GILBERT. A grander scheme was planned by Humphrey Gilbert. He wished to build up another England across the sea, just as the people of Spain were building up another Spain. He planned to do this by establishing farms to which he and others might send laborers who could not find work at home. Queen Elizabeth liked this plan, and to encourage him, and to repay him for the expense of carrying the emigrants over, she promised him the land for six hundred miles on each side of his settlements. [Illustration: CHARLCOTE HALL An English Manor House of the time of Queen Elizabeth] FAILURE OF GILBERT'S EXPEDITION. Gilbert tried twice to plant a colony in the neighborhood of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Sir Walter Raleigh, his half-brother, was one of his captains in the expedition of 1578. He would have been in the disastrous second attempt in 1583 had not Queen Elizabeth, full of forebodings of danger to her favorite, refused to let him go. As it was he sent a ship at his own cost. Gilbert took a large supply of hobby-horses and other toys with which to please the savages. Mishap, desertion, and shipwreck pursued the luckless commander. The second expedition left Plymouth with five vessels in 1583. The ship that Raleigh sent, the best in the fleet, deserted before they were out of sight of England. One was left in Newfoundland. The wreck of the largest ship, with most of the provisions, off Cape Breton, so discouraged the crews that they prevailed upon Gilbert to abandon the plan to settle on such barren and stormy shores, Gilbert attempted to return on the _Squirrel_, the smaller of the two remaining vessels. This was a tiny vessel of scarcely ten tons burden. What was left of the little fleet voyaged homeward by the southern way, and ran into a fearful storm as it approached the Azores. Although Gilbert was urged to go aboard the larger vessel, he refused to desert his companions, with whom he had passed through so many storms and perils, and tried to calm the fears of all by his reply, "Do not fear, Heaven is as near by water as by land." One night the _Squirrel_ suddenly sank. All on board were lost. Such was the sad ending of the first efforts to establish an English colony in North America.