Humphrey Gilbert

• 1. Introduction

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  Humphrey Gilbert died sitting in the stern of a tiny frigate, reading a book, as an Atlantic storm swallowed him whole. His crew on a nearby vessel heard him cry out again and again, "We are as near to Heaven by sea as by land!" Then, at midnight on the 9th of September 1583, the lights of the Squirrell went out. The watch on the Golden Hind cried out that "the Generall was cast away." The ship went down with everyone on board.

  Gilbert was born around 1539 as the fifth son of Otho Gilbert of Devon. He grew up to be a soldier, a member of parliament, an explorer, and a theorist of empire. He campaigned in Ireland with a brutality that shocked even contemporaries. He lobbied the Queen personally on the best route to China. He carried letters patent from the crown to claim territory in North America and planted the flag in Newfoundland in the name of England. None of his grand expeditions made money. Most of them barely made it home. What made him matter was not what he completed but what he set in motion.

• 2. Court, Education, and Early Ambition

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  Gilbert's path to Queen Elizabeth's court began through a family connection: his mother Catherine Champernowne was a niece of Kat Ashley, Elizabeth's own governess. That tie opened doors for Gilbert and his brothers at a moment when proximity to the Queen determined a man's prospects. His brothers Sir John Gilbert and Adrian Gilbert, and his half-brothers Carew Raleigh and Sir Walter Raleigh, all made their mark during Elizabeth's reign and into that of King James VI and I.

  At Eton College and the University of Oxford, Gilbert learned to speak French and Spanish and studied war and navigation, a combination that shaped everything he would attempt afterward. He went on to reside at the Inns of Chancery in London around 1560-1561. His mentor through much of his early career was Sir Henry Sidney, who would later command him in Ireland.

  Gilbert showed his appetite for ideas early. When he was present at the siege of Newhaven at Le Havre in June 1563 and was wounded there, he used the diplomatic journey back to England to press a proposal on the Queen directly. He presented her with his A Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia, a tract arguing for a Northwest Passage to China by way of America. The document would not be published in revised form until 1576, but it announced an obsession that would occupy him for the rest of his life.

• 3. Violence in Ireland

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  By July 1566, Gilbert was in Ireland serving under Sir Henry Sidney, then Lord Deputy of Ireland, fighting against Shane O'Neill during the Tudor conquest. After O'Neill's assassination in 1567, Gilbert was appointed governor of Ulster and sat in the Irish Parliament. His ambitions, though, kept pulling him southward toward the province of Munster.

  In the summer of 1569, conflict erupted between Devonshire landowners pressing claims in Butler territories and the local Irish, pulling in the Geraldines of Desmond under James FitzMaurice FitzGerald. Gilbert was promoted to colonel by Sidney and sent in pursuit of FitzGerald. The Geraldines were driven from Kilmallock, then returned to besiege Gilbert himself. He led a sally that drove them off, during which his horse was shot from under him and his buckler was transfixed with a spear. After that, he marched for three weeks through Kerry and Connello without opposition, taking thirty to forty castles.

  Soldier and author Thomas Churchyard recorded what happened to the dead along the way. Gilbert ordered that the heads of everyone killed each day, regardless of who they were, be cut from their bodies and laid on either side of the path leading into his tent, so that anyone approaching him had to walk through what Churchyard called "a lane of heddes." Gilbert argued afterward that killing non-combatants was strategically sound: the men of war, he wrote, could not survive without the people who milked the cows and provided their food, so killing civilians was the way to starve the fighters.

  In December 1569, he was knighted by Sidney in the ruined FitzMaurice camp, reportedly surrounded by heaps of dead gallowglass warriors. A month after Gilbert's return to England, FitzMaurice retook Kilmallock with 120 soldiers, sacked the town for three days, and then held out for three more years before surrendering. On the 1st of January 1570, Gilbert had already received a formal knighthood from Sidney for his services.

• 4. Parliament, Alchemy, and the Northwest Passage

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  Back in England in 1570, Gilbert married Anne Ager, daughter of John Ager of Otterden. She bore him six sons and one daughter. In 1571, he was elected to parliament for Plymouth, Devon; in 1572, for Queenborough. He also plunged into an unlikely intellectual world: alchemy. He joined Thomas Smith and William Cecil in backing William Medley's project to transmute iron into copper. He helped set up the Society of the New Art alongside William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who maintained an alchemical laboratory in Limehouse.

  In 1573, Gilbert presented the Queen with a proposal for an academy in London. The idea was eventually realized not by Gilbert but by Sir Thomas Gresham, who established Gresham College.

  Through all of this, Gilbert never stopped arguing for the Northwest Passage. During the winter of 1566, he had debated the question directly before Queen Elizabeth against Anthony Jenkinson, a rival who had sailed to Russia and crossed overland to the Caspian Sea. Jenkinson favored a northeast route; Gilbert called the northeastern approach too dangerous, arguing the air near the pole was "so darkened with continual mists and fogs" that no navigator could see to guide a ship. Gilbert's reasoning won out. Money was raised, chiefly by London merchant Michael Lok, and Martin Frobisher was appointed captain. Frobisher left England in June 1576, but found no passage. He came back with a black stone later found to be worthless and a native Inuit.

