Armagil Waad

Armagil Waad (or Armigill Wade) (ca. 1511 – 20 June 1568) was a chief clerk of the Privy Council, servant of government and an English parliamentarian.

He is said to have been born at Kilnsey, Yorkshire, near Conistone, and his mother’s maiden name is given as Comyn. On the dissolution of the monasteries Kilnsey was granted to Sir Richard Gresham, to whom Armagil may have owed his introduction at court.

Waad was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, whence he graduated B.A. on 23 January 1531-2. He is then said to have entered some inn, possibly the Middle Temple, as his name does occur in the registers of the other three principal inns of court.

In 1536 he joined as an adventurer in Hore’s voyage to North America; he sailed with Oliver Daubeney, ‘Mr. Joy, afterwards gentleman of the king’s chapel,’ and others in the Minion from Gravesend, towards the end of April. After about two months’ sailing they reached Cape Breton; they also visited Newfoundland and Penguin Island (now known as Funk Island). They steered a northerly course home, fell in with icebergs, though it was the middle of summer, and reached St Ives, Cornwall about the end of October. Waad is said to have written an account of this voyage, which was afterwards printed. No such work has been traced, and it is not in Hakluyt, which, however, contains an account of the voyage furnished by one of Waad’s companions, Thomas Butts, son of Sir William Butts. Sir William Waad’s description of his father as the first English explorer of America, subsequently paraphrased into ‘the English Columbus’ rests on this voyage. It has little justification. Waad has no more title to the name than his companions on the Minion, and infinitely less than the sixteen Englishmen who accompanied Sebastian Cabot, not to mention the possibility that were English sailors among Columbus’s crews.

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