Sir Walter Ralegh.
It was at this time that Sir Walter Ralegh came into prominence in pushing English colonization in America. He had been associated with his half-brother, Gilbert, in the earlier movements, but now he was alone. In 1584 he got his new charter, partly by reason of the urgency of Hakluyt in his Westerne Planting. Ralegh had his eye upon a more southern coast than Gilbert had aimed for,—upon one better fitted to develop self-dependent colonization. He knew that north of what was called Florida the Spaniards had but scantily tracked the country, and that they probably maintained no settlements. Therefore to reach a region somewhere south of the Chesapeake was the aim of the first company sent out under Ralegh's inspiration. These adventurers made their landfall where they could find no good inlet, and so sailed north, searching, until at last they reached the sounds on the North Carolina coast, and tarried awhile. Satisfied with the quality of the country, they returned to England; and their recitals so pleased Ralegh and the Queen that the country was named Virginia, and preparations were made to dispatch a colony. It went the next year, but its history is of no farther importance to our present purpose than that it marks the commencement of English colonization, disastrous though it was, on the North American continent, and the beginning of detailed English cartography of its coast, in the map, already referred to, which seems to open a passage, somewhere near Port Royal, to an interior sea.
1585-86. John Davis.
In 1585-86 John Davis had been buffeting among the icebergs of Greenland and the north in hopes to find a passage by the northwest; on June 30, 1587, he reached 72° 12' on the Greenland coast, and discovered the strait known by his name, and in 1595 when he published his World's Hydrographical Description, he maintained that he had touched the threshold of the northwest passage. He tells us that the globe of Molineaux shows how far he went.
English seamanship.
Seamanship owes more to Davis than to any other Englishman. In 1590, or thereabout, he improved the cross-staff, and giving somewhat more of complexity to it, he produced the back-staff. This instrument gave the observer the opportunity of avoiding the glare of the sun, since it was used with his back to that luminary; and when Flamsteed, the first astronomer royal at Greenwich, used a glass lens to throw reflected light, the first approach to the great principle of taking angles by reflection was made, which was later, in 1731, to be carried to a practical result in Hadley's quadrant.
BACK-STAFF.
The art of finding longitude was still in an uncertain state. Gemma Frisius, as we have noted, had as early as 1530 divined the method of carrying time by a watch; but it was not till 1726 that anything really practicable came of it, in a timekeeper constructed by Harrison. This watch was continually improved by him up to 1761, when the method of ascertaining longitude by chronometer became well established; and a few years later (1767) the first nautical almanac was published, affording a reasonably good guide in lunar distances, as a means in the computations of longitude.