Sir Richard Grenville
With that he died, and his body was committed to the sea. As to those who survived of his ship’s company, the Spaniards treated them with honor; sending them as free men home to England. But they believed that the body of Grenville being in the sea raised that appalling cyclone that presently destroyed the treasure fleet and its escort, in all one hundred seven ships, including the Revenge.
So perished the fourth armada, making within five years a total loss of four hundred eighty-nine capital ships, in all the greatest sea calamity that ever befell a nation. Hear then the comment of Linschoten the Dutchman. The Spaniards thought that “Fortune, or rather God, was wholly against them. Which is a sufficient cause to make the Spaniards out of heart; and on the contrary to give the Englishmen more courage, and to make them bolder. For they are victorious, stout and valiant; and all their enterprises do take so good an effect that they are, hereby, become the lords and masters of the sea.”
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The Portuguese were by no means the first seamen to round the Cape of Good Hope. About six hundred years B. C. the Pharaoh of Egypt, Niko, sent a Phœnician squadron from the Red Sea, to find their way round Africa and through Gibraltar Strait, back to the Nile. “When autumn came they went ashore, wherever they might happen to be, and having sown a tract of land with corn, waited till the grain was fit to eat. Having reaped it, they again set sail; and thus it came to pass that two whole years went by, and it was not until the third year that they doubled the Pillars of Hercules, and made good their voyage home. On their return, they declared—for my part, do not believe them, but perhaps others may—that in sailing round Lybia (Africa), they had the sun on their right hand” (i. e. in the northern sky). Herodotus.
XXXIII
A. D. 1583 SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT
“He is not worthy to live at all, that for any fear of danger of death, shunneth his countrey’s service and his own honor.”
This message to all men of every English nation was written by a man who once with his lone sword covered a retreat, defending a bridge against twenty horsemen, of whom he killed one, dismounted two and wounded six.
In all his wars and voyages Sir Humphrey Gilbert won the respect of his enemies, and even of his friends, while in his writings one finds the first idea of British colonies overseas. At the end of his life’s endeavor he commanded a squadron that set out to found a first British colony in Virginia, and on the way he called at the port of Saint Johns in Newfoundland. Six years after the first voyage of Columbus, John Cabot had rediscovered the American mainland, naming and claiming this New-found Land, and its port for Henry VII of England. Since then for nearly a hundred years the fishermen of Europe had come to this coast for cod, but the Englishmen claimed and held the ports where the fish were smoked. Now in 1583 Gilbert met the fishermen, English and strangers alike, who delivered to him a stick of the timber and a turf of the soil in token of his possession of the land, while he hoisted the flag of England over her first colony, by this act founding the British empire.
When Gilbert left Saint Johns, he had a secret that made him beam with joy and hint at mysterious wealth. Perhaps his mining expert had found pyrites and reported the stuff as gold, or glittering crystals that looked like precious stones. Maybe it was the parcel of specimens for which he sent his page boy on board the Delight, who, failing to bring them, got a terrific thrashing.