John Davis sights the strait off Greenland

Some discoveries are not made by storming a coast but by recognising, on a quiet forenoon, that the water under the keel is open where the chart insists on land. The men who manage this recognition are seldom the loud captains of the Elizabethan imagination. More often they are the working pilots, raised on the cod-banks, who have spent ten years learning to read a horizon the way a clerk reads a ledger, and who carry into the northern latitudes a habit of patient measurement that the courtiers at Greenwich would call dull.

THE PILOT FROM SANDRIDGE

John Davis was born about 1550 at Sandridge Barton above the Dart, in the Devon parish of Stoke Gabriel, son of a gentleman-farmer and of Joan Sandridge whose people had held the ground since before the Wars of the Roses. He went to sea at fifteen on the Newfoundland cod-fishery and the Iberian trade, and by the time he was thirty he was the kind of pilot whom Plymouth shipmasters trusted with a bark in dirty weather off Ushant. He read what English mathematical books there were, taught himself the lunar-distance method from the working tables then circulating in the Devonshire pilot houses, and kept company at Sandridge with his neighbour Adrian Gilbert, the Cambridge geographer, half-brother to the drowned Sir Humphrey. Out of that fireside grew a commission. William Sanderson of the Muscovy Company would put up the money; Gilbert would supply the geography; Davis would supply the sea.

Frobisher had been north three times and had come back the third time with five hundred tons of black ore that proved to be worthless rock. The court had lost its appetite. The new commission, sealed in February 1585, was modest: two small barks, the Sunshine of fifty tons and the Moonshine of thirty-five, forty-two men in all, and instructions to find the passage to Cathay by the north-west. Davis was about thirty-five when he took it. He did not write of glory. He wrote, in a later memorial, that the work was the discovery of a passage by the North, and let the sentence carry itself.

THE OUTWARD PASSAGE

They cleared Dartmouth on 7 June 1585 into a westerly that held for a fortnight. The barks were small enough that a steep sea broke green over the waist; the men slept wet for most of the run. Davis kept his chart-book in oilskin beneath the table in the great cabin of the Sunshine and worked his latitudes at noon with a cross-staff, his longitudes by the lunar method when the moon and a fixed star would stand clear together. On 19 July they raised the south-east coast of Greenland, a black cliff above mist, with the ice grinding offshore in a noise the Devon men had never heard. The next day Davis named the headland Cape Farewell, in the plain Devon manner of naming a thing for the act it served. They worked north along the western coast through the last week of July and into August, sounding, taking the bearings of every inlet, noting where the seal-rookeries lay and where a ship might water.

The weather on the morning of 6 August was clear and cold, with a light air from the north-east and the sea running long and quiet. The Sunshine lay at about sixty-four degrees north. Off the larboard bow, the Greenland coast fell away to the east. Off the starboard bow, across a width of open water the eye could not measure without the cross-staff, stood a land nobody on board had a name for.

A FORENOON AT SIXTY-FOUR NORTH

Davis came on deck at the change of the watch with the chart-book under his arm. The mate had the deck; the boy was at the glass; the cook had brought up biscuit and a can of small beer for the officers. He set the book on the binnacle box, opened it to the working sheet, and looked west.

What he was looking at, by the working five days of observation, was not a bay. Frobisher in seventy-seven had taken a bay for a strait and gone home convinced; the post-voyage assessors at the Muscovy Company had walked that mistake back to a bay by seventy-nine, and the lesson sat in every Devon pilot's mind like a stone in a shoe. A bay closed. A bay had a head. This water did not close. The tide that morning was setting north out of it and not back, and the colour of the sea to westward was the colour of deep water, not the green of a shoaling head. The land to the west stood high and continuous. It did not curve in to meet the eastern coast. It ran. He held the cross-staff up and took the angle of the western hills against the horizon, and the figure was the figure of a true coast at a true distance, not the figure of a closing arm.

