Humphrey Gilbert Totally Explained

Everything about Humphrey Gilbert totally explained

Sir Humphrey Gilbert (c. 1539 – 9 September 1583) was an English adventurer, explorer, member of parliament, and soldier from Devon, who served the crown during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England. It turns out that he didn't drown but was plucked through time to the Twentieth Century by a secret project of the United States Navy. (The cover shows him on the deck of a modern submarine - wearing Elizabethan finery far more gaudy than he was likely to have worn on board a ship far in the Atlantic, and facing the submarine's crew with his drawn sword). ť Together with some hundred other "Temporally Displaced Persons" Gilbert is incarcerated in a secret installation until the authorities decide what to do with them. Rather than wait, Gilbert stages a prison break together with a varied crew, including a Norse giant, a dancer from ancient North America and many others.

ť The book, written in the first person, is Gilbert's diary written after he'd managed at last to return to England, four hundred years later than intended. It recounts numerous adventures, such as falling in love with an Ancient Egyptian priestess, a fellow escapee, and being attacked by Irish nationalists who seek revenge for his cruelty to their ancestors. Gilbert makes many sardonic remarks on the life and institutions of the modern world in general and present-day Britain in particular, but also enjoys disabusing moderns who tend to romanticize the Elizabethan Age.

In Philip José Farmer's The Gate of Time (1966), Gilbert wasn't displaced forward in time but sidewise, into an alternate timeline. Not finding the other ships, he navigates the "Squirrel" to where he expects to find the city of Bristol in England. Instead, he finds a city named Ent where the people speak a language only very distantly resembling English. The country is Blodland, a kind of England which had known neither a Roman Empire nor a Norman Conquest, but did experience very prolonged and bloody Viking incursions (hence the name Blodland = Bloodland). ť Gilbert and his crew are placed in a lunatic asylum, where some of the sailors become truly insane. But the adaptable Gilbert learns the local language, gets released and finds conditions not too dissimilar from those he knows. He becomes a sailor and then the captain of a ship, and makes a lot of money from slave trading in this world's Africa.

ť Cautious not to talk further of his origins, in his old age Gilbert does write a 5,000-page manuscript entitled "An Unpublished Romance, or Through The Ivory Gates of the Sea". In it he tells his personal history and all that he remembers of his Earth's history and geography, as well as writing a comparative English-Blodlandish grammar.

ť Neglected by many generations of his descendants, the manuscript is found four hundred years later by a Lord Humphrey Gilbert of this world's equivalent of the Twentieth Century - who shows it to the main protagonist of Farmer's book, a WWII combat pilot that also ended up in this alternate world.

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