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The Book of the Week is “Walter Ralegh, Architect of Empire” by Alan Gallay, published in 2019. There are alternate spellings of “Ralegh” but the author used this spelling.
In this hodgepodge of a tome, the author recounted the tenor of the times and exploits of the explorer, colonizer and treasure-seeker Walter Ralegh. Around the time Ralegh (born circa 1554), men originally from Spain owned most of the riches of the world. Humphrey Gilbert, Ralegh’s older brother by seventeen years, got permission from Queen Elizabeth of England to go on expeditions in order to steal those riches.
International voyages were dangerous, and use of multi-disciplinary expertise (of mathematics, ship-building and maintenance, cartography, alchemy and medicine, etc.) somewhat reduced the risks involved.
Queen Elizabeth believed she was (the Anglican Church) God’s representative on earth. England had an anti-Catholic bent. So when she funded Ralegh’s trips sailing across the Atlantic to colonize the Eastern Seaboard of North America, he recruited dissidents (who tended to be Catholic) to help him, to get them to leave England and become some other territory’s problem.
The voyages were made at intervals of several years, as they involved planning (data collection of the location of enemies whose ships could be pirated for their cargo), fund-raising, provisioning, recruiting of crew, etc.
Ralegh truly wanted to civilize the natives of foreign shores, but pirating of ships was so much more lucrative. He had thousands of men including his cousin, under his command. Through the decades, they encountered Native Americans when they hit land after their transatlantic voyages. Some expedition leaders ruled by fear and force and provoked violent incidents with them. The land was richly endowed with resources such as seafood and timber, and crops such as maize and tobacco could be grown for a profit. In his thirties, Ralegh named the territory now known as Virginia.
Read the book to learn much, much, much more about Ralegh’s adventures at sea, on land along the coast of North America, southeastern Ireland, and Guiana in South America.