• 5. The Failed Expeditions

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  On the 11th of June 1578, Gilbert received letters patent from the crown, and in November of that year he set sail from Plymouth with seven vessels for North America. Storms scattered the fleet. They were forced back to port roughly six months later. The only ship to have reached any real distance into the Atlantic was the Falcon, under Walter Raleigh's command.

  The summer of 1579 brought a second attempt, this time ordered by William Drury, Lord Deputy of Ireland, who commissioned Gilbert and Raleigh to intercept a Spanish fleet expected to bring aid to Irish rebels. Gilbert had three ships: the 250-ton Anne Ager, named after his wife; the Relief; and the 10-ton Squirrell, a small frigate that had already completed a voyage to America and back within three months under a captured Portuguese pilot.

  Gilbert set sail in June 1579, promptly got lost in fog off Land's End in Cornwall, and his fleet was driven into the Bay of Biscay. The Spanish slipped past and made their rendezvous at Dingle harbour. In October, Gilbert put into Cobh in Cork, where he beat a local gentleman about the head with a sword and then murdered a local merchant on the dockside. These were not isolated episodes. A. L. Rowse later described Gilbert as "passionate and impulsive, a nature liable to violence and cruelty." The Queen's doubts about his seafaring ability, raised by the Land's End fiasco, were not misplaced.

  By 1583, the six-year exploration license from his 1578 letters patent was nearly expired. Gilbert raised money from English Catholic investors, who were drawn by the prospect of settling nine million acres around the river Norumbega. The Privy Council insisted the investors pay recusancy fines before departing, and Catholic clergy and Spanish agents discouraged participation. Stripped of most of his financing, Gilbert sailed in June 1583 with five vessels. The largest, the Bark Raleigh, owned and commanded by Sir Walter Raleigh himself, turned back early for lack of supplies. The remaining crews, described as misfits, criminals, and pirates, pressed on to Newfoundland.

• 6. Newfoundland Claimed

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  At St. John's, the fishing fleet blockaded Gilbert on arrival. A Portuguese vessel had been attacked by one of his commanders in 1582, and the port admiral, an Englishman, was not inclined to wave that incident aside. Once the blockade was broken, Gilbert moved quickly. On the 5th of August 1583, he took formal possession of Newfoundland for the English Crown, including all lands two hundred leagues north and south of it. The ceremony followed common law: turf was cut from the ground to symbolize the transfer of the soil. The local fishermen presented him with a dog, which he named Stella, after the North Star.

  He then levied taxes on the fishermen from several countries who worked the rich waters near the Grand Banks. His authority over the fish stations at St. John's was real, if brief.

  On the 20th of August the fleet departed for the river Norumbega region on the American mainland. Gilbert ordered a controversial change of course that his more experienced mariners opposed. His largest remaining ship, the Delight, was sent ahead into uncharted coastal waters near Sable Island, ran aground on a sandbar, and sank. All but sixteen of her crew were lost. The Delight had also been carrying most of the remaining supplies. On the 31st of August, after talking with Edward Hayes and William Cox, the captain and master of the Golden Hind, Gilbert decided to turn for home.

• 7. The Last Night at Sea

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  The two small ships, the Golden Hind and the Squirrell, made good speed after clearing Cape Race. Then, somewhere near the Azores, nearly nine hundred miles from Cape Race, the sea rose into what Edward Hayes described as waves "breaking short and high Pyramid wise." Gilbert had stepped on a nail aboard the Squirrell and had gone onto the Golden Hind on the 2nd of September to have his foot bandaged. Hayes told him the Squirrell was over-gunned and unsafe for the crossing. Gilbert refused to stay.

  On the 9th of September, the Squirrell was nearly swallowed by the sea but recovered. Observers on the Golden Hind could see Gilbert sitting calmly in the stern of his small frigate, reading. When the two ships came close enough to hail, the crew of the Golden Hind heard him repeat the phrase, "We are as near to Heaven by sea as by land!" At midnight the lights of the Squirrell went out. The watch reported the general was lost.

  His reading material was believed to be the Utopia of Sir Thomas More. More had written: "He that hathe no grave is covered with the skye: and, the way to heaven out of all places is of like length and distance." Whether Gilbert chose the book deliberately or by chance, the passage fit the moment with an eerie precision that Hayes, who survived, would not have forgotten.

• 8. Legacy and Consequence

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  Gilbert Sound near Greenland was named after Gilbert by John Davis, one of the explorers who came after him. His son Ralegh Gilbert became second in command of the Popham Colony in Maine, another failed venture that followed in his father's footsteps.

  The formal annexation of Newfoundland that Gilbert performed on the 5th of August 1583 did not take real hold until 1610. His efforts in Ireland helped push Ulster and Munster toward forcible English colonization. And in 1584, the crown issued a royal charter to Walter Raleigh, grounded in part on Gilbert's own earlier patent. With that backing, Raleigh launched the Roanoke expeditions, the first sustained attempt by the English crown to plant a colony in North America.

  A. L. Rowse described Gilbert as "an interesting psychological case" with a "disturbed personality," at once intellectual and visionary and prone to savage violence. He argued that Gilbert was "outstanding for his initiative and originality, if not for his successes." The violence in Ireland, the lost fleets, the murdered merchant in Cobh, the reading of Thomas More in a sinking ship: all of it fit the portrait of a man whose reach exceeded every resource he actually had. The royal charter that went to Raleigh in 1584 was the instrument that eventually made the colonial project real, and it was built on the ground that Gilbert had prepared.