Abstract

"The Limits of Adventure: Speculative Finance and Elizabethan Era Exploration"

Brent Lane, UNC Global Research Institute, UNC-Chapel Hill (brent_lane@unc.edu)

Between 1540 and 1620, European efforts to settle eastern North America progressed slowly from efforts such as the failed colonies by the French at Charlesbourg Royal and the English at Roanoke to the eventual success of the Spanish at St. Augustine and the English at Jamestown Virginia. Over the same period emerging scientific fields- including chemistry, botany, biology, cartography, and ethnography – were evolving as distinct separate disciplines from their progenitor cosmology and alchemy origins.

These concurrent developments converged as the sponsors and investors of European exploration and settlement endeavors, made skeptical by repeated failures, sought increasing assurances that the schemes of promoters were sound and their results verifiable. The demand for “scientific expertise” to mollify investor wariness was especially pronounced in the wake of the spectacularly unsuccessful Frobisher expeditions of 1576-78 in which the financial losses to the English crown and numerous individual English “adventurer” investors resulting from inaccurate metallurgical assaying of gold “ores” created a poisonous environment for speculative investment in New World settlement promoters.

One such promoter, Sir Walter Ralegh, sought to counter investor skepticism through an emphasis on scientific expertise as an integral component of exploration and colonization. His 1584-90 Roanoke Colony expeditions emphasized the inclusion of recognized scientific and technical experts and the performance of credible research. A previously unknown manuscript recently discovered by Mr. Lane provides the first description of the investment proposition Ralegh offered prospective investors in his Roanoke venture. Combining analysis of that document with other recent archaeological and cartographic discoveries related to the Roanoke Colony and other contemporaneous efforts, the paper will describe how a growing reliance on private investors to support exploration and settlement elevated the role of scientific expertise to a necessity.