Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 46.djvu/104

 Lacy, Duncombe, and Dick. Other pieces to be found in the same publications are ‘The Hole in the Wall,’ ‘A Soldier's Courtship,’ ‘Match Making,’ ‘Past and Present,’ ‘Patrician and Parvenu.’ Poole also published ‘Byzantium, a Dramatic Poem,’ 8vo; ‘Crotchets in the Air, or a Balloon Trip,’ 8vo; ‘Christmas Festivities;’ ‘Comic Miscellany;’ ‘Little Pedlington,’ 2 vols.; ‘Phineas Quiddy, or Sheer Industry,’ 3 vols.; ‘Sketches and Recollections,’ 2 vols.; ‘Village School improved, or Parish Education.’

In 1831 he was living at Windsor. For many years, near the middle of the century, Poole resided in Paris, and was constantly seen at the Comédie Française. He was appointed a brother of the Charterhouse, but, disliking the confinement, threw up the position. Afterwards, through the influence of Charles Dickens, he obtained a pension of 100l. a year, which he retained until his death. For the last twenty years of his life he dropped entirely out of recognition. He died at his residence in Highgate Road, Kentish Town, London, and was buried at Highgate cemetery on 10 Feb. 1872. He supplied in 1831 to the ‘New Monthly Magazine,’ to which he was during many years an active contributor, what purported to be ‘Notes for a Memoir.’ This, however, is deliberately and amusingly illusive. A portrait, prefixed to his ‘Sketches and Recollections’ (1835), shows a handsome, clear-cut, intelligent, and very gentlemanly face.

[Private information; Forster's Life of Dickens; Letters of Dickens; Genest's Account of the English Stage; Poole's Sketches and Recollections; Brit. Mus. Cat.; London Catalogue of Books; Allibone's Dictionary of Authors; Men of the Reign; Brewer's Readers' Handbook; Scott and Howard's Life of E. L. Blanchard; Biographical Dictionary of Living Authors, 1816; Daily Telegraph, 10 Feb. 1872; Era, 11 Feb. 1872; Notes and Queries, 8th ser. vi. 372.] 

POOLE, JONAS (d. 1612), mariner, made a voyage to Virginia in 1607 in the employment of Sir Thomas Smythe [q. v.] In 1610 he commanded the Amity, set forth by the Muscovy Company ‘for a northern discovery,’ which sailed in company with the Lioness, commanded by Thomas Edge, under orders for Cherry Island and the whale fishery. In May the Amity made Spitzbergen, which Poole named Greenland, and continued on the coast during the summer, examining the harbours and killing morses, with the blubber of which they filled up, and so returned to England, carrying also the horn of a narwhal, or ‘sea-unicorn.’ In 1611, again in company with Edge in the Mary Margaret, which was to fish ‘near Greenland,’ Poole sailed in the Elizabeth of sixty tons burden, with instructions from Smythe ‘to see if it were possible to pass from “Greenland” towards the pole.’ Accordingly, parting from Edge near Spitzbergen, he stood to the north, but in lat. 80° he fell in with the impenetrable ice-field, which he skirted towards the west, never finding an opening, till he estimated that he must be near Hudson's Hold with Hope on the east coast of Greenland. A westerly wind then carried him back to Cherry Island, where, through July, they killed some two hundred morses, and filled up the Elizabeth with ‘their fat hides and teeth.’ On 25 July Edge and most of the men of the Mary Margaret arrived with the news that their ship had been wrecked in Foul Sound, now known as Whale's Bay (Nordenskjöld, 1861–4). Edge ordered a great part of the Elizabeth's cargo to be landed, and the vessel went to Foul Sound to ship as much of the Mary Margaret's oil as possible. There the ship, owing to her lightness after her cargo was removed, filled and went down; Poole escaped with difficulty, with many broken bones. They afterwards got a passage to England in the Hopewell of Hull, which Edge chartered to carry home the oil. In 1612 Poole again went to Spitzbergen, but apparently only for the fishing, and, having killed a great many whales, brought home a full cargo. Shortly after his return he was ‘miserably and basely murdered betwixt Ratcliffe and London.’

[Brown's Genesis of the United States; Purchas his Pilgrimes, iii. 464, 711, 713.] 

POOLE, JOSHUA (fl. 1640), was admitted a subsizar at Clare Hall, Cambridge, on 17 Jan. 1632, and was placed under the tuition of Barnabas Oley. He graduated M.A., and for some time had charge of a private school kept in the house of one Francis Atkinson at Hadley, near Barnet in ‘Middlesex,’ as he describes it in ‘The English Parnassus.’ Poole, who died before 1657, published: ‘The English Accidence, or a Short and Easy Way for the more Speedy Attaining to the Latine Tongue,’ 4to, 1646; reprinted 1655, and, with a slightly different title, 1670. ‘The English Parnassus, or a Helpe to English Poesie,’ 8vo, 1657 (reprinted 1677), though a posthumous publication, has a dedication to Francis Atkinson, in whose house it was compiled, signed by Poole, who has also prefixed ten pages of verse addressed to ‘the hopeful young gentlemen his scholars.’ 