But bringing freedom to Indians was hardly the only argument Hakluyt marshaled as England prepared to step onto the world stage. National power and glory were never far from the minds of the era’s propagandists of empire. Through colonization, Hakluyt and other writers argued, England, a relatively minor power in Europe at the end of the sixteenth century, could come to rival the wealth and standing of great nations like Spain and France.
Other considerations also weighed heavily in their arguments. Spanish claims to the south and French explorations in the area of present-day Canada left to England the middle part of North America, a region deemed worthless by other powers because it lacked precious metals and was unsuitable for sugar cultivation, the two paths to riches in early American empires. This did not, however, prevent promoters of colonization from painting a portrait of a fertile land of “great plenty.” Its animals were supposedly so abundant and its climate and soil so favorable that colonists could enrich the mother country and themselves by providing English consumers with goods now supplied by foreigners and opening a new market for English products. Unlike early adventurers such as Raleigh, who thought of wealth in terms of deposits of gold, Hakluyt insisted that trade would be the basis of England’s empire.