When the Delight, his flagship, was cast away on Sable Island, with a hundred men drowned and the sixteen survivors missing, Gilbert mourned, it was thought, more for his secret than for ship or people. From that time the wretchedness of his men aboard the ten-ton frigate, the Squirrel, weighed upon him. They were in rags, hungry and frightened, so to cheer them up he left his great ship and joined them. The Virginia voyage was abandoned, they squared away for England, horrified by a walrus passing between the ships, which the mariners took for a demon jeering at their misfortunes.
They crossed the Atlantic in foul weather, with great seas running, so that the people implored their admiral no longer to risk his life in the half-swamped Squirrel.
“I will not forsake my little company,” was all his answer. The seas became terrific and the weird corposants, Saint Elmo’s electric fires “flamed amazement,” from masts and spars, sure harbinger of still more dreadful weather.
A green sea filled the Squirrel and she was near sinking, but as she shook the water off, Sir Humphrey Gilbert waved his hand to the Golden Hind. “Fear not, my masters!” he shouted, “we are as near to Heaven by sea as by land.”
As the night fell, he was still seen sitting abaft with a book in his hand.
Then at midnight all of a sudden the frigate’s lights were out, “for in that moment she was devoured, and swallowed up by the sea,” and the soul of Humphrey Gilbert passed out of the great unrest.
XXXIV
A. D. 1603 SIR WALTER RALEIGH
To its nether depths of shame and topmost heights of glory, the sixteenth century is summed up in Sir Walter Raleigh. He was Gilbert’s young half-brother, thirteen years his junior, and a kinsman of Drake, Hawkins and Grenville, all men of Devon.
He played the dashing young gallant, butchering Irish prisoners of war; he played the leader in the second sack of Cadiz; he played the knight errant in the Azores, when all alone he stormed the breached walls of a fort; he played the hero of romance in a wild quest up the Orinoco for the dream king El Dorado, and the mythical golden city of Manoa. Always he played to the gallery, and when he must dress the part of Queen Elizabeth’s adoring lover, he let it be known that his jeweled shoes had cost six thousand pieces of gold. He wrote some of the noblest prose in our language besides most exquisite verse, invented distilling of fresh water from the sea, and paid for the expeditions which founded Virginia.
