‘From the time of their setting out from Gravesend, they were very long at sea … above two moneths, and never touched any land.’ So reads the account of Thomas Buts, one of the two men who would later tell their stories to Richard Hakluyt, author of The Principall Navigations. Both accounts are full of inconsistencies, for by the time the men were quizzed about their suffering, their minds were addled with old age. But they allow a partial reconstruction of an audacious voyage that would later provide the inspiration for the champion of American colonisation, Sir Walter Ralegh.

The men caught their first glimpse of land in the first week of July, by which time food supplies were perilously low. Believing themselves to have reached Cape Breton, the north-eastern tip of Nova Scotia, they steered their ship north to ‘the Island of Penguin’ – the outlying Funk Island – which was a landmark for the few mariners who fished these lonely waters. It was ‘full of great foules, white and grey, as big as geese, and they saw infinite numbers of their egges’. This strange bird was the flightless great auk which was unafraid of man and proved easy to catch. ‘They drave a great number of the foules into their boates upon their sayles’, and began to pluck them, a tiresome business for ‘their skinnes were very like honycombes [and] full of holes’. Eventually, they were ready to eat, and the men were so hungry that they declared it ‘very good and nourishing meat’.

After resting up at Penguin Island, the two ships went their separate ways. The William, manned by sea-dogs and fisherfolk, headed to the Newfoundland Banks where cod was plentiful. The Trinity, meanwhile, was to carry the gentlemen adventurers into unknown and uncharted waters in the hope of capturing a savage. The men were poorly equipped for such latitudes and totally unprepared for the rigours of exploration. ‘They were so farre northwards that they sawe mighty islands of yce in the sommer season, on which were haukes and other foules to rest themselves, being weary of flying over farre from the maine.’ They shot at polar bears that had drifted south on icebergs and caught brown bears on the mainland and, in this way, supplemented their meagre diet.

It was as they coasted the remote and bleak shores of Labrador that they first sighted the ‘savages’. One of the adventurers, Master Oliver Dawbeny, was standing on the foredeck of the Trinity when he noticed a strange object far off in the water. He strained his eyes in staring at the horizon and realised with a start that he had certainly not been deceived. It was ‘a boat with savages of those partes, rowing downe the bay toward them, to gaze upon the ship and our people’.