Our space is sadly limited for historical portrait painting; but we must find room for another of that Greenaway party whose nature was as fine as that of Gilbert, and who intellectually was more largely gifted.  The latter was drowned in 1583.  In 1585 John Davis left Dartmouth on his first voyage into the Polar seas; and twice subsequently he went again, venturing in small ill-equipped vessels of thirty or forty tons into the most dangerous seas.  These voyages were as remarkable for their success as for the daring with which they were accomplished, and Davis’s epitaph is written on the map of the world, where his name still remains to commemorate his discoveries.  Brave as he was, he is distinguished by a peculiar and exquisite sweetness of nature, which, from many little facts of his life, seems to have affected every one with whom he came in contact in a remarkable degree.  We find men, for the love of Master Davis, leaving their firesides to sail with him, without other hope or motion; and silver bullets were cast to shoot him in a mutiny; the hard rude natures of the mutineers being awed by something in his carriage which was not like that of a common man.  He has written the account of one of his northern voyages himself; one of those, by the by, which the Hakluyt Society have mutilated; and there is an imaginative beauty in it, and a rich delicacy of expression, which is a true natural poetry, called out in him by the first sight of strange lands and things and people.

To show what he was, we should have preferred, if possible, to have taken the story of his expedition into the South Seas, in which, under circumstances of singular difficulty, he was deserted by Candish, under whom he had sailed; and after inconceivable trials, from famine, mutiny, and storm, ultimately saved himself and his ship, and such of the crew as had chosen to submit to his orders.  But it is a long history, and will not admit of being mutilated.  As an instance of the stuff of which it was composed, he ran back in the black night in a gale of wind through the Straits of Magellan, by a chart which he had made with the eye in passing up.  His anchors were lost or broken; the cables were parted.  He could not bring up the ship; there was nothing for it but to run, and he carried her safe through along a channel often not three miles broad, sixty miles from end, and twisting like the reaches of a river.  For the present, however, we are forced to content ourselves with a few sketches out of the north-west voyages.  Here is one, for instance, which shows how an Englishman could deal with the Indians.  Davis had landed at Gilbert’s Sound, and gone up the country exploring.  On his return, he found his crew loud in complaints of the thievish propensities of the natives, and urgent to have an example made of some of them.  On the next occasion he fired a gun at them with blank cartridge; but their nature was still too strong for them.

“Seeing iron,” he says, “they could in no case forbear stealing; which, when I perceived, it did but minister to me occasion of laughter to see their simplicity, and I willed that they should not be hardly used, but that our company should be more diligent to keep their things, supposing it to be very hard in so short a time to make them know their evils.”