nd with it
a ready access to Cathay and the Indies became one of the great
ambitions of the Elizabethan age. There is no period when great things
might better have been attempted. It was an epoch of wonderful
national activity and progress: the spirit of the nation was being
formed anew in the Protestant Reformation and in the rising conflict
with Spain. It was the age of Drake, of Raleigh, of Shakespeare, the
time at which were aroused those wide ambitions which were to give
birth to the British Empire.

In thinking of the exploits of these Elizabethan sailors in the Arctic
seas, we must try to place ourselves at their point of view, and
dismiss from our minds our own knowledge of the desolate and hopeless
region against which their efforts were directed. The existence of
Greenland, often called Frisland, and of Labrador was known from the
voyages of the Cabots and the Corte-Reals. It was known that between
these two coasts the sea swept in a powerful current out of the north.
Of {8} what lay beyond nothing was known. There seemed no reason why
Frobisher, or Davis, or Henry Hudson might not find the land trend away
to the south again and thus offer, after a brief transit of the
dangerous waters of the north, a smooth and easy passage over the
Pacific.

Perhaps we can best understand the hopes and ambitions of the time if
we turn to the writings of the Elizabethans themselves. One of the
greatest of them, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, afterwards lost in the northern
seas, wrote down at large his reasons for believing that the passage
was feasible and that its discovery would be fraught with the greatest
profit to the nation. In his _Discourse to prove a North-West Passage
to Cathay_, Gilbert argues that all writers from Plato down have spoken
of a great island out in the Atlantic; that this island is America
which must thus have a water passage all round it; that the ocean
currents moving to the west across the Atlantic and driven along its
coast, as Cartier saw, past Newfoundland, evidently show that the water
runs on round the top of America. A North-West Passage must therefore
exist. Of the advantages to be derived from its discovery Gilbert was
in no doubt.

{9}

It were the only way for our princes [he wrote] to possess themselves
of the wealth of all the east parts of the world which is infinite.
Through the shortness of the voyage, we should be able to sell all
manner of merchandise brought from thence