58 DISCOVERIES IN 1527. 



VIII., and flourished in full vigour under the 

 fostering hand of Elizabeth. The first enterprize 

 undertaken solely by Englishmen, of which we 

 have any record, w^as at the suggestion of Master 

 Robert Thorne, of Bristol, who is said to have ex- 

 horted King Henry VIII. " with very weighty 

 and substantial reasons to set forth a discoverie 

 even to the North Pole," w^iich voyage, as would 

 appear from the Chronicles of Hall and Grafton, 

 actually took place; for they inform us that 

 " King Henry VIII. sent two faire ships well 

 manned and victualled, havino- in them divers 

 cunning men to seek strange regions, and so they 

 set forth out of the Thames the 20th day of May, 

 in the Ipth veere of his raio-ne, which was the yere 

 of our Lord 1527-' * Hakluyt took great pains to 

 discover who these cunning men were, but all he 

 could learn was that one of the ships was called 

 the DoMiNUS VoBiscuM, and that a canon of St. 

 Paul's, in London, a great mathematician and 

 wealthy man, went therein himself in person ; that 

 having sailed very far north-westward, one of the 

 ships was cast away on entering into a dangerous 

 gulph, about the great opening between the north 

 parts of Newfoundland and Meta incognita or 

 Greenland, and the other returned home about the 

 beginning of October: "and this," says Hakluyt, 

 " is all that I can hitherto learne or finde out of 

 this voyage, by reason of the great negligence of 



* Chronicles quoted by Hakluyt, vol. iii. p. 12^. 



