previous next

[169]

The death of Sir Humphrey Gilbert.

[Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed from England for Newfoundland with a fleet of five vessels. The largest of these (two hundred tons), fitted out by Sir Walter Raleigh, soon returned to England; the next in size was lost; and the three others were the ‘golden hind,’ forty tons; the ‘Swallow,’ of the same size; and the ‘Squirrel,’ of only ten tons,— merely a sail-boat. The loss of their largest vessel, or ‘admiral,’ discouraged the crews very much; and they finally insisted on returning, as appears in the narrative which follows. The original account is in Hakluyt's voyages (Edition of 1810), vol. III. p. 199.]


Our people lost courage daily after this ill-success, the weather continuing thick and blustering, with increase of cold, winter drawing on, which took from them all hope of amendment, settling an assurance of worse weather to grow upon us every day. The lee-side1 of us lay full of flats and dangers inevitable, if the wind blew hard at south. Some, again, doubted2 we were ingulfed in the Bay of St. Lawrence, the coast full of dangers, and unto us unknown. But, above all, provision waxed scant, and hope of supply was gone with loss of our admiral.3

1 i.e., the north side, if the wind was south.

2 Suspected.

3 The ‘Delight,’ the flag-ship.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Newfoundland (Canada) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Humphrey Gilbert (2)
Swallow (1)
Walter Raleigh (1)
Hakluyt (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
1810 AD (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: