In 1602,
he became the first Englishman to sail directly to New England across the ill-charted waters of the North Atlantic (Google books; alt: Archive.org). He is credited with
setting up a fort on Cuttyhunk Island, and naming both
Martha's Vineyard and
Cape Cod in that voyage. A few months later, he then returned to England, where he planned the first English settlement to take hold in the new world.
He returned in 1607, but only survived 13 weeks in Jamestown (Gb). Who was this founding father of the first English colony take hold in North America?
Bartholomew Gosnold.
Gosnold grew up
in a manorial family near
Suffolk, and studied law. Bartholomew likely was influenced in part
Richard Hakluyt, geographer and priest who heavily promoted the English colonization of North America (or perhaps it was
Gosnold who influenced Hakluyt (Gb; A.o) , or a combination of the two).
Gosnold turned from law to the sea, and
commanded the Diamond of Southampton in a privateering cruise 1599 (Gb) against Spanish ships, which provided funding for his first journey directly across the Atlantic.
Gosnold, a former skipper for Sir Walter Raleigh, sailed with 32 people. This was the first English journey to set up a colony since
the previous attempt to set up a colony had failed, 15 years prior.
Instead of taking the
"unneedfull Southernly course" by way of the West Indies and the Canary Islands (Gb) (
but then no better was knowne), Gosnold and crew took a more direct route.
Their trip was a healthy one, and their findings were positive, "as healthful a climate as any can be," and the inhabitants they met there were healthy, too. But the would-be colonists could not agree on who would stay and who would return to England, and their supplies were running out, so
the fort lasted one summer. But Gosnold was not done with the New World.
Back in England, Bartholomew Gosnold was trying to plan for his next trip across the Atlantic, gathering funds and people, both colonists and seafaring men of adventure. Amongst the latter was a young farmer's son named
John Smith. On
December 20, 1606, the voyage to the Chesapeake began for the 105 colonists with the Virginia Company of London. The three ships landed on May 13, 1607, and a fort was built in the
strategic location of Jamestown in 19 days. Three months after landing,
Bartholomew Gosnold took sick and died, buried outside the walled compound. John Smith became the name most closely associated with
Jamestown, the troubled colony that survived.
To celebrate the 400th anniversary of Gosnold's first journey,
BBC Suffolk ran some stories on Gosnold (warning: the audio is
RealAudio). In 2006,
East Anglian Daily Times posted a long article on Bartholomew Gosnold, for the 400th anniversary of his second journey. There is ongoing work to identify remains found outside the walls of the Jamestown fortification, but
the DNA evidence has been hard to match with known Gosnold relations. And for a lot more reading material,
Gosnold.info has a lot of material, from family history, detailed biographies of Bartholomew Gosnold, collections of his writings and other accounts of the voyages, and even
speculation that Shakespeare drew on the accounts from Gosnold's voyages when he wrote works such as The Tempest.
Fun find in Google books:
Warning -- its not as good as the movie, scrawled in the front of
Elizabethan Sea-Dogs.
posted by saucysault at 12:10 PM on December 7, 2011