John Davis
English Navigator and Explorer · circa 1550–1605
Who is John Davis?
John Davis was an English navigator and explorer from Sandridge, Devon, celebrated as one of the most skilled seamen of the Elizabethan age. He is best remembered for three voyages between 1585 and 1587 in search of the Northwest Passage, during which he charted the strait between Greenland and Baffin Island that today bears his name, the Davis Strait. In August 1592, while serving as pilot on an expedition intended to raid Spanish shipping in the Pacific, his ship Desire was driven off course by a violent storm in the South Atlantic and blown among a group of previously uncharted islands, producing the first recorded European sighting of what became known as the Falkland Islands. Davis's account of the encounter was later published by the geographer Richard Hakluyt in his compendium of English voyages. Davis was killed in 1605 off the coast of present-day Malaysia during a later voyage, in a clash with Japanese pirates, but his navigational charts and journals remained influential for generations of English seafarers.
Sources: John Davis (explorer), Wikipedia · Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1600) · MercoPress, "Falklands' Day recalls when John Davis first sighted the Islands on 14 August 1592" (2019)