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Apo- neral was cast away,' which was too true."

So stirbt ein Held. It was a fine end for a mortal man. We will not call it sad or tragic, but heroic and sublime; and if our eyes water as we write it down, it is not with sorrow, but with joy and pride.

General came on board the Golden Hinde noon, the frigate was near cast away oppressed by "to make merry with us." He greatly de- waves, but at that time recovered, and giving plored the loss of his book and papers; and forth signs of joy, the General, sitting abaft with Mr. Hayes considered that the loss of ma- a book in his hand, cried out unto us in the Hinde so often as we did approach within hearing, We nuscripts could not be so very distressing, are as near to heaven by sea as by land,' reiteratand that there must have been something ing the same speech, well beseeming a soldier rebehind, certain gold ore, for instance, which solute in Jesus Christ, as I can testify that he was. had perished also-considerations not perhaps The same Monday night, about twelve of the of particular value. He was full of confi- clock, or not long after, the frigate being a-head dence from what he had seen, and talked of us in the Golden Hinde, suddenly her lights were out, whereof as it were in a moment we lost with all eagerness and warmth of the new the sight; and withal our watch cried, The Geexpedition for the following spring. cryphal gold mines still occupying the minds of Mr. Hayes and others, who were persuaded that Sir Humfrey was keeping to himself some such discovery which he had secretly made, they tried hard to extract it from him. They could make nothing, however, of his odd ironical answers, and their sorrow at the catastrophe which followed is sadly blended. "Thus faithfully," concludes Mr. Hayes (in with disappointment that such a secret some degree rising above himself), "I have reshould have perished. Sir Humfrey doubt-lated this story, wherein some sparks of the less saw America with other eyes than theirs, knight's virtues, though he be extinguished, may and gold-mines richer than California in its happily appear; he remaining resolute to a purhuge rivers and savannahs. pose honest and godly as was this, to discover, possess, and reduce unto the service of God and tries of America. Such is the infinite bounty of Christian piety, those remote and heathen counGod, who from every evil deriveth good, that fruit may grow in time of our travelling in these North Western lands (as has it not grown?), and the crosses, turmoils, and afflictions, both in the preparation and execution of the voyage, did correct the intemperate humors which before we noted to be in this gentleman, and made unsavory and less delightful his other manifold virtues.

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Leaving the issue of this good hope (about the gold)," continues Mr. Hayes, "to God, who only knoweth the truth thereof, I will hasten to the end of this tragedy, which must be knit up in the person of our General, and as it was God's ordinance upon him, even so the vehement persuasion of his friends could nothing avail to divert him from his wilful resolution of going in his frigate; and when he was entreated by the captain, master, and others, his well-wishers in the Hinde, not to venture, this was his answer-I will not forsake my little company going homewards, with whom I have passed so many storms and perils.'

Albeit, thinks the writer, who is unable to comprehend such high gallantry, there must have been something on his mind of what the world would say of him, "and it was rather rashness than advised resolution to prefer the wind of a vain report to the weight of his own life," for the writing of which sentence we will trust the author, either in this world or the other, has before this done due penance and repented of it.

Two-thirds of the way home they met foul weather and terrible seas, "breaking short and pyramid-wise." Men who had all their lives "occupied the sea' had never seen it more outrageous. "We had also upon our mainyard an apparition of a little fire by night, which seamen do call Castor and Pollux."

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"Thus as he was refined and made nearer unto

the image of God, so it pleased the Divine will to resume him unto Himself, whither both his and every other high and noble mind have always aspired."

Such was Sir Humfrey Gilbert; we know but little more of him, and we can only conjecture that he was still in the prime of his years when the Atlantic swallowed him. Like the gleam of a landscape lit suddenly for a moment by the lightning, these few scenes flash down to us across the centuries; but what a life must that have been of which this was the conclusion! He was one of a race

which have ceased to be. We look round for them, and we can hardly believe that the same blood is flowing in our veins. Brave we may still be, and strong perhaps as they, but the high moral grace which made bravery and strength so beautiful is departed from us for ever.

