He was not yet thirty when he obtained for his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, then a man of thirty-eight, a royal commission ’to inhabit and possess all remote and Heathen lands not in the possession of any Christian prince.’  The draft of Gilbert’s original prospectus, dated at London, the 6th of November, 1577, and still kept there in the Record Office, is an appeal to Elizabeth in which he proposed ’to discover and inhabit some strange place.’  Gilbert was a soldier and knew what fighting meant; so he likewise proposed ’to set forth certain ships of war to the New Land, which, with your good licence, I will undertake without your Majesty’s charge....  The New Land fish is a principal and rich and everywhere vendible merchandise; and by the gain thereof shipping, victual, munition, and the transporting of five or six thousand soldiers may be defrayed.’

But Gilbert’s associates cared nothing for fish and everything for gold.  He went to the West Indies, lost a ship, and returned without a fortune.  Next year he was forbidden to repeat the experiment.

The project then languished until the fatal voyage of 1583, when Gilbert set sail with six vessels, intending to occupy Newfoundland as the base from which to colonize southwards until an armed New England should meet and beat New Spain.  How vast his scheme!  How pitiful its execution!  And yet how immeasurably beyond his wildest dreams the actual development to-day!  Gilbert was not a sea-dog but a soldier with an uncanny reputation for being a regular Jonah who ‘had no good hap at sea.’  He was also passionately self-willed, and Elizabeth had doubts about the propriety of backing him.  But she sent him a gilt anchor by way of good luck and off he went in June, financed chiefly by Raleigh, whose name was given to the flagship.

Gilbert’s adventure never got beyond its base in Newfoundland.  His ship the Delight was wrecked.  The crew of the Raleigh mutinied and ran her home to England.  The other four vessels held on.  But the men, for the most part, were neither good soldiers, good sailors, nor yet good colonists, but ne’er-do-wells and desperadoes.  By September the expedition was returning broken down.  Gilbert, furious at the sailors’ hints that he was just a little sea-shy, would persist in sticking to the Lilliputian ten-ton Squirrel, which was woefully top-hampered with guns and stores.  Before leaving Newfoundland he was implored to abandon her and bring her crew aboard a bigger craft.  But no.  ‘Do not fear,’ he answered; ‘we are as near to Heaven by sea as land.’  One wild night off the Azores the Squirrel foundered with all hands.