Essays in Literature and HistoryFroude, James Anthony
History
Essays in Literature and History
Froude, James Anthony
History; Literature
saturated through and through with his inborn nobility
of nature.
Homer and Aristotle are pressed into service to prove
that the ocean runs round the three old continents, and
America therefore is necessarily an island. The gulf
stream which he had carefully observed, eked out
by a theory of the primum mobile, is made to demonstrate
a channel to the north, corresponding to Magellan's
Straits in the south, he believing, in common with
almost every one of his day, that these straits were
the only opening into the Pacific, the land to the
south being unbroken to the Pole. He prophecies a
market in the East for our manufactured linen and
calicoes:--
"The Easterns greatly prizing the same, as appeareth
in Hester where the pomp is expressed of the great
King of India, Ahasuerus, who matched the coloured
clothes wherewith his houses and tents were apparelled,
with gold and silver, as part of his greatest treasure."
These and other such arguments were the best
analysis which Sir Humfrey had to offer of the spirit
which he felt to be working in him. We may think
what we please of them. But we can have but one
thought of the great grand words with which the
memorial concludes, and they alone would explain the
love which Elizabeth bore him:--
"Never, therefore, mislike with me for taking in hand any
laudable and honest enterprise, for if through pleasure
or idleness we purchase shame, the pleasure vanisheth,
but the shame abideth for ever.
"Give me leave, therefore, without offence, always to
live and die in this mind: that he is not worthy to live
at all that, for fear or danger of death, shunneth his
country's service and his own honour, seeing that death
is inevitable and the fame of virtue immortal, wherefore
in this behalf routare vel lintere sperno."
Two voyages which he undertook at his own cost,
which shattered his fortune, and failed, as they naturally
might, since inefficient help or mutiny of subordinates,
or other disorders, are inevitable conditions under which
more or less great men must be content to see their great
thoughts mutilated by the feebleness of their instruments,
did not dishearten him, and in June, 1583, a last
fleet of five ships sailed from the port of Dartmouth,
with commission from the Queen to discover and take
possession from latitude 45^0 to 50^0 north--a voyage not
a little noteworthy, there being planted in the course of
it the first English colony west of the Atlantic. Elizabeth
had a foreboding that she would never see him again.
She sent him a jewel as a last token of her favour, and
she desired Raleigh to have his picture taken before he
went.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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