Blackwell Reference Online

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Sir Humphrey Gilbert (1537–83) was an Elizabethan explorer, mariner, and soldier. He is known chiefly as an advocate for attempts to seek a north-west passage to the Pacific in the 1560s, for his successful but ruthless military service in Ireland in the 1570s, and for his attempts to explore and colonize North America after he was granted letters patent by Elizabeth I in 1578 authorizing the planting of an English colony in the New World. Born in 1537 at Greenway on the River Dart in Devon, Humphrey Gilbert was the second son of Otto Gilbert of Compton, Devon, and Katherine Champernoun of Modbury, Devon. When his father died in 1547, his mother married Walter Ralegh (?1496–1581) from Hayes Barton, Devon: Sir Walter Ralegh (1554–1618) was the second son of this union. Gilbert's adventurous career was a great influence on his younger half-brother, and on his first expedition, after receiving the letters patent from the queen, Ralegh sailed as captain of the Falcon , one of the fleet's ships. When Gilbert died, the letters patent, which allowed him ‘to discover search fynde out and viewe such remote heathen and barbarous landes … not actually possessed of any Christian Prynce and inhabited by Christian people’, transferred to Ralegh. Gilbert's first published text was Discourse of a discoverie for a new passage to Cataia (1576), which he had originally written in about 1565, after ... log in or subscribe to read full text