Like many another of his age Raleigh, hearing the call of the waves ever in his ears, felt the desire to explore tug at his heart-strings.  For in those days America had been discovered, and the quest for the famous North-West passage had begun.  And Raleigh longed to set forth with other men to conquer new worlds, to find new paths across the waves.  But above all he longed to fight the Spaniards, who were the great sea kings of those days.  Raleigh however could not be a courtier and a sailor at one and the same time.  He was meanwhile high in the Queen’s favor, and she would not let him go from her.  So all that Raleigh could do, was to venture his money, and fit out a ship to which he gave his own name.  This he sent to sail along with others under the command of his step-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who was setting out upon a voyage of discovery.  It was on this voyage that Sir Humphrey found and claimed Newfoundland as an English possession, setting up there “the Arms of England ingraven in lead and infixed upon a pillar of wood."* But the expedition was unfortunate, most of the men and ships were lost, Sir Humphrey himself being drowned on his way home.  He was brave and fearless to the last.  “We are as near to Heaven by sea as by land,” he said, a short time before his ship went down.  One vessel only “in great torment of weather and peril of drowning"* reached home safely, “all the men tired with the tediousness of so unprofitable a voyage to their seeming.”  Yet though they knew it not they had helped to lay the foundation of Greater Britain.

Hakluyt’s Voyages.

Nothing daunted by this loss, six months later Raleigh sent out another expedition.  This time it was to the land south of Newfoundland that the ships took their way.  There they set up the arms of England, and named the new possession Virginia in honor of the virgin Queen.  This expedition was little more successful than Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s, but nothing seemed to discourage Raleigh.  He was bent on founding a colony, and again and yet again he sent out ships and men, spending all the wealth which the Queen heaped upon him in trying to extend her dominions beyond the seas.  Hope was strong within him.  “I shall yet live to see it an English nation,” he said.

And while Raleigh’s captains tried to found a new England in the New World, Raleigh himself worked at home to bring order into the vast estates the Queen had given to him in Ireland.  This land had belonged to the rebel Earl of Desmond.  At one time no doubt it had been fertile, but rebellion and war had laid it waste.  “The land was so barren both of man and beast that whosoever did travel from one end of all Munster . . . . he should not meet man, woman, or child, saving in cities or towns, nor yet see any beast, save foxes, wolves, or the ravening beasts.”  And barren and desolate as it was when Raleigh received it, it soon became known as the best tilled land in all the country-side.  For he brought workers and tenants from his old Devon home to take the place of the beggared or slain Irish.  He introduced new and better ways of tilling, and also he brought to Ireland a strange new root.  For it is interesting to remember that it was in Raleigh’s Irish estates that potatoes were first grown in our Islands.