Our space is sadly limited for historical portrait painting; but we must find room for Monday, the ninth of September, in the after- another of that Greenaway party whose

Seeing iron," he says, "they could in no case forbear stealing; which, when I perceived, it did but minister to me occasion of laughter to see their simplicity, and I willed that they should not be diligent to keep their things, supposing it to be hardly used, but that our company should be more very hard in so short a time to make them know

their evils."

nature was as fine as that of Gilbert, and Davis had landed at Gilbert's Sound, and who intellectually was more largely gifted. gone up the country exploring. On his reThe latter was drowned in 1583. In 1585 turn, he found his crew loud in complaints of John Davis left Dartmouth on his first voy- the thievish propensities of the natives, and age into the Polar seas; and twice subse- urgent to have an example made of some of quently he went again, venturing in small ill- them. On the next occasion he fired a gun equipped vessels of thirty or forty tons into at them with blank cartridge; but their nathe most dangerous seas. These voyagesture was still too strong for them. were as remarkable for their success as for the daring with which they were accomplished, and Davis's epitaph is written on the map of the world, where his name still remains to commemorate his discoveries. Brave as he was, he is distinguished by a peculiar and exquisite sweetness of nature, which, from many little facts of his life, seem to have affected every one with whom he came in contact in a remarkable degree. We find men, for the love of Master Davis, leaving their firesides to sail with him, without other hope or motion; and silver bullets were cast to shoot him in a mutiny; the hard rude natures of the mutineers being awed by something in his carriage which was not like that of a common man. He has written the account of one of his northern voyages himself; one of those, by the by, which the Hakluyt Society have mutilated; and there is an imaginative beauty in it, and a rich delicacy of expression, which is a true natural poetry, called out in him by the first sight of strange lands and things and people.

To show what he was, we should have preferred, if possible, to have taken the story of his expedition into the South Seas, in which, under circumstances of singular difficulty, he was deserted by Candish, under whom he had sailed; and after inconceivable trials, from famine, mutiny, and storm, ultimately saved himself and his ship, and such of the crew as had chosen to submit to his

In his own way, however, he took an opportunity of administering a lesson to them of a more wholesome kind than could be given with gunpowder and bullets. Like the rest of his countrymen, he believed the savage Indians in their idolatries to be worshippers of the devil. They are witches," he says; 66 they have images in great store, and use many kinds of enchantments.' And these enchantments they tried on one occasion to put in force against himself and his crew.

Being on shore on the 4th day of July, one of them made a long oration, and then kindled a fire, into which with many strange words and gestures he put divers things, which we supposed to be a sacrifice. Myself and certain of my company standing by, they desired us to go into the smoke. I

desired them to go into the smoke, which they would by no means do. I then took one of them and thrust him into the smoke, and willed one of my company to tread out the fire, and spurn it into the sea, which was done to show them that

we did contemn their sorceries."

spect for him than formerly.

orders. But it is a long history, and will modern Englishman would do; only, perIt is a very English story-exactly what a not admit of being mutilated. As an instance of the stuff of which it was composed, devil in the case, which makes a difference. haps, not believing that there was any real he ran back in the black night in a gale of However, real or not real, after seeing him wind through the Straits of Magellan, by a chart which he had made with the eye in pass-will hope the poor Greenlander had less repatiently put up with such an injury, we ing up. His anchors were lost or broken; the cables were parted. He could not bring up the ship; there was nothing for it but to run, and he carried her safe through along a channel often not three miles broad, sixty miles from end, and twisting like the reaches of a river. For the present, however, we are forced to content ourselves with a few sketches out of the north-west voyages. Here is one, for instance, which shows how an Englishman could deal with the Indians.

Leaving Gilbert's Sound, Davis went on to the north-west, and in lat. 63° fell in with a barrier of ice, which he coasted for thir

teen days without finding an opening. The very sight of an iceberg was new to all his crew; and the ropes and shrouds, though it was midsummer, becoming encompassed with ice,

"The people began to fall sick and faint-hearted

- whereupon, very orderly, with good discretion, they entreated me to regard the safety of mine own life, as well as the preservation of theirs; and that I should not, through overbouldness, leave their widows and fatherless children to give me bitter curses.

