“Near to Heaven by Sea”: Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s Last Voyage

We are as near to Heaven by sea as by land.” On this day, 9 September 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s tiny ship, the Squirrel, disappeared in an Atlantic storm, and an audacious Elizabethan life ended in a flash of foam and darkness.

I’m historian and author Claire Ridgway, and today we follow Gilbert’s extraordinary arc: Devon gentleman and half-brother to Sir Walter Ralegh; soldier praised at Newhaven and feared in Munster for brutal tactics; polemicist for a Northwest Passage and English colonisation; MP who clashed in Parliament; and, finally, patent-holder who sailed to Newfoundland and claimed St John’s for Queen Elizabeth I, before disaster struck on the homeward voyage.

In this episode:

• Gilbert’s powerful family network (Kat Ashley & the Ralegh connection)
• Soldier and strategist: praise in France, terror in Ireland
• Pen and policy: A Discourse of a Discoverie & dreams of an academy
• The 1583 voyage: The Delight, the Golden Hind, the Swallow, and the fateful Squirrel
• Claiming St John’s—and losing men, charts, and nerve in a wreck
• The storm off the Azores and Gilbert’s haunting last words
• Legacy: how his vision fed later English ventures in the New World

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