Thomas Hariot, the Mathematician, the Philosopher and the ScholarStevens, Henry
Philosophy
Thomas Hariot, the Mathematician, the Philosopher and the Scholar
Stevens, Henry
Harriot, Thomas, 1560-1621; Hercules Club
It ought perhaps to be mentioned here that five of Gilbert’s six years
having already expired without his obtaining success or possession,
several others, anticipating a forfeiture of the patent, began
agitation for rival patents in 1583. Carleil, Walsingham, Sidney,
Peckham, Raleigh, and perhaps others were eager in the strife. Mostof
the papers are given in Hakluyt’s 1589 edition. The ‘Golden Hinde’
returned in September 1583 with the news of the utter failure of the
expedition and the death of Sir Humphrey. Raleigh succeeded in
obtaining the royal grant, and then all the rest joined him in getting
the patent confirmed by Parliament.
Raleigh was now thirty-three, a man of position, of large heart and
large income, a popular courtier high in royal favor, a man of foreign
travel, great experience and extensive acquirements. He had served
under Coligni with his protestant friends in France; subsequently
served under William of Orange in Flanders; had served his Queen in
Ireland; under Gilbert’s patent, contemplated a voyage to Newfoundland
in 1578; and in 1583 was ready to embark himself again, but by some
happy accident did not go, though he fitted out and sent a large ship
at his own cost bearing his own name, which ship however put back on
account of the outbreak of some contagion. Fully alive to the wants,
plans, and desires of the Huguenots, he had not only informed himself
of their Florida schemes, but had promoted the publication of their
history, and secured the interest and active co-operation of the most
important survivor of them all, Jaques LeMoyne, the painter, who having
escaped landed destitute in Wales, and subsequently entered the service
of Raleigh who had him safely lodged in the Blackfriars. He had also,
how or when precisely is not known, secured the active aid and facile
pen of the geographical Richard Hakluyt, who wrote for him, as no man
else could write, in 1584, a treatise on Western Planting, a work
intended probably to prime the ministry and the Parliament, to enable
Raleigh first to secure the confirmation of his patent, and afterwards
the co-operation and active interest of the nobility and gentry in his
enterprise. This important hitherto unpublished volume of sixty-three
large folio pages in the hand writing of Hakluyt, after having probably
served its purpose and lain dormant for nearly three centuries, was
bought at Earl Mountnorris’s sale at Arley Castle in December 1852, by
Mr Henry Stevens of Vermont, who, as he himself informs us, after
partly copying it, and endeavouring in vain to place it in some public
or private library in England or the United States, threw it into
auction, where it was sold by Messrs Puttick and Simpson in May 1854,
for £44, as lot 474, Sir Thomas Phillipps being the purchaser. The
manuscript still adorns the Phillipps library at Cheltenham. In 1868 a
copy of this most suggestive volume was obtained by the late Dr Leonard
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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