Of many of the stirring scenes which the port of Dartmouth must have witnessed, there are unfortunately few historical records. But we know that it was visited by several of the early Kings. Here, too, in Saxon times came Sweyn, son of Godwyn, into whose hands Earl Beorn fell a prisoner, and by him was afterwards put to death about 1049. It was to Dartmouth that the “Red King” William Rufus came in hot haste from his hunting of the deer on Dartmoor in 1099, after receiving the news of the siege of Mans, Dartmouth being the nearest port from which he could embark. Just upon a century later, in 1190, came Richard Cœur de Lion with his army of knights and Crusaders obsessed by the necessity for slaying infidels, and of themselves dying in a far-off land. King John came to Dartmouth more than once, notably in 1214, after his defeat at Roche aux Moines in Anjou. It is this monarch, Leland states, who gave a charter to the town, confirmed in the succeeding reign by Henry III, although another writer, Merewether, states that in 1319 the town set up a claim as having been free in the reign of Henry I early in the twelfth century. A less pleasant visitor of Royal blood was Prince Maurice, nephew of Charles I, who besieged and took the town in 1643, the Royalists losing possession three years later, when General Fairfax and his Parliamentarians stormed and captured the place after considerable loss of life and destruction of property. Charles I was here in 1643, and (so tradition asserts) held his court in a room of one of the houses in the Butterwalk, and Charles II visited the place after his Restoration, some say with fair Mistress Gwynne in his suite. But after all it is not to Royal folk that Dartmouth owed its fame in years gone by, but to the sturdy seafarers of whom the famous navigating sons of Devon, Adrian Gilbert, who (to quote a letter of Queen Elizabeth herself) “doth travail and seeke, and by divers meanes indeavoureth and laboureth that the passage unto China and the Isles of the Moluccas by the northwestward may be known”; Martin Frobisher, and John Davis of Sandridge; Francis Drake, and John Hawkins are but a few. It was to John Davis that the task of discovering the sea route concerning which Sir Humphrey Gilbert (the brother of Adrian) wrote a _Discourse_ “to prove a Passage by the North-West to Cathay and the East Indies” was entrusted. In all he made three voyages, in 1585, 1586, and 1587, in vessels which are well described in Chaucer’s words, “little bote(s) no bigger than a manne’s thought”; and afterwards we are told that he sailed into southern seas, and eventually was killed by the Malaccan pirates with whom he had had more than one “brush,” leaving behind him a permanent memorial in the name of Davis’s Straits between Greenland and Baffin Land.