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7 n the teeming, brawling, bustling London of the early 1600s, more than two hundred thousand people lived and worked. It was the fastest-growing city in Europe and a major world port. On the wide Thames River, small boats went up and down, oars moving like the legs of water bugs, and east of London Bridge, dozens of large ships rode at anchor.Warehouses full of spices and silks, pottery and bronze, and other exotic foreign goods lined the riverbanks. This was the heyday of the great trading companies: The Levant Company traded in rugs, wine, and fruits from the Mediterranean. The Muscovy Company brought furs and wax from Russia. Sable and seal fur made cloak linings and trimmed robes and gowns; beaver pelts went into felt for hats. Wax, melted and usually imprinted with a signet ring or stamp, sealed letters and lent importance to documents. Thousands of pounds of sealing wax were used in England every year. The largest and richest of the trading companies, the ExxonMobil of its day, was the East India Company. Chartered in 1600, it had a monopoly on trade with India, bringing spices, silks, and cotton cloth from exotic places like Madras and Bombay. In 1608 Sir Thomas Smith, one of that company’s directors, was about to become the guiding force of the Virginia Company. As the company’s treasurer, he was organizing the largest expedition England had yet sent to the New World.1 On a chilly day in March 1608, Don Pedro de Zuñiga, Spain’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, sat hunched over a desk in his house at Highgate.He had been living in London for three years,but he still missed the warm sunshine of his homeland. The ambassador was finishing a laborious task, writing a letter in code to his sovereign in Madrid. When it was done, he blotted the ink carefully with sand, folded the paper, and sealed it. The imprint of his signet ring in the soft red wax would ensure that his letter was handled carefully. It was an urgent message, but he did 1 The Wreck of the Sea Venture I A Tale of two colonies 8 not expect an immediate reply. Diplomatic exchanges between London and Madrid often took as long as three months. Zuñiga wrote to King Philip III that the English were sending eight hundred men to Virginia, and, the ambassador said,“it seems to me necessary to intercept them on the way.”2 Spain had good reason to be concerned. By the mid-1500s Spanish fleets of up to seventy ships were transporting hundreds of tons of gold and silver from Mexico and Peru every year. Masters of these galleons sailing home from the West Indies followed the coast of North America to latitude 33 degrees. Then they headed eastward toward a landmark in the vast Atlantic, Bermuda. Even though it was a tiny, uninhabited island in the middle of nowhere, Bermuda served as a guide for convoys of Spanish galleons crossing the Atlantic. This tiny island, twenty-four square miles in size, was about to be inhabited, with unintended consequences. But Virginia was already inhabited, and the English there were in a prime position to prey on the Spanish treasure fleets. The latest English expedition to Virginia was not due to depart until the next year. The flagship Sea Venture and the rest of the large fleet would not sail until May 1609. How had Zuñiga come by this information? King James I had not yet signed the Virginia Company’s new charter, and the company had not yet made public its grand plan. But the Spanish ambassador had his sources. Don Pedro de Zuñiga,the first resident Spanish ambassador to England, was a member of what has been called the most efficient and talented diplomatic corps in Europe. When Spain and England signed a peace treaty in 1604, Spain’s Philip III chose his ambassador carefully. Zuñiga had been Philip III’s chief huntsman, and Philip, knowing James I’s fondness for hunting, sent his favorite huntsman as ambassador, along with six “beautifully outfitted horses” as a present to the English king.3 Zuñiga soon became a hunting companion of James I. The shrewd ambassador also maintained a secret, handsomely paid network of seven “pensioners of Spain,” that is, English spies. Among them were the brilliant but unscrupulous Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton and member of...

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