The name is absent

58 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

napery pannes pottes and divers other wares. . . But the
expedition never got farther than Ireland, and the vessels
returned to the Channel, as Surrey intended they should.⁵

Rastell was to have, nonetheless, if not his heart’s desire,
at least the last word. The issue of the court action was
apparently in his favor; but so intense was his indignation
at the frustration of his design that he wrote, printed (prob-
ably in 1519), and perhaps even produced at Court, a dra-
matic piece in which he vilified those responsible for his
failure, the New Interlude already referred to. Not only is it
the first English description of America, but it records also
the first imaginative apprehension of the astounding signifi-
cance of the discoveries that must have seemed to con-
temporaries almost like creatio ex nihilo.

Rastell tells with fiery passion the story of his own
abortive voyage:

.. . They that were they venteres
Have cause to curse their maryners
Fals of promys and dissemblers
That falsly them betrayed;

Whiche wolde take no paine to saile farther
Than their owne Iyst and pleasure,
Wherfore that vyage and dyvers other
Suche kaytyffes have distroyed.

He sets down in a few earnestly patriotic lines his desire to
colonize the new country:

O what a thynge had be than

Yf that they that be Englyshe men
Myght have ben the furst of all
That there shulde have take possessyon
And made furst buyIdynge and habytacion:
A memory perpétuait

Here, too, is the first English recognition of the duty of
evangelizing the Indian:

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