of think about it, you know, is it conceivable that this could have been smallpox and that these bullets were leading to the pustules on the skin? We don't know the answer to that. That's going to remain a hypothetical. But the idea of those invisible warriors shooting those invisible bullets, which they also said were pulled with a string from arrows, I mean, they have this whole thing is it fit the Algonquian's understanding of the English, because at one point Harriet sort of says, oh, they think we're not people, because how could we be people if there are no women among us? Because it was an all male expedition, we must be some other kinds of creatures. So once you believe that they're not humans like you, because there are no women there, it's not that far of a leap to say, well, we got sick after you got here and we think you must have brought along these invisible agents to what? To destroy our bodies. So it's this. It fits in this idea that we have, that we. Part of what we call the Colombian exchange, the movement of Old World diseases to the Western Hemisphere. And the other part of the exchange is the movement of Western Hemisphere goods to the Old World. We know in retrospect that smallpox was likely the most devastating of these diseases. You know, we want to instinctively say, well, that sort of lines up. I don't believe we actually know that. I do think it likely. I think the story is accurate to the point that some of these Europeans did spread some sort of contagion to the Carolina Gonkwins and that they did die in large numbers. And I. So I think that they had a better sense of how disease functions than Harriet, because Harriet mocks this. Harriet says this is not how disease spreads, because he believes that disease spreads when, you know, there's a comet in the sky or there's some sort of miasma. Right. His way of thinking is also not modern. It's just different from theirs. And so the figure of the invisible bullets becomes sort of almost metaphorical in the way that it comes down to us as a way to visualize the bodily changes, the threats to the bodies of the Carolina Algonquians.
- [45:57]
Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. I mean, I absolutely take your point that we can't be certain this is what's going on. We shall never know. But invisible bullets does seem a pretty good way of describing a pathogen, doesn't it, really?
- [46:09]
Peter C. Mancall
Absolutely.
- [46:10]
Susannah Lipscomb
So how does Thomas Harriot's work and these prints, how does it influence English colonial plans?
- [46:16]
Peter C. Mancall
So Harriet's book, and then, especially when it gets in the hands of Hacklett, becomes part of a. Of a campaign that works in print as well as, I think, you know, within the corridors of Whitehall, within. Within the places where people of power are discussing what to do. So this information is coming back and more. It's. And it comes back before Harriet. There's already news sort of coming back from the Americas. And so people, English people, prominent ones, think, okay, well, there's something we should do more here. And in fact, one of the sort of twists of history is that in 1583, Hakluyt is offered the chance to go to the Western Hemisphere, to go on an expedition that winds up in Newfoundland. But Walsingham, the Queen's principal secretary, Walsingham says, neo, I need you as a spy in Paris. So Hackett says, okay, I'll go to Paris, where he has an amazing life. Putting that aside, he gives his place up to someone he knew at Oxford, a young poet. And that young poet goes and he dies on the way home. There are three ships on that expedition under Gilbert, and two of them go down. Had Hakluyt gone on that expedition, chances are we don't know. Much about what we know now because Hakluyt helped gather documents together, went around talking to people, wrote them up. So we can see in the pages of a book like the Principal Navigations, and for those who haven't seen it, you know, this is a massive work. I mean, the first edition in 1589, which we think of as two volumes, is really one gigantic volume in three parts. Page after page of a printer taking the words that Hakluyt had brought him that bear witness to English expeditions, quite plain and simple. These are reports of English people. He weaves in other things at times, and he weaves in reports that he gets suspicious about eventually. We know that because he drops them from a later edition of the book. But the Principal Navigations, once it sort of hits the shelves, it's hard to imagine hitting streets, you know, the size of it. But in 1589, then becomes sort of a go to book because it becomes the corollary, it becomes the companion to those maps. It begins to put a new spin on geographical information which Europeans, which people in England, I should say, are getting. And it does so in a very, I guess we would say, patriotic way. Right? He's not just sort of reprinting, oh, this is what Columbus did. He's reprinting what earlier English people had written about, right, that this is about English expeditions, English explorers, English bravery. Look at what we've done. If we've done all this in the past, imagine what our future can hold. And so I think there is this campaign, and I think print is central to the campaign because print helps gin up interest to people that maybe don't have access to the court for people who need to be convinced to get on a ship and to go on this mission, which is still very dangerous and still in the waters. They are being charted, but there's still much that is not known. They've learned the basic pattern of the winds. They know they can get to the Americas and come back. But they're all stories. But they're stories about shipwrecks, not just of English shipwrecks, but European shipwrecks, which litter the ocean floor and also in some ways litter the books coming out of printer shops. So we know there's real danger. So that contest in print, that argument in print that Hakluyt and others like him make, is just as important, I would say, as what goes on, where the decisions are being made. Because they're not just reading what English people have done, they're also reading what other Europeans have done. And to go Back to Raleigh for a moment. Raleigh becomes obsessed with the Orinoco and he gains the support of the Queen because he is going to go into this territory that the Spanish have claimed, and he's going to sort of reclaim part of it, try to claim part of it for the English. It would become the great sort of tragic through line of his later years where his son dies there. He eventually would be executed. All these things happen, right? But they're all happening in this age of print. And he is printing what he's talking about also with his book about the new discoveries of Guyana. So there's a lot that's going on among these sort of intellectuals in the age of the Tudors that are really motivating action, motivating investment, motivating people to get on ships.
