REVIVAL OF THE NORTHWEST THEORY

Too Long; Didn't Read

To Humphrey Gilbert belongs the credit for so reviving the Northwest Passage theory as to turn the thoughts of English merchants and statesmen to adventure and to colonization in America; while Martin Frobisher was the first English navigator fairly to begin the Northwest explorations. Gilbert, born in 1539, in the county of Devon, was the son of a country gentleman, half-brother of Walter Raleigh, on the mother’s side, an Eton schoolboy and an Oxford man, bred to the law, but taking instead to adventure. When a soldier in Ireland, in 1566–1567, a captain under Sir Henry Sidney against the Irish rebellion, his mind was busied with speculation on cosmography; and in the latter year, being sent home with despatches by Sidney, he took occasion to present to Queen Elizabeth, whose favour he enjoyed, a petition for privileges “concerning the discoverings of a passage by the North to go to Cathaie.” This, it is said, was an alternative to the earlier memorial of Anthony Jenkinson and himself for royal patronage to a new expedition of discovery by the Northeast. Both petitions lay unanswered, and he returned to soldiering. 144In 1570 he was knighted for his services in Ireland, the previous year having been given the government of Münster. In 1571, back in England, he was a member of Parliament for Plymouth. The next year he was fighting in the Netherlands, the first colonel in command of English forces there. Returned again to England, he temporarily retired to country-life at Limehouse, employing his leisure in further geographical investigations and in writing a learned Discourse of a Discovery for a New Passage to Cathaia, partly, it is assumed, in support of his petition still before the queen. One day in the winter of 1574 he showed the manuscript of the Discourse to his friend George Gascoigne, one of the pioneer Elizabethan poets, who afterward edited and published it. Meanwhile it led to the granting of a license by the Fellowship of English Merchants, in 1575, to Martin Frobisher with “divers gentlemen,” out of which grew Frobisher’s Northwest voyage.