John Davis(c. 1550–1605)

John Davis was born at Sandridge Barton above the Dart estuary in south Devon around 1550, son of a small Devon yeoman of the Stoke Gabriel parish. He was raised on the Dart estuary in the maritime world of the south-Devon Adventurer captains (the Gilbert and Raleigh families of Greenway across the river were his lifelong neighbours and patrons), went to sea at sixteen as an apprentice navigator on the Dartmouth privateers, and through the 1570s built a reputation as one of the most-skilled practical navigators on the south-Devon coast.

He persuaded the leading Adventurer-and-Court patron Sir Francis Walsingham in 1584 to back a voyage of discovery for the north-west passage to the Pacific, and sailed from Dartmouth in command of the two-ship expedition (Sunshine and Moonshine, fifty tons each) on the seventh of June 1585. He crossed the North Atlantic, came in to the south-west Greenland coast at the place he named Cape Desolation, sailed up the west Greenland coast to the latitude of sixty-six degrees thirty minutes north (the modern Sukkertoppen in central west Greenland), crossed the strait to the eastern coast of Baffin Island (the strait between Greenland and Baffin Island has carried his name ever since), and entered Cumberland Sound on the Baffin Island side believing it might be the passage. He returned to Dartmouth in the September of 1585.

He sailed again in May 1586 with three ships, took the second voyage up the Davis Strait to the latitude of sixty-seven degrees north and into the Hudson Strait at the southern end of Baffin Island. The third voyage of 1587, the most successful of the three for geographical purposes, took the small ship Ellen to a latitude of seventy-two degrees twelve minutes north on the western side of the Davis Strait (the modern Sanderson's Hope on the Greenland side) and named the most northerly point Hope Sanderson after the principal Adventurer backer William Sanderson. The three Davis voyages laid the geographical foundation of every subsequent English Arctic exploration for the next two and a half centuries; the Davis Strait between Greenland and Baffin Island is the most northerly strait of the Atlantic and the gateway to the modern north-west passage.

He served as a captain in the English fleet at the defeat of the Spanish Armada in July 1588, sailed with Thomas Cavendish on the second English circumnavigation of the world (1591 to 1593) but was separated from Cavendish off the River Plate, sailed five hundred miles up the Strait of Magellan and back, charted the south Atlantic coast of South America from latitude forty south to fifty-three south, and on the way home in August 1592 discovered the Falkland Islands (named the Davis Islands by him; renamed for the Viscount Falkland by John Strong in 1690). He wrote on the strength of the long voyages the navigational manuals The Seaman's Secrets (1594) and The World's Hydrographical Discription (1595); the Secrets was the standard English-language working manual of practical navigation for the next two centuries and went through nine editions to 1657.

He invented the back-staff (the Davis quadrant) of 1594 for measuring solar altitude without looking into the sun; the instrument was the standard navigation tool of the English-speaking trans-oceanic merchant trade for the next two hundred years. He piloted the first English East India Company voyage to the Spice Islands under James Lancaster (1601 to 1603), navigated the second voyage as Chief Pilot under Sir Edward Michelborne (1604 to 1605), and was killed in a skirmish with Japanese pirates off the coast of Bintan on the twenty-ninth of December 1605, in his fifty-fifth year. The Davis name in modern English navigational history carries the weight of the Davis Strait, the Davis quadrant and the Seaman's Secrets.