To face all the hazards of this journey, so very far away from civilization, and the perils and shocks that might await him in the frozen North, he fitted out a little fleet which consisted of the 'Barke _Sunneshine_, of London, fifty tunnes, and the _Moonshine_, of Dartmouth, thirty-five tunnes, the ship _Mermayd_, of a hundred and twenty tunnes, and a pinesse of tenne tunnes named the _North Starre_.'[5] But in spite of this name of good augury the little pinnace never came home again, and one can only admire with awe the daring that ventured to sail a boat of ten tons across the boisterous Atlantic into the unknown Arctic Seas. Traces of Davis's wanderings along the coasts of North America may still be found in the names he bestowed on different points. 'On sighting first the land, he named the bay which he entered after his friend, Gilbert Sound; we find also Exeter Sound, Totnes Roads, Mount Raleigh, and other familiar titles. A few years later John Davis found the right course to India and China, and introduced the trade from this country which exists to the present time.'
[Footnote 5: 'An Elizabethan Guild of the City of Exeter,' by William Cotton.]
A greater man than Davis lived farther down the river at Greenaway, opposite the pretty village of Dittisham, which, with its strip of beach and ferry, looks as if it had been 'made for a picture.' Sir Humphrey Gilbert, stepbrother to Sir Walter Raleigh, was a great man to whom Fortune was not overkind, but his 'virtues and pious intentions may be read ... shining too gloriously to be dusked by misfortune.' His aims were higher than the hopes that stirred most of his contemporaries, and of his 'noble enterprizes the great design ... was to discover the remote countries of America, and to bring off those savages from their diabolical superstitions, to the embracing the gospel.' He made two efforts to graft a colony with little success, but his third effort was rather happier; and having left Devonshire in June, 1583, he 'sailed to Newfoundland and the great river of St Laurence in Canada; which he took possession of, and seized the same to the crown of England, and invested the Queen in an estate for two hundred leagues in length by cutting a turf and rod after the antient custom of England.' From the developments of that great country that are now taking place, it cannot but be interesting to look back along the vista of years to this very simple ceremony.