ADVENTURE RECALLED ON STAMPS

Evening Star, Issue 21636, 3 February 1934, Page 5

ADVENTURE RECALLED ON STAMPS

Until the end of December Newfoundland is to use a set of delightful stamps, a picture story without words specially designed to remind the Empire at large of a high adventure. That great navigator Sir Humphrey Gilbert is the hero of the occasion. On an August day in 1583 he sailed info St. Johns Harbour and claimed the island on behalf of Queen Elizabeth. It is a poignant story, for on the way home his ships were scattered in a storm and the commander was lost.

The bright part of the adventure is being most beautifully told in the new stamps. The series starts with a portrait of Sir Humphrey,-taken from f.n old Dutch book of travel, and shows his home at Compton Castle and the Gilbert coat-of-arms, with the famous squirrel crest which gave its name to the smallest of Sir Humphrey’s ships. The little squadron is shown on a larger stamp—the Delight, the Raleigh, the Golden Hind, the Swallow, and the Squirrel, which was the baby of the expedition, being only of ten tons. Then wo see the ships passing through the Narrows at St. Johns, and Sir Humphreys receiving a sod from one of tho islanders in token that he had claimed Newfoundland for his queen. The brave little Squirrel comes into the story again on the stamp which shows Sir Humphrey sitting on tho poop of that cockleshell in the height of the storm. He is supposed to be hailing the Golden Hind in those immortal words: “We are as near Heaven by Sea as by Land.” The most expensive of the series shows Sir Humphrey’s statue in the south porch of Truro Cathedral. Queen Elizabeth is a little cheaper (how angry she would have been!), and a little cheaper still is a delightful miniature map showing what cartographers of tho sixteenth and seventeenth centuries considered should be put on a map.

Among the smaller stamps is Eton College, where Gilbert began to say his Latin in 1551. Another is called the token, and has a story of its own. The day before the little squadron set sail from Plymouth Sir Humphrey received a letter from Sir Walter Raleigh, written from the Court at Richmond. “ I am sending you,” he wrote, “ a token from Her Majesty, an Anchor guided by a lady, as you will see.”

The stamps are printed in a variety of colours. Happy are those who have friends in Newfoundland—the kind of friends who write once a week!