In the year 1583, when Sir Humphrey Gilbert, whose _Discourse_ gave so great a stimulus to Arctic discovery, founded St. John's, Newfoundland—the first English colony in America—a patent was granted by Queen Elizabeth to his brother Adrian "of Sandridge in the county of Devon," as one of the colleagues of the Fellowship for the Discovery of the North-West Passage. At this Sandridge—on the east of the Dart, bounded on three sides by the river, some two miles above Dartmouth—was the home of the three Gilberts (John, Humphrey, and Adrian), whose mother by a second marriage became the mother of Carew and Walter Raleigh; and here, about 1550, of a family also owning property in the small peninsula, was born John Davis, as we know him, or John Davys, as he signed himself, who was probably a playmate, and certainly a life-long friend, of these five. Davis was an accomplished seaman, the best of the Elizabethan navigators, and a man of accurate observation, always on the alert, whose reputation does not rest only on the work he did in the northern and other seas, for he was the author of _The Seaman's Secrets_, the most popular practical navigation treatise of its time. Very early, perhaps from the first, he was one of the moving spirits in this new north-west enterprise, for on the 23rd of January, 1583, we find Dr. Dee-who had helped to send Frobisher on his first voyage—making an entry in his journal that Mr. Secretary Walsingham had come to his house, where by good luck he found Mr. Adrian Gilbert, and so talk began on "the north-west straits discovery"; and, next day, "I, Mr. Awdrian Gilbert and John Davis, went by appointment to Mr. Beale, his howse, where only we four were secret, and we made Mr. Secretary privie of the N.W. Passage, and all charts and rutters were agreed upon in generall"—"rutter" being the French "routier," originating in _Le Routier de la Mer_, signifying a book of sea routes. Another important friend of Davis was William Sanderson, the representative of the merchants by whom the expenses of the voyage were borne, he being the chief subscriber. One of the ships, the _Moonshine_, seems to have belonged to him, and it was largely owing to his influence among the shareholders that Davis was appointed captain and chief pilot of the "exployt," in which he was to practically rediscover Greenland.