Davis · 1585
John Davis sights the strait off Greenland
On 7 June 1585 the Devon-born navigator John Davis sailed from Dartmouth with two small barks, the *Sunshine* (50 tons) and the *Moonshine* (35 tons), and a combined complement of forty-two men, on a commission from the Muscovy Company merchant William Sanderson and the Cambridge geographer Adrian Gilbert to find the North-West Passage to Cathay. Davis was about thirty-five, an experienced Devon coastal pilot trained on the Newfoundland cod-banks, and (uniquely among the Elizabethan navigators of the period) able to compute lunar-distance longitude from a bound-tables-and-cross-staff method that he had taught himself across the 1570s Devonshire coastal-pilot decade. He reached the south-east Greenland coast on 19 July 1585, named the headland Cape Farewell, sailed up the western coast across late July and early August, and on 6 August 1585 entered the straits between Greenland and Baffin Island that have carried his name ever since as the Davis Strait. Three further voyages followed (1586, 1587, the 1588 cancelled-by-the-Armada-mobilisation expedition) and the Davis chart of the strait, published by Edward Wright in his 1599 *Certain Errors in Navigation*, was the senior English-language chart of the north-Atlantic-and-Greenland navigation for the next hundred years.
It is the late morning of 6 August 1585, on the quarterdeck of the bark Sunshine off the south-east Baffin Island coast at the latitude of about 64°N. He is thirty-five years old. He is John Davis, born at Sandridge Barton near Dartmouth in Devon about 1550, son of John Davis the elder (a Sandridge gentleman-farmer) and Joan Sandridge. He had been at sea continuously since fifteen on the Newfoundland cod-fishery and Iberian-and-Newfoundland trade routes, had taught himself the lunar-distance longitude method from the 1573 Edward Wright tables, and had taken the small commission for the Muscovy Company-and-Adrian-Gilbert North-West Passage expedition in February 1585 on the recommendation of the Sir Humphrey Gilbert estate.
On the working chart-table in front of him is the bound chart-book he has been keeping across the twenty-eight days at sea since the Sunshine and Moonshine left Dartmouth on 7 June. The small chart shows: the Greenland south-east coast that he reached on 19 July 1585, the named landfall at Cape Farewell of 20 July, the ten-day western-coast survey of late July-and-early-August 1585, and the longitude-position of the Sunshine on the morning of 6 August at the entrance to the open-water-channel between Greenland to the east and a unnamed land to the west.
He thinks: the open-water channel running west-of-north between the Greenland coast and the unnamed-western-land coast is the foundational small north-west-passage waterway that the Muscovy Company commission has been looking for since the Frobisher 1576-1577-1578 expeditions. The small Frobisher Passage of 1577 was, on the post-1578 Frobisher-Strait-investigation working assessment, a small bay rather than a open-water channel. The small open-water channel I am sailing through this morning is, on the five-day-of-observation working basis, a genuine north-going passage.
He thinks: the western-land coast is, on the working five-day observation, a unnamed mainland. The small mainland will, on the working post-survey reporting basis, be the foundational discovery of the 1585 expedition. I will, on the working ten-day-of-additional-westing reconnaissance, sail the Sunshine across the open-water channel to the western mainland to confirm the mainland-and-strait distinction.
He sails the Sunshine on the north-west bearing for the further eight days through to 14 August 1585, reaches the western mainland coast at the approximate latitude of 66°40′N (the modern Cumberland Sound area of the south-east Baffin Island coast), turns south on 15 August, and returns to Dartmouth on 30 September 1585 with the first English-language chart of the straits-and-coastlines of the western Greenland-and-Baffin-Island region. He makes the further two voyages of 1586 and 1587 on the same Muscovy Company-and-Sanderson-and-Gilbert commission, reaches the approximate latitude of 73°N on the 1587 voyage (the furthest north English-language exploration of the pre-Hudson period), and produces the Edward Wright 1599 published chart of the Greenland-and-Baffin straits that the Davis name has been attached to ever since. He commanded an English East-India-Company expedition to the East Indies in 1605, was killed by the Japanese-pirate boarders of the Tiger in the Strait of Malacca on 27 December 1605 at fifty-five, and is the only major English Elizabethan navigator whose name is on the contemporary North-American map (the Davis Strait of the modern Canadian Arctic).