evenings doubtless rowing down with the tide to the
port, and wondering at the quaint figure-heads and
carved prows of the ships which thronged it; or climbing
on board, and listening, with hearts beating, to the
mariners’ tales of the new earth beyond the
sunset; and here in later life, matured men, whose
boyish dreams had become heroic action, they used
again to meet in the intervals of quiet, and the rock
is shown underneath the house where Raleigh smoked
the first tobacco. Another remarkable man, of
whom we shall presently speak more closely, could not
fail to have made a fourth at these meetings.
A sailor boy of Sandwich, the adjoining parish, John
Davis, showed early a genius which could not have
escaped the eye of such neighbours, and in the atmosphere
of Greenaway he learned to be as noble as the Gilberts,
and as tender and delicate as Raleigh. Of this
party, for the present we confine ourselves to the
host and owner, Humfrey Gilbert, knighted afterwards
by Elizabeth. Led by the scenes of his childhood
to the sea and to sea adventures, and afterwards,
as his mind unfolded, to study his profession scientifically,
we find him as soon as he was old enough to think
for himself, or make others listen to him, “amending
the great errors of naval sea cards, whose common
fault is to make the degree of longitude in every
latitude of one common bigness;” inventing instruments
for taking observations, studying the form of the
earth, and convincing himself that there was a north-west
passage, and studying the necessities of his country,
and discovering the remedies for them in colonization
and extended markets for home manufactures, and insisting
with so much loudness on these important matters that
they reached the all-attentive ears of Walsingham,
and through Walsingham were conveyed to the Queen.
Gilbert was examined before the Queen’s Majesty
and the Privy Council, the record of which examination
he has himself left to us in a paper which he afterwards
drew up, and strange enough reading it is. The
most admirable conclusions stand side by side with
the wildest conjectures; and invaluable practical
discoveries, among imaginations at which all our love
for him cannot hinder us from smiling; the whole of
it from first to last saturated through and through
with his inborn nobility of nature.
Homer and Aristotle are pressed into service to prove
that the ocean runs round the three old continents,
and America therefore is necessarily an island.
The gulf stream which he had carefully observed, eked
out by a theory of the primum mobile, is made to demonstrate
a channel to the north, corresponding to Magellan’s
Straits in the south, he believing, in common with
almost every one of his day, that these straits were
the only opening into the Pacific, the land to the
south being unbroken to the Pole. He prophecies
a market in the East for our manufactured linen and
calicoes:—
“The Easterns greatly prizing the same, as appeareth
in Hester where the pomp is expressed of the great
King of India, Ahasuerus, who matched the coloured
clothes wherewith his houses and tents were apparelled,
with gold and silver, as part of his greatest treasure.”