Background
Bartholomew Gosnold was the eldest son of a Suffolk squire of Grundisburgh, Anthony Gosnold, by Dorothy Bacon, his wife. The year of his birth is unknown but a will of 1572 contains unmistakable mention of him.
Bartholomew Gosnold was the eldest son of a Suffolk squire of Grundisburgh, Anthony Gosnold, by Dorothy Bacon, his wife. The year of his birth is unknown but a will of 1572 contains unmistakable mention of him.
For a time, obeying a family tradition, Gosnold attended Cambridge University, where he matriculated as a pensioner of Jesus College in 1587 but probably took no degree.
The assertion that Gosnold served Sir Walter Raleigh in one or more expeditions to America is as baseless as it is unlikely, for his kinsmen, Henry and Robert Gosnold, were bound by close ties to the Earl of Essex, Raleigh’s bitter enemy, and Raleigh considered Bartholomew’s voyage in 1602 a grievous infraction of his American patent.
The Earl of Southampton, a warm friend of Essex, in 1602 contributed largely to fitting out a ship to be commanded by Gosnold, who with thirty-one others embarked in a small vessel, the Concord, sailing from Falmouth March 26, 1602.
Emulating Verrazano, he set a western course across the Atlantic and after sighting the Azores made landfall on the southern Maine coast near Cape Porpoise, then stood southward and, having landed at the tip of a foreland to which he gave the name of Cape Cod, skirted its outer shore and doubled Monomoy Point.
The Concord continued her explorations, traversing Nantucket Sound and passing through Muskeget Channel. An islet, now No Man’s Land, Gosnold named Martha’s Vineyard in honor of his eldest child. The appellation was afterward transferred to the larger island which bears it today.
Elizabeth’s Isle, the modern Cuttyhunk, was selected as a base and a little fort erected. On the lookout for passage through the continent to the South Sea, Gosnold examined the coast of the mainland from West Island to Narragansett Bay, apparently sighting Point Judith.
Verrazano had preceded him in this region long before. The desire of his companions to return to England destroyed Gosnold’s hope of establishing a small trading- post, and loading his ship with furs, cedar, and sassafras, obtained by friendly trade with the Indians, he set sail on June 17 and anchored before Exmouth July 23, 1602.
Gabriel Archer and John Brierton, both members of the expedition, then prepared favorable narratives of the voyage, Brierton’s being published in 1602. Raleigh considered Gosnold an interloper and asked Cecil’s aid in confiscating the cargo. The sequel is uncertain.
Gosnold now for some years busied himself with interesting English merchants and others in an American settlement. His relative Edward-Maria Wingfield was one of the grantees of the Virginia charter of 1606 and his brother Anthony Gosnold a subscriber to the stock of the Company.
They accompanied him when on December 20, 1606, he sailed from the Thames as vice-admiral of the fleet in command of the God Speed, which carried fifty-two of the original pioneers bound for the projected settlement. The fleet made land at Cape Henry April 26, 1607.
The sealed instructions, which now were opened, nominated Gosnold a member of the local council for the colony and charged him to search the country for minerals and to explore the river in hope of finding a passage. Gosnold’s sound judgment opposed the selection of the dank island in the James River as the site for the settlement, but Wingfield, now president, overruled him and there Jamestown was founded.
In June, as a counselor, Gosnold signed the first report drawn up for the information of the home authorities, but on August 22 following, during an epidemic of malarial fever, he died. He was buried with military honors. The loss of his amiable but sturdy leadership was a notable misfortune for the struggling colony.
About 1596, Gosnold was married, probably to Catherine Barrington, daughter of Sir Thomas Barrington, a Puritan of Essex interested in maritime affairs. Six children were born to him and baptized at Bury St. Edmunds, where apparently he made his home.