38 
A VOYAGE TO SPITZBERGEN 
younger son in a large household, he would be not 
unlikely to enter the merchant service, and be trained 
to a seafaring life. The local influences of Kent must 
have had a strong tendency to excite a taste for mari¬ 
time adventure. Sir Francis Walsingham, the Sidneys, 
Richard Chancelor, Sir Thomas Smith, and Sir Dudley 
Digges, were all men of Kent by origin or residence ; 
and this local grouping of some of the most distin¬ 
guished promoters of naval enterprise favors the sup¬ 
position, that Fotherby may have belonged to that 
county. 7 
The manuscript journal, which we venture to believe 
was written by Robert Fotherby, is an uncommonly neat 
7 It is interesting to notice the family ties that united so many of these men of 
grand ideas and great undertakings. Chancelor was brought up by Sir Henry Sidney, 
and, on his recommendation, was employed in Willoughby’s expedition. — Hakluyt , 
vol. i. p. 271. One of the daughters of Sir Francis Walsingham was the wife of Sir 
Philip Sidney; another married Christopher Carlisle, who anticipated Raleigh in his 
plans of colonization, and, in the same year that Sir Humphrey Gilbert went to New¬ 
foundland (1583), published a scheme for the transportation of a colony to this country, 
W'hich he proposed to conduct in person. — Ibid., vol. iii. p. 228 et seq. Sir Philip 
Sidney was prevented from engaging personally in a similar enterprise, only by the 
prohibition of the Queen. Sir Thomas Smith and Sir Dudley Digges were kinsmen. 
The widow of Sir Thomas Smith married Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester, brother 
of Sir Philip, and grandfather of Algernon Sidney; and his eldest son married a 
daughter of Robert, Earl of Warwick, one of the Council of New England. His grand¬ 
son married a grand-daughter of the same Robert Sidney who became the husband 
of his widow. The last direct descendant of this branch is said to have been Sir 
Sidney Stafford Smythe, Chief Baron of the Exchequer, who died in 1777. But the 
two names of Sidney and Smith — which, in later times, have obtained a united 
distinction in literature and in arms — were cemented, at that period, by still another 
alliance. A nephew of Sir Thomas Smith was created a peer of Ireland in 1628, 
with the title of Viscount Strangford; and the son and heir of the viscount married 
Barbara Sidney, a daughter of the same Robert who married Sir Thomas Smith’s 
widow. The present (or recent) Viscount Strangford, Percy Clinton Sidney Smith, 
is the son of an American lady; his father, who was in the English Army during our 
Revolution, having married Mary Eliza, daughter of Frederic Phillips, Esq., of New 
York. — Berry's Genealogies; Burke's Peerage and Baronetage , 1847. We may re¬ 
mark, that the grand-daughter of Robert Sidnej 1 -, whom the grandson of Sir Thomas 
Smith married, as above stated, was the “Sacliarissa” of the poet Waller. She first 
married the Earl of Sunderland. 
