Foss Michal (2 results)

brown cloth hardbound 8vo. ~ 8º (octavo). dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cover. fine cond. binding square & tight. covers clean. edges clean. contents free of all markings. dustwrapper in fine cond. not worn or torn or price clipped (no price listed). possible book club edition. nice clean copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, inking , underlining, remainder markings etc ~ printing # not given. 186p. 11 glossy full color plates. 3 maps. 28 illustations. world history. british empire. biography. american history. travel & exploration. ~ The early Spanish colonization of the Americas is justly famous: England's unsuccessful attempt to colonize the New World during the same century is less well known. Michael Foss's Undreamed Shores is about England's failure, examining why England, acknowledged mistress of the seas in the reign of Elizabeth I, possessed not a square mile of American land at the end of her reign. From the visionary john Cabot, granted a royal patent in 1496 'to discover in any part of the world lands formerly unknown to Christians, to annex, conquer, and occupy them in the kinq's name', to Sir Walter Raleigh, whose 1584 colony at Roanoke Island struggled for some brief years and died, hardly any good resulted from a waste of energy and lives. The story is one of devious policy allied to misplaced idealism, high~flying ambition, and plain greed. The men who thrust themselves into the work of colonization were men with various and suspicious motives: Thomas Stukeley, rogue and pirate, Humphrey Gilbert, the hot~headed idealist, the impractical navigator who had hardly been to sea, and the incalculable Walter Raleigh, the entrepreneur of colonization, to whom Virginia was both a work of patriotism and a stepping~stone for his own ambition. And caught in the visionary or sordid schemes of the great were the ordinary victims of ambition and greed ~ the sailors, the colonists, the Indians. Buffeted by forces they could neither control nor understand they acted as best they could, suffered and died. These attempts, which in the last judgment are dark and tragic, are still illuminated by the extraordinary courage and energy of men like Stukeley, Gilbert, Lane and Grenville, and sweetened by the patient efforts of Thomas Harlot, the geographer, and john White, the painter, to whom we owe so much for our knowledge of early American life.

24x16. Hard cover. 186 pas. 599006.