- [50:54]
Susannah Lipscomb
So this is an extraordinary age of changing ideas about what might be possible. And there's a drive behind it, really, I suppose. And the two characters I mentioned in the introduction that we've come back to a couple of times, Manteo and Monchese, do you feel like their trip to England in the 1580s is part of that as well? Is that kind of creating a sense of. Of opportunity here?
- [51:22]
Peter C. Mancall
I think that's a great question, and I absolutely think that's the case. I think when they joined that expedition in 1584 to return and make their way eventually to London, I think, you know, there's one way, one spin you could have that, well, maybe they were taken captive, which I don't think was the case. I think this was. I think these were people in the. On 1584 expedition who are communicating through sign language and perhaps beginning to learn some words about each other. You see this in explorers accounts. They start to write down certain terms. You can see that they're trying to speak to people, trying to teach each other words. I think that Manteo and Monchese get on these ships and they sail back to England. And I think they see that as opportunity. I think you'd see that in other native voyages to England later on also, most famously with Pocahontas. But in this period in the 1580s, I think there is a sense that they are going to go and they're going to see a new world, what is to them the new world. And presumably they've communicated in a way that says, okay, they are going to come back again. And they do come back again. And as you alluded to in your opening, they have very different opinions about the English. Right. Manteo becomes very friendly, you know, with The English. And this runs through the rest of the documented aspects of his life. And Manchese decides these people are up to no good. I've got to warn people about what's to come. That same sort of tension happened with other native peoples who got to spend time with English or other Europeans. Right. Sometimes they see great opportunity, and I think those opportunities are real. And sometimes they see great danger, and those dangers are real. What led Manteo to take one path and Monchese another, we're never gonna know, because our only record is the relatively fragmentary documents that we have from this time period.
- [53:22]
Susannah Lipscomb
You mentioned that the algonquins were astonished that these people, who therefore clearly couldn't be human, didn't have women with them. What is the role of women, both English and indigenous, in these colonial encounters, these early ones? I mean, are they present at all?
