Career
After his education at Eton and Oxford he entered Elizabeth's service in 1559, before she became queen, and in 1563 he served with English troops in France. In 1566 he went to Ireland as a captain in Sir Henry Sidney's army and was later appointed colonel. Members of his family who had vague claims to land in Munster, Ireland, wanted to colonize it with Englishmen, and Gilbert was appointed governor of Munster in 1569 to help dispossess the Irish rebels from their lands.
Gilbert's greatest desire at the time was to discover a northwest passage to the Orient, and in 1566 he vainly petitioned Queen Elizabeth to aid him in organizing an expedition for this purpose. The petition, his famous Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia (1576) influenced the explorer Martin Frobisher and others. Gilbert also presented to Queen Elizabeth a plan for providing a more systematic education for the English nobility, but action was never taken on his suggestion. In 1570 Gilbert was knighted for his services in Ireland, and the following year he represented Plymouth in the House of Commons, where he actively supported the queen's policies. Elizabeth rewarded him with the post of surveyor-general of "all horses, armour, weapons, artillery, etc." in England. In 1572, unofficially but at the secret command of the queen, Gilbert led 1,500 men into the Netherlands to help the Dutch against Spain.
In 1577 Gilbert presented to the queen a plan entitled How Her Majesty may annoy the King of Spain, in which he proposed to take a number of ships to Newfoundland and seize the Spanish fishing fleet there. He received a charter the following year to plant a colony in the New World. The expedition of 1578-1579 was unsuccessful, however, because the ships were forced back to England by storms, and Gilbert was again sent to Ireland, where rebels had once more become active.
To raise money for his next expedition, Gilbert sold land in the as yet unfounded colony, and he was aided by his young half brother and lifelong friend, Sir Walter Raleigh, who contributed a ship and helped him to obtain the queen's permission. Gilbert sailed from Plymouth in 1583 with a fleet of five ships carrying two hundred and sixty men. He established a small colony in St. John's, Newfoundland, the first English colony in America. There were French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch fishing vessels in St. John's harbor when he arrived, as the harbor had already become a base for fishing fleets which came to the New World annually during the season. His men, lazy and lawless, deserted to these ships, and the colony did not survive. In an attempt to explore southward along the coast, Gilbert then lost one of his ships, and he started back to England with two of the others. He sailed on the smaller, the Squirrel, a vessel of only ten tons, and was lost when it sank off the Azores, Sept. 9, 1583.