"Whereupon, seeking counsel of God, it pleased His Divine Majesty to move my heart to prosecute that which I hope shall be to His glory, and to the contentation of every Christian mind."

He had two vessels, one of some burthen, the other a pinnace of thirty tons. The result of the counsel which he had sought was, that he made over his own large vessel to such as wished to return, and himself, "thinking it better to die with honor than to return with infamy," went on, with such volunteers as would follow him, in a poor leaky cutter, up the sea now called Davis's Straits, in commemoration of that adventure, 4° north of the furthest known point, among storms and icebergs, by which the long days and twilight nights alone saved him from being destroyed, and, coasting back along the American shore, discovered Hudson's Straits, supposed then to be the longdesired entrance into the Pacific. This exploit drew the attention of Walsingham, and by him Davis was presented to Burleigh, "who was also pleased to show him great encouragement. If either these statesmen or Elizabeth had been twenty years younger, his name would have filled a larger space in history than a small corner of the map of the world; but if he was employed at all in the last years of the century, no vates sacer has been found to celebrate his work, and no clue is left to guide us. He disappears; a cloud falls over him. He is known to have commanded trading vessels in the Eastern seas, and to have returned five times from India. But the details are all lost, and accident has only parted the clouds for a moment to show us the mournful setting with which he, too, went down upon the sea.

In taking out Sir Edward Mitchellthorne to India, in 1604, he fell in with a crew of Japanese, whose ship had been burnt, drifting at sea, without provisions, in a leaky junk. He supposed them to be pirates, but he did not choose to leave them to so wretched a death, and took them on board, and in a few hours, watching their opportunity, they murdered him.

like on the field of victory, but cut off in some poor brawl or ambuscade. But so it in the flower of their days, and few indeed was with all these men. They were cut off of them laid their bones in the sepulchres of their fathers. They knew the service which they had chosen, and they did not ask the wages for which they had not labored. Life with them was no summer holiday, but a holy sacrifice offered up to duty, and what their Master sent was welcome. Beautiful is old age-beautiful as the slow-dropping mellow autumn of a rich glorious summer. In the old man nature has fulfilled her work; she loads him with her blessings; she fills him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to a grave, to which he is followed with blessings. God forbid we should not call it beautiful. It is beautiful, but not the most beautiful. There is another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the cross is the symbol; a battle which no peace follows, this side the grave; which the grave gapes to finish, before the victory is won; and-strange that it should be so-this is the highest life of man. Look back along the great names of history; there is none whose life has been other than this. They to whom it has been given to do the really highest work in this earth-whoever they are, Jew or Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, legislators, philosophers, priests, poets, kings, slaves-one and all, their fate has been the same-the same bitter cup has been given to them to drink; and so it was with the servants of England in the sixteenth century. Their life was a long battle, either with the elements or with men, and it was enough for them to fulfil their work, and to pass away in the hour when God had nothing more to bid them do. They did not complain, and why should we complain for them? Peaceful life was not what they desired, and an honorable death had no terrors for them. Theirs was the old Grecian spirit, and the great heart of the Theban poet lived again in them:

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« θανεῖν δ' οἰσίν ἀνάγκα τὶ κέ τὶς ἀνώνυμον γῆρας ἐν σκότῳ καθήμενος ἕψοι μάταν, ἀπάντων καλῶν ἄμμορος.

As the fool dieth, so dieth the wise, and there is no difference; it was the chance of the sea, and the reward of a humane action -a melancholy end for such a man-like the end of a warrior, not dying Epaminondas-mutare vel timere sperno."