He thought of Frobisher and of the five hundred tons of black stone in the yard at Dartford, and of how a man might be undone by wanting too quickly to have found a thing. He thought of Sanderson in his London counting-house, who had laid out the money on the strength of a Devon pilot's word and would want, when the Sunshine came home, not a flourish but a chart. He thought of his neighbour Adrian Gilbert at Sandridge, and of the brother drowned three years before in the Squirrel off the Azores, going down with his book in his hand and the words, by Hayes's report, We are as near to Heaven by sea as by land. The sentence had been quoted in every Devon parlour since. It was the kind of sentence a man spoke when he had run out of latitudes. Davis had not run out of latitudes. He had a fair wind, a sound bark, eight days of westing in hand, and a coast on his starboard that nobody in England had drawn.

He gave the order quietly. The Sunshine and the Moonshine would stand across to the western land on a north-west bearing, sounding as they went, and would not turn for home until the question was answered.

THE CROSSING

They crossed for eight days. The wind hauled twice and made them tack; the ice was working south out of the channel and the lookout had to be doubled at the foremast head. Davis took soundings every glass, and the lead came up at sixty fathoms, at eighty, at no bottom at a hundred, which was the answer he wanted. On 14 August they raised the western coast at about sixty-six degrees and forty minutes north, in the country a later age would call Cumberland Sound. He landed a boat, took the bearings, named what he could, and turned south on the fifteenth. The channel was a channel. The land to the west was its own land. He had what he had come for.

THE COUNTING-HOUSE

The Sunshine came back into Dartmouth on 30 September 1585, twenty-eight days from the western coast, having lost no man. Sanderson received the chart in his London house with the door shut and the candles lit; Adrian Gilbert read the journal at Sandridge by the fire he and Davis had planned the voyage at. There was no court reception. Elizabeth's privy council was busy with the Low Countries and with the man in the Escorial. But the commission was renewed. Davis went north again in 1586 and again in 1587, and on the third voyage worked the Elizabeth up to about seventy-three degrees north, the furthest north any English keel had yet been laid, and brought back the soundings and the bearings that Edward Wright would set into copperplate in 1599 in his Certain Errors in Navigation. The channel had a name on the plate. It was the name of the pilot who had crossed it.

THE INTERLUDE OF THE ARMADA

The fourth voyage, fitted for 1588, never sailed. Every English bottom of any burthen was called into the Channel that summer, and the Sunshine and her sisters with them. Davis served, like the rest. The years after were the years of small commands and of writing: The Seaman's Secrets in 1594, the back-staff of his invention in the same decade, the long working out of how an ordinary master might find his latitude in a heavy sea without burning his eye out on the sun. Other men's names were louder. Drake's was louder. Raleigh's was louder. Davis kept his books and his instruments and went on shipping out, because shipping out was what a Sandridge pilot did.

THE STRAIT OF MALACCA

He took an East India Company commission in 1605 as pilot-major of the Tiger under Sir Edward Michelborne, bound for the eastern seas. On 27 December of that year, in the Strait of Malacca, a Japanese junk that had been received aboard as a friend turned in the night and her men came over the rail with swords. Davis was killed on his own deck. He was fifty-five. The Tiger fought the boarders off and came home without him. The notice in the company's books is short.

THE CHART

The chart outlived him by three centuries. Wright's plate of 1599 was the senior English-language chart of the Greenland and Baffin coasts for a hundred years, and the strait carried the pilot's name into every atlas that followed, from Hondius to the Admiralty. The men who later went north (Hudson in 1610, Baffin in 1616, Ross and Parry in their turn) sailed with Davis's soundings on the table in front of them. The water he stood looking at on the forenoon of 6 August 1585 is on every modern chart of the Canadian Arctic by the name he did not give it. Others gave it. He gave it the measurements.

A discovery, when it is real, is the quiet recognition that the water is open where the chart said land. The recognition takes a forenoon. The chart that comes of it takes a lifetime. At Sandridge Barton above the Dart, the house Davis was born in still stands, and from its upper windows a man can see the water running out past Dartmouth to the open sea, on the bearing his bark took on 7 June 1585.