- [53:38]
Peter C. Mancall
Eventually, after that 1584 expedition goes back, when they come back in 1585 with other things. A small number of English women do cross the Atlantic ocean. And it's a sign that very quickly, the English have decided that this one place, the outer banks, adjacent north mainland of North Carolina, that this place is a place that we could colonize. That is, it's not just a place to extract resources from. As a place to extract resources from only needs men. And we know the English thought that because when Martin frobisher went on his journey looking for the northwest passage in the middle of the 1570s and thought he found gold, he. He didn't. He planned to create a gold mining colony, and he brought all English men, right? So we know that the English make a differentiation between places where they can just extract wealth and places they can colonize. And I think that what's happened as soon as 1585 is that the English have decided, okay, we can establish colonies here, and we have to have women present. I mean, that strikes us as an obvious sort of way to create. To think about colonies. It's not necessarily obvious, because another opportunity that they could have taken would be, we need to establish families with the native peoples we're meeting. This is, in fact, what French fur traders did later on in farther north. They created families. There were not very many French women who went to the St. Lawrence Valley. It's almost all men from France who go to the St. Lawrence Valley. They create durable social ties, Familial networks, which helps their fur trade. So that's an option. We tend not to think about it for the English, but that option could have existed. It doesn't seem to Exist, they bring over a small number of women. It's hard to know exactly what the Carolina Algonquians are thinking about the English because it's in this period after the 85 expedition and as more colonists come, leads to one of the great mysteries of American history, which is what happened at Roanoke, where this would be colony disappears. And Americans have been arguing about it ever since. You know, one new theory after another. Someone thinks they've cracked the code on this. What we know about that early Roanoke community is that there were women there, right? That the English have decided that their species of colonization in North America is going to involve English women. It's not going to be men only. It's not going to be men marrying into indigenous societies. They had that lesson of Englishmen doing that in Ireland centuries earlier. They saw, they heard about that with Spanish doing that with native women farther south. And they condemn virtually everything that Spanish are doing. So they don't want to follow that path. And so they have this first tentative thing, it would become a foundation for English colonization after Elizabeth, that there should be some women and or girls along on some of these missions. But the initial mission, even to Jamestown, typically are all male.
- [56:57]
Susannah Lipscomb
I talked to Professor Mark Horton about roanoke back in November 2025, and my jaw was on the floor thinking about this so called mystery. Are the English dissuaded at all by what happens at Roanoke?
- [57:13]
Peter C. Mancall
I think the English are saddened by what happened at Roanoke. I mean, and I think that we should not just sort of say, well, we see other colonial missions launching soon after. And so they didn't care. I think it really struck them, I think when they discovered the news in 1590, after they could get there after the armada. I think this was a moment of reflection, a moment that colonization is in fact is much more difficult. A moment when they realize we need to really communicate with the peoples we're meeting or else it's going to lead to tragedy. Now that tragedy could be these native peoples gang up on them. The tragedy could be another wave of violence like the English had witnessed and launched in Ireland. Right. But I think there's a real moment there that said the circulation of the printed version of Harriet's book, when it comes out in 1590, I think acts as a real spur to colonization in some sense. It's so tempting, right? It's so possible. Success seems just right there. Like we really can reach it, we can really get there. That they then sort of say, okay, learn from Roanoke, but don't abandon this. Move on. And in the 1590s, end of the first decade of the 17th century, there are greater frequency of English people going across the Atlantic Ocean with the idea of first exploration and then colonization.
- [58:53]
Susannah Lipscomb
Well, Professor Mancleur, you've given us an amazing introduction to, well, more than an introduction really, to the Elizabethan ventures in America. But as you say, the most famous part of the story picks up after James comes to the throne and we get, of course, the creation of Jamestown, inventively named. This is rather cheeky of me, but I wonder, would you come back on to talk to me about that phase of the English in America? It's been such a, a fascinating conversation and our time together has flown past. You can say no. And I shall cut this out. I shall edit this out.
- [59:30]
Peter C. Mancall
I would be delighted to come back on and just because I've so enjoyed this conversation, of course I would come back and talk to you about that piece of it. I'd be delighted.
- [59:38]
Susannah Lipscomb
Well, that would be an absolute treat for me. Thank you. And just to remind listeners that you have this wonderful book, I can see it over your shoulder, but coming out very soon, contested content continent, When's that published?
- [59:52]
Peter C. Mancall
So it's already published in the United States and my understanding is that it'll be published in England in September, but I don't really know how these things work. So I'm going to say that it's out here now and it will be out there in September and I'll be coming to England to talk about it later in the autumn.
- [60:11]
Susannah Lipscomb
How exciting. Well, we have listeners in both America and in England. So folks, you can get hold of it if you're in the US and you can put in your pre order if you're in the uk. It was lovely to talk to you and I look forward now that I've persuaded you to doing so again soon. Thank you.
- [60:28]
Peter C. Mancall
I will look forward to that as well. Thank you very much.
- [60:31]
Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode
- [60:33]
of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Thank you also to my researcher, Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to
- [60:40]
Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for
- [60:47]
subjects we can cover.
- [60:48]
So do drop us a line@notjusthetudorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tudors From History Hit.