Sunneshine_, of London, fifty tunnes, and the _Moonshine_, of
Dartmouth, thirty-five tunnes, the ship _Mermayd_, of a hundred and
twenty tunnes, and a pinesse of tenne tunnes named the _North
Starre_.'[5] But in spite of this name of good augury the little
pinnace never came home again, and one can only admire with awe the
daring that ventured to sail a boat of ten tons across the boisterous
Atlantic into the unknown Arctic Seas. Traces of Davis's wanderings
along the coasts of North America may still be found in the names he
bestowed on different points. 'On sighting first the land, he named the
bay which he entered after his friend, Gilbert Sound; we find also
Exeter Sound, Totnes Roads, Mount Raleigh, and other familiar titles. A
few years later John Davis found the right course to India and China,
and introduced the trade from this country which exists to the present
time.'

[Footnote 5: 'An Elizabethan Guild of the City of Exeter,' by William
Cotton.]

A greater man than Davis lived farther down the river at Greenaway,
opposite the pretty village of Dittisham, which, with its strip of beach
and ferry, looks as if it had been 'made for a picture.' Sir Humphrey
Gilbert, stepbrother to Sir Walter Raleigh, was a great man to whom
Fortune was not overkind, but his 'virtues and pious intentions may be
read ... shining too gloriously to be dusked by misfortune.' His aims
were higher than the hopes that stirred most of his contemporaries, and
of his 'noble enterprizes the great design ... was to discover the
remote countries of America, and to bring off those savages from their
diabolical superstitions, to the embracing the gospel.' He made two
efforts to graft a colony with little success, but his third effort was
rather happier; and having left Devonshire in June, 1583, he 'sailed to
Newfoundland and the great river of St Laurence in Canada; which he took
possession of, and seized the same to the crown of England, and invested
the Queen in an estate for two hundred leagues in length by cutting a
turf and rod after the antient custom of England.' From the developments
of that great country that are now taking place, it cannot but be
interesting to look back along the vista of years to this very simple
ceremony.

Later this group of emigrants lost heart, and nearly all returned to
England, and possibly Sir Humphrey may have wondered whether this
venture also would have but a flickering existence, and would leave no
las