In the spring of 1565 Jenkinson is found in association with Humphrey Gilbert presenting to Queen Elizabeth a memorial on the subject of the Northeast Passage, and offering to take charge of an expedition to attempt its discovery. Nothing, however, came of this petition, the queen finding other service for both petitioners. Jenkinson was appointed to the command of her ship “Aid” the following September, with instructions to cruise on the coast of Scotland to prevent a landing of the Earl of Bothwell, and to clear the sea of pirates.
In 1566 the Muscovy Company, in consequence of encroachments by various traders upon their monopoly, were reincorporated by the queen’s act and under a new name—the “Fellowship of English Merchants”—with authority to continue the “discovery of new trades.” Then Jenkinson made another voyage to Russia and secured the monopoly of the White Sea trade for the reorganized company. Trade voyages also followed annually to Persia by various navigators for the company. In the summer of 1571 Jenkinson, again as the queen’s ambassador, was in Russia, having been sent to appease the emperor, who, incensed at the failure of overtures made by him for an alliance with England by which each would assist the other in its wars, had annulled the Fellowship’s privileges and confiscated their property. Although upon his arrival at St. Nicholas being told that Ivan had threatened to take his head if he should venture into the country, he boldly sought the irate czar, and finally succeeded in bringing him round to a renewal of the privileges.
This was Jenkinson’s last voyage. He had accomplished much in enlarging the geographical knowledge of his time. He next appears as an associate in new ventures for discovery to the Westward, attention now being again directed to the Northwest Passage and to the North American continent.
To Humphrey Gilbert belongs the credit for so reviving the Northwest Passage theory as to turn the thoughts of English merchants and statesmen to adventure and to colonization in America; while Martin Frobisher was the first English navigator fairly to begin the Northwest explorations.
Gilbert, born in 1539, in the county of Devon, was the son of a country gentleman, half-brother of Walter Raleigh, on the mother’s side, an Eton schoolboy and an Oxford man, bred to the law, but taking instead to adventure. When a soldier in Ireland, in 1566–1567, a captain under Sir Henry Sidney against the Irish rebellion, his mind was busied with speculation on cosmography; and in the latter year, being sent home with despatches by Sidney, he took occasion to present to Queen Elizabeth, whose favour he enjoyed, a petition for privileges “concerning the discoverings of a passage by the North to go to Cathaie.” This, it is said, was an alternative to the earlier memorial of Anthony Jenkinson and himself for royal patronage to a new expedition of discovery by the Northeast. Both petitions lay unanswered, and he returned to soldiering. In 1570 he was knighted for his services in Ireland, the previous year having been given the government of Münster. In 1571, back in England, he was a member of Parliament for Plymouth. The next year he was fighting in the Netherlands, the first colonel in command of English forces there. Returned again to England, he temporarily retired to country-life at Limehouse, employing his leisure in further geographical investigations and in writing a learned _Discourse of a Discovery for a New Passage to Cathaia_, partly, it is assumed, in support of his petition still before the queen. One day in the winter of 1574 he showed the manuscript of the _Discourse_ to his friend George Gascoigne, one of the pioneer Elizabethan poets, who afterward edited and published it. Meanwhile it led to the granting of a license by the Fellowship of English Merchants, in 1575, to Martin Frobisher with “divers gentlemen,” out of which grew Frobisher’s Northwest voyage.