"Seeing," in Gilbert's own brave words, "that death is inevitable, and the fame of virtue is immortal; wherefore in this behalf

In the conclusion of these light sketches | we pass into an element different from that in which we have been lately dwelling. The scenes in which Gilbert and Davis played out their high natures were of the kind which we call peaceful, and the enemies with which they contended were principally the ice and the wind, and the stormy seas and the dangers of unknown and savage lands; we shall close amidst the roar of cannon, and the wrath and rage of battle. Hume, who alludes to the engagement which we are going to describe, speaks of it in a tone which shows that he looked at it as something portentous and prodigious; as a thing to wonder at-but scarcely as deserving the admiration which we pay to actions properly within the scope of humanity and as if the strength which was displayed in it was like the unnatural strength of madness. He does not say this, but he appears to feel it; and he scarcely would have felt it, if he had cared more deeply to saturate himself with the temper of the age of which he was writing. At the time, all England and all the world rang with it. It struck a deeper terror, though it was but the action of a single ship, into the hearts of the Spanish people-it dealt a more deadly blow upon their fame and moral strength, than the destruction of the Armada itself; and in the direct results which arose from it, it was scarcely less disastrous to them. Hardly, as it seems to us, if the most glorious actions, which are set like jewels in the history of mankind are weighed one against the other in the balance, hardly will those 300 Spartans who in the summer morning sate "combing their long hair-for death" in the passes of Thermopyle, have earned a more lofty estimate for themselves than this one crew of modern Englishmen.

In August, 1591, Lord Thomas Howard, with six English line-of-battle ships, six victuat anchor under the island of Florez. Light allers, and two or three pinnaces, were lying in ballast and short of water, with half their men disabled by sickness, they were unable to pursue the aggressive purpose on which they had been sent out. Several of the ships' crews were on shore; the ships themselves "all pestered and rommaging," with thing out of order. In this condition they were surprised by a Spanish fleet consisting of 53 men-of-war. Eleven out of the twelve English ships obeyed the signal of the Admiral, to cut or weigh their anchors and escape as they might. The twelfth, the Revenge, was unable for the moment to follow; of her crew of 190, 90 being sick on shore,

every

and, from the position of the ship, there being some delay and difficulty in getting them on board. The Revenge was commanded by Sir Richard Grenville, of Bideford, a man well known in the Spanish seas, and the terror of the Spanish sailors; so fierce he was said to be, that mythic stories passed from lip to lip about him, and, like Earl Talbot or Coeur de Lion, the nurses at the Azores frightened children with the sound of his name. "He was of great revenues," they said, "of his own inheritance, but of unquiet mind, and greatly affected to wars," and from his uncontrollable propensities for blood eating, he had volunteered his services to the Queen; "of so hard a complexion was he, that I (John Huighen von Linschoten, who is our authority here, and who was with the Spanish fleet after the action) have been told by divers credible persons who stood and beheld him, that he would carouse three or four glasses of wine, and take the glasses between his teeth and crush them in pieces and swallow them down." Such he was to the Spaniard. To the English he was a goodly and gallant gentleman, who had never turned his back upon an enemy, and remarkable in that remarkable time for his constancy and daring. In this surprise at Florez he was in no haste to fly. He first saw all his sick on board and stowed away on the ballast, and then, with no more than a hundred men left him to fight and work the ship, he deliberately weighed, uncertain, as it seemed at first, what he intended to do. The Spanish fleet were by this time on his weather bow, and he was persuaded (we here take his cousin Raleigh's beautiful narrative and follow it in his words) "to cut his mainsail and cast about, and trust to the sailing of the ship."

"But Sir Richard utterly refused to turn from

her Majesty's ship, persuading his company that the enemy, alledging that he would rather choose to die than to dishonor himself, his country, and he would pass through their two squadrons in despite of them, and enforce those of Seville to give him way, which he performed upon diverse of the foremost, who, as the mariners term it, sprang their luff, and fell under the lee of the Revenge. But the other course had been the bet

ter; and might right well have been answered in standing, out of the greatness of his mind, he so great an impossibility of prevailing notwithcould not be persuaded."

The wind was light; the San Philip, “a huge high-carged ship," of 1500 tons, came up to windward of him, and, taking the wind out of his sails, ran aboard him.