From quite a different source we hear of the further adventures of Rut and his vessel. Herrera in his Historia General,[[235]] under the erroneous date of 1519, says that a Spanish caravel encountered an English ship off the island of Porto Rico—a ship of three masts and about 250 tons. Gines Navarro, the Spanish captain, thinking it was a Spanish ship, was going aboard when he was met by a pinnace with twenty-five armed men and two guns. They said they were English, and had set sail with another large ship to find the land of the Grand Cham, and that a storm had separated them. They had been in a high latitude and had encountered great icebergs, and turning further south they had come into a hot sea, and lest it should melt their pitch they had made for the Baccalaos, where they found fifty ships fishing—Spanish, French, and Portuguese. They landed there to make inquiries of the Indians, who killed the pilot, a Piedmontese. Navarro asked them what they were doing in those islands, to which they replied that they wished to make a report to their king, and to trade. They asked him to show them the course for San Domingo. When they arrived at that island they were fired upon, and so did not land. They went back to Porto Rico and traded with the inhabitants, and then disappeared. The ship had sixty men with plenty of guns and merchandise. Oviedo’s Historia General das Indias gives a corroborating account under the correct date, 1527, and adds that, as nothing more was heard of this ship, she was supposed to have been lost.[[236]]
Such, however, was not the case, for, in the autumn of 1528, John Rut, still in the Mary Gilford, was engaged in bringing wine from Bordeaux to England.[[237]] There is no further trace of the Samson, and it is probable that she was lost, although Frobisher’s story that she foundered in Hudson’s Strait does not agree with John Rut’s northernmost latitude of 53°.[[238]] Before setting out on his voyage John Rut received, on May 24, 1527, a grant of an annuity of £10.[[239]] This is two days later than the sailing date from London given in the Chronicles, but the discrepancy is not serious, for England was not finally lost sight of until June 10.
In reviewing the evidence above set out, it is evident at once that here was another quest of the North-West Passage. John Rut’s letter, describing the attempt to force a way northwards through the icebergs of Davis Strait, and its reference to the islands which he had received instructions to make for—evidently not the islands of the new-found land, but far beyond them—point to that conclusion; and the story told to the Spanish captain, as to seeking the land of the Grand Cham, is conclusive. We may therefore set this down as the third authenticated English expedition for the discovery of the northern route to Asia, those of Sebastian Cabot and the Anglo-Portuguese syndicate being the first and second.
On closely comparing the above accounts with Robert Thorne’s letter to the king, it is evident that the voyage of John Rut was not an attempt to put Thorne’s theories into practice, but rather a revival of Sebastian Cabot’s old plan of finding a passage by closely hugging the supposed northern shore of America. Thorne, on the other hand, wished to send his expedition over the Pole itself, and such a course would have taken it well to the east of Iceland and Greenland, and would, in fact, have lain almost at right angles to that actually followed by Rut. Hence it becomes certain, either that Thorne’s ideas were modified by the king’s advisers in London, possibly by Albert de Prato, who seems to have been a man of learning, or that Thorne’s letter was written after the unsuccessful return of the surviving vessel. It must be remembered that, although the Book to Dr. Lee is dated by internal evidence early in 1527, there is no such clue to the date of the letter to the king. Also, certain expressions quoted from the letter as to the advisability of following new courses, if literally construed, are consonant with the recent return of an expedition which had failed on the old course. On the whole, then, it must be left in doubt whether Thorne may claim the honour of being the author of the voyage of 1527.
Yet another mystery is the identity of the Italian pilot who, according to the Spanish captain’s account, was killed by Indians. There is absolutely no confirmatory evidence that such a man accompanied the expedition. It is more probable that, apart from Rut, there was no pilot in the ordinary sense of the word as then used, and that Albert de Prato was the man referred to. There is no proof of his return from the voyage, and it is quite possible that, in the conversation between the English and the Spaniards, with an imperfect command of each other’s languages, a man with a knowledge of geography and astronomy might have been described as a ‘pilot’.
A brief account of the Thorne family may be of interest, especially as an incomplete article on them appears in a recent authority on the subject, the Dictionary of National Biography. The father of the Robert Thorne who wrote the treatises above considered was another Robert Thorne, who, at the opening of the sixteenth century, was a prosperous merchant of Bristol. According to his son he accompanied Hugh Elyot on a voyage of discovery to the North-West about the year 1502, although his name does not appear in the charters granted for that purpose by Henry VII. In 1510 he was one of a group of Bristol men who were appointed to act as commissioners for the office of admiral in their town.[[240]] In 1514 he was mayor of Bristol,[[241]] and in 1523 was returned as Member of Parliament for that city,[[242]] dying in London shortly afterwards. He was evidently dead at the time his son was writing, in 1527. A Bristol historian, however, states that he died in 1519, in which case the M.P. of 1523 must have been Robert Thorne the younger (J. Latimer, Sixteenth Century Bristol, 1908; authorities not given). He was buried in London in the Temple Church, and his epitaph runs as follows:
Epitaphium M. Roberti Thorni, sepulti in Ecclesia Templariorum Londini.
Robertus jacet hîc Thorne, quem Bristolia quondam
Praetoris merito legit ad officium.
Huic etenim semper magnae Respublica curae