The finished globe was presented to Elizabeth I at court, in the company of councilors, scientists and visiting dignitaries. Molyneux’s printed globes, of which Petworth’s is an example, were then the largest to have ever been made, with a diameter of two feet and one inch. They were hugely expensive, the initial outlay costing about £170,000 in today’s money.
Financing ‘discovery’
Imperialist expansion under Elizabeth I was largely funded by private speculators like Molyneux’s patron, William Sanderson (c.1548–1638), a merchant married to Sir Walter Raleigh’s niece. Sanderson had co-sponsored John Davis’s voyage to the Northwest Passage, as well as countless other maritime enterprises, and had funded Molyneux’s initial costs.
A dedication to Sanderson’s munificence and his coat of arms can be seen on the Petworth Globe, along with tributes within legends to the Queen, Davis, Cavendish and Drake.
Conquest
Red and blue lines drawn on the Petworth Globe mark the routes Drake and Cavendish took in their individual circumnavigations of world. Traced across land and sea by generations of inquisitive fingers, behind these trajectories – and those that preceded them – lay acts of unimaginable violence. The effect of European conquest in the Americas was catastrophic – local populations were decimated by disease, their communities pillaged, their people enslaved, their cultural and religious practices suppressed.
Piracy or privateering?
En-route to their destinations Drake and Cavendish accrued vast wealth for themselves and their queen under the legal commission of ‘privateering’. Essentially piracy, English seafarers were given license to attack rival vessels and seize them as prizes, capturing their crew as prisoners and goods as booty.
Drake’s circumnavigation, for example, involved a sequence of brutal raids on Spanish colonies in South America and the seizure of Spanish ships, with spoils estimated at around £480 million today. An earlier voyage saw him and his crew brutally attack Portuguese colonies in West Africa and capture cargoes of enslaved Africans to sell on to Spanish plantations in the Americas. Indeed, it was Drake’s cousin Sir John Hawkins (1532–95) who effectively established the transatlantic slave trade through trafficking and privateering.
The ‘Wizard’ Earl’s Globe
The Petworth globe was owned by Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland (1564–1632), whose nickname the ‘Wizard’ Earl derived from an interest in scientific and alchemical instruments. Anecdote says that it was given as a gift to Percy by Sir Walter Raleigh whilst the two were comfortably imprisoned in the Tower of London, Percy for his connection to the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. An account of 1596, however, records the repair of globes in his collection, suggesting that Percy bought or was given the Molyneux globe at an earlier date.