| Newfoundland declared to be a British possession. |
The want of a settled authority, of some guarantee for law and order, in the harbours and on the coasts of Newfoundland, was no doubt felt by those who came year by year to the fisheries, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert's name and high repute may well have been known to others than his own countrymen. Two days after his arrival he took formal possession of the land, with ceremony of rod and turf, in the name of his sovereign; the arms of England were set up; three simple laws were enacted—providing that the recognized religion should be in accordance with the forms of the Church of England, safeguarding the sovereign rights of the Queen of England, and enjoining due respect for her name; and then Gilbert issued land grants as proprietor of the soil. In the words of one of the accounts which Hakluyt has preserved,53 'he did let, set, give, and dispose of many things as absolute Governor there, by virtue of Her Majesty's letters patents.'
53 Peckham's account, Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 209.
Thus was Newfoundland declared to be a British possession, and such are its claims to be our oldest colony. The annexation was complete in form and substance; no protest was entered against it by those whom it concerned; land was granted by the recognized proprietor, and nothing was wanting to constitute a claim which should last, and has lasted, to all time. Frobisher proclaimed the sovereignty of England over Arctic lands, but his proclamation was as barren as the shores over which it extended. Gilbert, on the contrary, went to a place where European sailors had long foregathered; he went there as an English Governor; his authority was unquestioned, his grants were accepted, and when he read his commission and set up the arms of England at the harbour of St. John, he took the first step, and a very long step, towards British dominion in the New World.
| Gilbert's death. |
Gilbert had great hopes of finding precious metal in Newfoundland; and his principal mining expert, a Saxon, promised him a rich yield of silver from the ore which was collected in the island. That ore, however, was lost early on the voyage home, and the miner himself was lost with it in the wreck of the largest ship—the Delight. A far greater loss, however, was in store for the ill-fated expedition. They left St. John's on August 20, making for Sable Island, which had been stocked years before by the Portuguese.54 In a few days the Delight foundered on a rock; and the weather became so bad that, at the end of the month, Gilbert consented to make for home. He was in the smallest ship, the Squirrel, a little ten-ton vessel, as being the best suited to explore the creeks and inlets of the American coast; and, in spite of the remonstrances of his companions, he would not leave her on the return voyage. 'We are as near heaven by sea as by land,' were his last words, before the ship went down in the middle of the Atlantic with all on board; and thus, fearless and faithful unto death, he found his resting-place in the sea. The story is one which stands out to all time in the annals of English adventure and English colonization. It was meet and right that the founder of the first English colony should be a Devonshire sailor of high repute, of stainless name, chivalrous, unselfish, strong in the fear of God. It was no less meet that his grave should be in the stormy Atlantic, midway between the Old World and the New. Thus those who came after had a forerunner of the noblest type; and the ships, which from that time to this have carried Englishmen to America, may ever have been passing by where Humphrey Gilbert went to his rest.
54 See [above].
| Sir Walter Ralegh. His attempts to colonize Virginia. |
Gilbert's half-brother, Sir Walter Ralegh, was cast in the same mould, but the record of his doings lies in the main beyond the range of this book. Virginia and Guiana were the scenes of his attempts at colonization, not Newfoundland or the coasts and rivers of Canada. In 1584, the year after Gilbert had been lost at sea, Ralegh obtained from Queen Elizabeth a patent which was practically the same as Gilbert's grant of 1578; and, at the end of April, he sent out two ships, commanded by two captains named Amidas and Barlow, to explore and report upon a likely place for an English settlement.55
55 Accounts of this and the following voyages are given in the third volume of Hakluyt. See also the first book of John Smith's general history of Virginia, The English Voyages to the Old Virginia, in Mr. Arber's edition, The English Scholar's Library.