CHAPTER V
SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT, THE FOUNDER
OF NEWFOUNDLAND
Humphrey Gilbert was the second son of Sir Otho Gilbert of the manor-house of Greenaway in South Devon; his mother was Catherine, daughter of Sir Philip Champernown, of pure Norman descent, having the blood of the Courtneys in her veins.
The three brothers, John, Humphrey, and Adrian, living at Greenaway close to the Dart, about two miles above Dartmouth, no doubt often played at being sailors in the beautiful reach of water that runs so deep beneath the windows, that the largest vessels may ride safely within a stone's throw. They were brave boys, full of promise even in their boyhood, and all three destined to win the honour of knighthood for daring deeds.
Humphrey, born about the year 1539, was no mere fighting seaman, but a thoughtful, earnest discoverer of such scientific truths as were within the intellectual grasp of the sixteenth century.
He was educated at Eton and Oxford, but his heart was ever in seamanship. He talked so learnedly about his profession that news of his prowess came to the ears of Walsingham, who rehearsed them to the Queen. Hence it came that Humphrey Gilbert was examined before her Majesty and the Privy Council: a record of this examination was drawn up by Humphrey and still exists. He was "for 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"; he had already begun to invent instruments for taking observations and for studying the shape of the earth. But his great idea was to form colonies in the New World and find an outlet for trade and a population growing too thick upon English soil. His manner and intelligence left a great impression upon the Virgin Queen, for he reminded her more of her favourite Greek philosophers than of a blunt English squire.
Sir Otho must have died when Humphrey was about twelve years old, and his mother then married Mr. Raleigh of Hayes; he was a country gentleman of slender means, living in a modest grange in a village between Sidmouth and Exmouth. Whether her three boys accompanied her we do not know; but when Walter Raleigh was a boy, he used to visit his half-brothers at Compton Castle, amid the apple orchards of Torbay, or at the Greenaway manor-house. We can imagine how that imaginative child would sit by the river and listen to the stories of his half-brothers, drinking in a love of adventure, a hatred of religious persecution, and a belief in God's providence. For the river was full of quaint vessels from every port, and the sailors were full of moving stories of the prisons of the Inquisition, or the sufferings of the Netherlanders; and the Gilberts had been brought up by their mother to see the hand of God in all the great events of life.
As one of Frobisher's men said, when describing the great tussle with the ice-floes, "The ice was strong, but God was stronger."
We may be sure that one of the most critical moments in Walter Raleigh's education was the time when he stayed with the Gilberts, and listened to ideas of empire and duty which only a few in any age have been inspired to feel and know and carry into practice.
Humphrey shows in his writings that he had read deeply; Homer and Aristotle and Plato are quoted in his Discourse to prove a north-west passage to Cathay. Philosophers of Florence, Grantor the Grecian, and Strabo, Proclus, and Philo in his book de Mundo, and the German Simon Gryneus, and a host of modern geographers are called to bear witness to his theory that America was an island. Then he had read all the accounts brought home by great seamen, and skilfully wrought them together to prove his theory. But of course his facts were very unreliable and mixed with strange errors, but that was not his fault. If he believed that there was unbroken land to the South Pole, except for the narrow opening of the Straits of Magellan, the error was not his.
At the end of his memorial to the Queen, he writes: "Never therefore mislike with me for the taking in hand of any laudable and honest enterprise; for if through pleasure or idleness we purchase shame, the pleasure vanisheth, but the shame remaineth for ever. Give me leave therefore, without offence, always to live and die in this mind: that he is not worthy to live at all that, for fear or danger of death, shunneth his country's service and his own honour, seeing that death is inevitable and the fame of virtue immortal."