The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert

1940

Journals G161 H2 Ser. 2 no. 84

London: Hakluyt Society

This map, by London merchant and colony promoter Michael Lok (b. 1532), was essentially a promotional tool. It originally featured in Richard Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages (1582) and was a means of attracting investors and prospective colonists to Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s (c. 1539-83) proposed Norombega (Newfoundland) colony. It is described as ‘one of the most bizarre Arctic maps ever drawn’: Greenland is in three bits; Florida is unusually close to Canada; and there is the mysterious island of Lok. Gilbert’s 1582 colonising expedition failed and he was lost at sea in a storm off the Azores in 1583.