Bath, England: Wilson Publications, 2007
Paperback, $25.00
“Rich pickings were easily acquired”
To the student of English and colonial history during the turbulent 16th and 17th centuries, this book will be a delight, filled as it is with accounts, descriptions, biographies, maps and illustrations connected with the various “adventurers” who undertook explorations in the New World. Wilson’s own exploration begins, appropriately, with the England of Elizabeth I, the long-reigning daughter of Henry VIII under whom English civilization flowered in the late 1500s. It was the age of Shakespeare and the of the defeat of the Spanish Armada; it was also a time populated by freebooting characters (some would call them pirates) such as Humphrey Gilbert, Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh. Wilson describes “near anarchy at sea” as “rich pickings were easily acquired.” Little surprise, therefore, that English seafarers, with the blessing of the Queen, turned their eyes westward in search of wealth.
One goal was Norumbega, a fabled “city of gold” supposed to be located somewhere near modern-day Bangor on the Penobscot River. Quickly, however, the explorers turned their attention to the region’s true wealth: fisheries and timber. George Waymouth. John Smith, Raleigh and others mounted expeditions — some better documented than others — and before 1610 Europeans had visited spots on the St. Croix River, the Kennebec, Monhegan and Cape Cod, as well as Jamestown and Roanoke to the south. Wilson explores the roles played by spices and minerals, namely gold, in luring explorers to this coast as they searched in vain for a “Northwest Passage” to the Orient. There are chapters on John Cabot, Francis Drake and Humphrey Gilbert, all of whom sailed in increasingly sophisticated English ships. She provides an interesting chapter on tin mining in southwestern England, a successful enterprise that had produced many knowledgeable people who must have been disappointed in the failure to find significant quantities of gold in the New World. Finally, there is a chapter on the Popham Colony, established at the mouth of the Kennebec in 1607-8.
If all of this information were better organized, Norumbega Navigators would be a stronger book. Unfortunately, it suffers from what feels like a lack of focus, an unclear overarching theme. Wilson has profiled the important characters of the Elizabethan age of exploration and its aftermath in the early 17th century, but we don’t get the synthesis or perspective that a more professional historian would provide. Norumbega Navigators is an interesting book to dabble in (the pictures are wonderful) but somewhat unsatisfying to read. q