"

"Kiss hands to the wilderness, then, and come with me to Newfoundland!"

"You to Newfoundland?"

"Yes. I to Newfoundland, unless my little matter here is settled at
once. Gloriana don't know it, and sha'n't till I'm off. She'd send me to
the Tower, I think, if she caught me playing truant. I could hardly get
leave to come hither; but I must out, and try my fortune. I am over ears
in debt already, and sick of courts and courtiers. Humphrey must go next
spring and take possession of his kingdom beyond seas, or his patent
expires; and with him I go, and you too, my circumnavigating giant."

And then Raleigh expounded to Amyas the details of the great
Newfoundland scheme, which whoso will may read in the pages of Hakluyt.

Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Raleigh's half-brother, held a patent for
"planting" the lands of Newfoundland and "Meta Incognita" (Labrador).
He had attempted a voyage thither with Raleigh in 1578, whereof I never
could find any news, save that he came back again, after a heavy brush
with some Spanish ships (in which his best captain, Mr. Morgan, was
killed), having done nothing, and much impaired his own estate: but now
he had collected a large sum; Sir Gilbert Peckham of London, Mr. Hayes
of South Devon, and various other gentlemen, of whom more hereafter, had
adventured their money; and a considerable colony was to be sent out the
next year, with miners, assayers, and, what was more, Parmenius Budaeus,
Frank's old friend, who had come to England full of thirst to see the
wonders of the New World; and over and above this, as Raleigh told Amyas
in strictest secrecy, Adrian Gilbert, Humphrey's brother, was turning
every stone at Court for a patent of discovery in the North-West;
and this Newfoundland colony, though it was to produce gold, silver,
merchandise, and what not, was but a basis of operations, a halfway
house from whence to work out the North-West passage to the Indies--that
golden dream, as fatal to English valor as the Guiana one to
Spanish--and yet hardly, hardly to be regretted, when we remember the
seamanship, the science, the chivalry, the heroism, unequalled in the
history of the English nation, which it has called forth among those
our later Arctic voyagers, who have combined the knight-errantry of the
middle age with the practical prudence of the modern, and dared for duty
more than Cortez or Pizarro dared for gold.

Amyas, simple fellow, took all in greedily; he knew enough of the
dan