olar seas;
and twice subsequently he went again, venturing in
small ill-equipped vessels of thirty or forty tons into the
most dangerous seas. These voyages were as remarkable
for their success as for the daring with which they
were accomplished, and Davis's epitaph is written on the
map of the world, where his name still remains to
commemorate his discoveries. Brave as he was, he is
distinguished by a peculiar and exquisite sweetness of
nature, which, from many little facts of his life, seems to
have affected every one with whom he came in contact
in a remarkable degree. We find men, for the love of
Master Davis, leaving their firesides to sail with him,
without other hope or motion; and silver bullets were
cast to shoot him in a mutiny; the hard rude natures of
the mutineers being awed by something in his carriage
which was not like that of a common man. He has
written the account of one of his northern voyages
himself; one of those, by the by, which the Hakluyt
Society have mutilated; and there is an imaginative
beauty in it, and a rich delicacy of expression, which is
a true natural poetry, called out in him by the first sight
of strange lands and things and people.

To show what he was, we should have preferred, if
possible, to have taken the story of his expedition into
the South Seas, in which, under circumstances of singular
difficulty, he was deserted by Candish, under whom
he had sailed; and after inconceivable trials, from famine,
mutiny, and storm, ultimately saved himself and his
ship, and such of the crew as had chosen to submit to
his orders. But it is a long history, and will not admit
of being mutilated. As an instance of the stuff of which
it was composed, he ran back in the black night in a
gale of wind through the Straits of Magellan, by a chart
which he had made with the eye in passing up. His
anchors were lost or broken; the cables were parted.
He could not bring up the ship; there was nothing for
it but to run, and he carried her safe through along
a channel often not three miles broad, sixty miles
from end, and twisting like the reaches of a river.
For the present, however, we are forced to content
ourselves with a few sketches out of the north-west
voyages. Here is one, for instance, which shows how
an Englishman could deal with the Indians. Davis had
landed at Gilbert's Sound, and gone up the country
exploring. On his return, he found his crew loud in
complaints of the thievish propen