Sir Walter Raleigh Ambition

“A smooth sea never made a skillful sailor.” Like any other experienced adventurer, Sir Walter Raleigh is a man that has been weathered and worn by the constant turbulence of the sea of life, but through his ambition and wrongdoings, opportunities for even more potential have presented themselves. Although he may not have always done things with the best intentions, the results of his expeditions have shaped the way we live today.

Sir Walter Raleigh was born in Devon, England, in 1554 to a rich, aristocratic family. Like the people around them, his family was fiercely Protestant, and Raleigh’s father along with other “Gentlemen of the West” often fought and killed people if they disagreed with their religious beliefs. As a young boy, Raleigh

Because of the environment he was raised in, he was also very keen on spreading his culture forcefully to other people in foreign places or even at home. When looking at his life history, it seems that Raleigh was always working for a title that was bigger, greater, better for himself. Starting in his earlier days, Raleigh was always known as ‘too ambitious’ to his classmates. When he finished school, the first thing he did was make connections with famous people and work to discover the key to manipulation: ambitious men used religion in order to make others help them get power. Once he had those connections, he used them to hoist himself up into the royal world, managing to squeeze into the Queen’s court. Of course, that wasn’t enough for him, and Raleigh slaughtered the innocent families of thousands of Irish rebels just to get the Queen’s attention and become her favorite. Raleigh also had the lifetime goal to be the first to settle an English colony in the New World. Although he tried his best to carry out these plans, in the end he did not succeed. England’s goals, although similar, were not quite the same. Like Raleigh, England wanted to spread their religion, Christianity, to the Americas. England also was looking for new trade routes and possible connections that they could make through the natives living there, especially since they knew that the

As a result, the details of some of his expeditions are not entirely known and it is hard to know exactly where he went. Raleigh’s most famous known ‘exploration’ was his idea to settle the first English colonies in the New World. Starting in 1585, Raleigh funded four separate groups of settlers to attempt to colonize the Roanoke Islands, which he named ‘Virginia’ after the Virgin Queen, Queen Elizabeth I’s nickname. These colonizers crossed straight through the Atlantic directly from England to North Carolina on a voyage around 10 weeks long. But the first three parties were all unsuccessful, most of the group dying out and only a handful settlers able to return on boat to England. Then, the fourth voyage in 1588 mysteriously disappeared from the island entirely! Many men sailed in attempt to find the lost settlers, but their efforts were all in vain. In the end though, the people who returned on the first three voyages brought back tobacco and potatoes, two things that Europeans had never seen before. This sparked new trade sources for the English. In addition to this one, Sir Walter also went on two other relatively famous expeditions. Both were similar locations in South America, the first under Queen Elizabeth I’s rule and the second under King James I. With the queen’s funding, Raleigh made his first trip to the tropical continent in 1595, in