half-brother was often his companion. As early as 1584 Barlow
addresses Raleigh as one personally conversant with the islands of the
Gulf of Mexico, and there was a volume, never printed and now lost,
written about the same time, entitled _Sir Walter Raleigh's Voyage to
the West Indies_. This expedition, no other allusion to which has
survived, must have taken place before he went to Ireland in 1580, and
may be conjecturally dated 1577.

The incidents of the next two years may be rapidly noted; they are all
of them involved in obscurity. It is known that Raleigh crossed the
Atlantic for a second time on board one of the ships of Gilbert's
ill-starred expedition to the St. Lawrence in the winter of 1578. In
February of the next year[1] he was again in London, and was committed
to the Fleet Prison for a 'fray' with another courtier. In September
1579, he was involved in Sir Philip Sidney's tennis-court quarrel with
Lord Oxford. In May of this same year he was stopped at Plymouth when in
the act of starting on a piratical expedition against Spanish America.
He had work to do in opposing Spain nearer home, and he first comes
clearly before us in connection with the Catholic invasion of Ireland in
the close of 1579. It was on July 17, 1579, that the Catholic
expedition from Ferrol landed at Dingle. Fearing to stay there, it
passed four miles westward to Smerwick Bay, and there built a fortress
called Fort del Ore, on a sandy isthmus, thinking in case of need easily
to slip away to the ocean. The murder of an English officer, who was
stabbed in his bed while the guest of the brother of the Earl of
Desmond, was recommended by Sandars the legate as a sweet sacrifice in
the sight of God, and ruthlessly committed. The result was what Sandars
had foreseen; the Geraldines, hopelessly compromised, threw up the
fiction of loyalty to Elizabeth. Sir Nicholas Malby defeated the rebels
in the Limerick woods in September, but in return the Geraldines burned
Youghal and drove the Deputy within the walls of Cork, where he died of
chagrin. The temporary command fell on an old friend of Raleigh's, Sir
Warham Sentleger, who wrote in December 1579 a letter of earnest appeal
which broke up the apathy of the English Government. Among other steps
hurriedly taken to uphold the Queen's power in Ireland, young Walter
Raleigh was sent where his half-brother, Humphrey Gilbert, had so much
distinguished himself ten years before.

The biographer breathe