English navigator, the half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh. He served in Ireland (156670), and was made Governor of Munster. He then campaigned in Holland (15705), and in 1578 led an unsuccessful colonizing expedition to the New World. In a second attempt in 1583 he landed in Newfoundland, taking possession of it for the crown, and established a colony at St John's.
Sir Humphrey Gilbert (c.
Early life
Gilbert was second son of Otho and Katherine Gilbert of Compton and Greenway Estate, Devonshire.
Gilbert's assumed personal mottoes were, Quid non? (Why not?) and, Mutare vel timere sperno (I scorn to change or to fear), which indicated how he chose to live his life.
Military career in Ireland
Gilbert returned to Ireland and, after the assassination of O'Neill in 1569, he was appointed to the profitless office of governor of Ulster and served as a member of the Irish parliament. At about this time he petitioned the Queen's principal secretary, Lord Burghley, for a recall to England - "for the recovery of my eyes" - but his ambitions still rested in Ireland, and particularly in the province of Munster.
Gilbert's actions in the south of Ireland played a significant part in the outbreak of the first of the Desmond Rebellions.
Gilbert was eager to participate and, after Carew's seizure of the barony of Idrone (in modern County Carlow), he pushed westward with his forces across the river Blackwater in the summer of 1569 and joined up with his kinsman to defeat Sir Edmund Butler, a younger brother of the Earl's. Gilbert was then created colonel by Lord Deputy Sidney and charged with the pursuit of the rebel James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald (whom Gilbert considered, "a silly wood-kerne").
The Geraldines were driven out of Kilmallock, but returned to lay siege to Gilbert, who drove off their superior force in a sally, in which his horse was shot from under him and his buckler transfixed with a spear. During three weeks of Gilbert's campaign, all were treated without quarter and put to the sword, including women and children - which explains, perhaps, the swiftness with which so many castles were abandoned before him.
Gilbert's attitude to the Irish during this campaign may be captured in one quote from him, dated 13 November 1569: "These people are headstrong and if they feel the curb loosed but one link they will with bit in the teeth in one month run further out of the career of good order than they will be brought back in three months." In order to cow local supporters of the rebels, he chose to put on gruesome spectacles after a day's killing: he would order the decapitation of the scattered corpses so that the heads could be brought to his camp in the evening, where they were arranged in two parallel rows, making a pathway to the flaps of his tent, along which the supplicants would tread in the presence of their late fathers, brothers and sons.
At this point, Ormond returned from England and called in his brothers, which caused the Geraldine resistance to weaken. In December 1569, after one of the chief rebels had come in to the government and confessed his treason, Gilbert received his knighthood at the hands of Sidney in the midst of the ruined Fitzmaurice camp, reputedly amid heaps of slain gallowglass warriors. Fitzmaurice stayed out in rebellion (only coming in to submit in 1573), and one month after Gilbert's return to England he retook Kilmallock with 120 foot, defeating the garrison and sacking the town for three days, leaving it "the abode of wolves".
MP and Adventurer
In 1570 Gilbert returned to England, where he married Anne Aucher, who was to bear him six sons and one daughter - on the basis of Smith's observation that the only way to soothe Gilbert's temper was to send a boy to him, it has been conjectured that he was an "intermittent homosexual", or perhaps a pederast.
By 1572 Gilbert had turned his attention to the Netherlands, where he fought an unsuccessful campaign in support of the Dutch Seabeggars; In the period 1572-1578 Gilbert settled down and devoted himself to writing. Gilbert also helped to establish the Society of the New Art with Lord Burghley and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who had their alchemical laboratory in Limehouse.
Thereafter, Gilbert's life was spent in a series of failed marine expeditions, the financing of which exhausted his own fortune and a great part of his family's.
Return to Ireland
In the summer of 1579, Gilbert and Raleigh were commissioned by the lord deputy of Ireland, William Drury, to attack his old foe, the rebel James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, by sea and land and to intercept a fleet expected to arrive from Spain with aid for the Munster rebels. At this time Gilbert had three vessels under his command: the Anne Ager (or perhaps, Anne Archer or Aucher - named after his wife) of 250 tons, the Relief, and the Squirrell of 10 tons.
