FOR DAVIS AND BAFFIN 7 



Long before the Bombay Marine existed, however, 

 and even before the old East India Company became 

 a power in the land, the seas of India were being 

 roughly and fitfully surveyed by English explorers. 

 Some of the old sea-dogs of the spacious times of 

 great Elizabeth carried their flag — it was the plain 

 red cross of Saint George in those days — into 

 eastern waters, and even coloured these waters with 

 their life-blood. So we may learn that, viewed from a 

 broad standpoint, little things, like a local branch of 

 science, and great things, like an Indian Empire 

 and the rule of the seas, all had their birth in one 

 great impulse, and are phases of the same destiny. 



The earliest of these great Elizabethans who left 

 any sort of record of his Indian surveys was John 

 Davis — that John Davis whose name is familiar to 

 everyone in Davis' Strait between Greenland and 

 America, and whose history is a part of our imperish- 

 able arctic annals. After again and again facing the 

 perils of the unknown arctic ice, and after a disastrous 

 attempt to reach the gorgeous East in the track 

 discovered by Magellan, John Davis took to piloting 

 voyages to India by the Cape route. The great 

 navigator's last adventure proved fatal to him, for he 

 was treacherously murdered by Malay pirates off the 

 coast of Sumatra, and his bones were turned to coral 

 in the reefs that beset the Singapore Strait, probably. 

 I like to fancy that the eyes of John Davis took 