In pursuit of his Irish commission, Gilbert set sail in June 1579 after a spell of bad weather, and promptly got lost in fog and heavy rains off Land's End, an incident that caused the Queen thereafter to doubt his seafaring abilities. Gilbert then fell into a row with a local merchant, whom he slew on the dockside.
Newfoundland
It was assumed that Gilbert would be appointed president of Munster after the dismissal of Ormond as lord lieutenant of the province in the spring of 1581. At this time Gilbert was member of parliament for Queenborough, Kent, but his attention was again drawn to North America, where he hoped to seize territory on behalf of the crown.
The six year exploration licence Gilbert had secured by letters patent from the crown in 1578 was on the point of expiring, when he succeeded in 1583 in raising significant sums from English Catholic investors. thus, the prospect of an American adventure appealed to them, especially when Gilbert was proposing to seize some 9 million acres (36,000 km²) around the river Norumbega, to be parcelled out under his authority (although to be held ultimately of the crown).
The Catholic investment didn't work out - partly because of the privy council's insistence that the investors pay their recusancy fines before departing, partly because of efforts by catholic clergy and Spanish agents to dissuade their interference in America - but Gilbert did manage to set sail with a small fleet of 5 vessels in June of 1583. Gilbert's crews were made up of misfits, criminals and pirates, but in spite of the many problems caused by their lawlessness, the fleet did manage to reach Newfoundland.
On arriving at the port of St. John's, Gilbert found himself temporarily blockaded by the fishing fleet under the organisation of the port admiral (an Englishman) on account of piracy committed against a Portuguese vessel in the previous year by one of Gilbert's commanders. Once this resistance was overcome, Gilbert waved his letters patent about and, in a formal ceremony, took possession of Newfoundland (including the lands 200 leagues to the north and south) for the English crown on the 5th of August 1583.
During the return voyage, Gilbert insisted on sailing in his hardy old favourite, the Squirrell.
Nine hundred miles out from the coast the fleet ran into heavy seas - "breaking short and high Pyramid wise" - and the Squirrell began to suffer. Despite the persuasions of others, who wished him to take to one of the larger vessels, Gilbert stayed put and was observed sitting in the stern of the Squirrell reading a book;
It is thought the book Gilbert had been reading was the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, which contains the following passage: "He that hathe no grave is covered with the skye: and, the way to heaven out of all places is of like length and distaunce."
Legacy
Gilbert was father to Ralegh Gilbert, who was to become second in command of Popham Colony.
Gilbert was part of a remarkable generation of Devonshire men, who combined the roles of adventurer, writer, soldier and mariner - often in ways as equally loathsome as admirable. but perhaps of more significance was the reissue to Raleigh in 1584 of Gilbert's patent, on the back of which he undertook the Roanoke expeditions, the first sustained attempt by the English crown to establish colonies in North America.
Gilbert Sound near Greenland was named after him by John Davys.
Afterlife in Science Fiction
Since no one actually saw Gilbert and his ship go down, there remained (at least in theory) room for various fanciful theories as to his ultimate fate, both in his own time and later.
In Fire in the Abyss by Stuart Gordon (1983) , Humphrey Gilbert is the main character.
Together with some hundred other "Temporally Displaced Persons" Gilbert is incarcerated in a secret installation until the authorities decide what to do with them. Rather than wait, Gilbert stages a prison break together with a varied crew, including a Norse giant, a dancer from ancient North America and many others.
The book, written in the first person, is Gilbert's diary written after he had managed at last to return to England, four hundred years later than intended. Gilbert makes many sardonic remarks on the life and institutions of the modern world in general and present-day Britain in particular, but also enjoys disabusing moderns who tend to romanticize the Elizabethan Age.
See
In Philip José Farmer's The Gate of Time (1966), Gilbert was not displaced forward in time but sidewise, into an alternate timeline.
Gilbert and his crew are placed in a lunatic asylum, where some of the sailors become truly insane. But the adaptable Gilbert learns the local language, gets released and finds conditions not too dissimilar from those he knows.
Cautious not to talk further of his origins, in his old age Gilbert does write a 5,000-page manuscript entitled "An Unpublished Romance, or Through The Ivory Gates of the Sea".
Neglected by many generations of his descendants, the manuscript is found four hundred years later by a Lord Humphrey Gilbert of this world's equivavlent of the Twentieth Century - who shows it to the main protagonist of Farmer's book, a WWII combat pilot that also ended up in this alternate world.
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