The Boy's Book of Heroes

by Helena Peake

Now that they were all assembled once more Frobisher lost no time, but set at work at once to look for the ore. Gentlemen and soldiers, all helped the miners in their labour, whilst the captains of the vessels sought out new mines, and the gold finers made trial of the ore. But when they wanted to raise the fort, so many parts of it had been destroyed in the storm that it was no longer fitted for its object, and although one of the brave captains wanted to remain there with only fifty men, it was found that a building large enough to hold them all could not be raised before the winter set in. The cold was now rapidly increasing; every night the ships' ropes were frozen so that no man might handle them without cutting his hands; besides this the vessels were leaky, and the ice at any moment might have blocked them in altogether, when all on board must have perished.

Thus Frobisher was compelled to return to England without having found the passage he had hoped all his life to discover. It is said that if he had not had charge of the fleet, he would have sailed straight to the South Sea, and thus pointed out a nearer route to China.

Before they left, they caused a house of lime and stone to be built, on the Countess of Warwick's Island, which they hoped would remain standing until the following year, and they left in it bells, pictures, looking-glasses, whistles, and pipes for the delight of the savages, and an oven, with bread baked in it, that they might taste it and see how it was made. Then they sowed peas and corn, and various sorts of grain, to see if they would grow; and they buried all the timber left of the fort, that it might be ready for them to use if they came to the place again.

Whilst the ships were being laden with the ore, the admiral wanted to find something else, and he went higher up the straits in a pinnace. It was then that he discovered that the land on either side was not all firm as he had imagined, but broken up into many islands.

On the voyage home some of the vessels got scattered during the violent storms that arose, and they were kept long apart, but they all reached England by October of the year 1578.

After this there is no account of Frobisher until he went in his ship the Aid on an expedition to the West Indies with Sir Francis Drake, and was present at the taking and sacking of St. Domingo. When Philip II. of Spain sent the Invincible Armada to invade England, the English fleet prepared to resist it was divided into four squadrons, and Frobisher commanded one of them in the ship called the Triumph. Lord Howard of Effingham, the Lord High Admiral of the fleet, was a witness of his gallant conduct on that occasion, and knighted him on board the Triumph whilst the action was going on. A little later he served under Sir Walter Raleigh in an expedition directed towards the coasts of Spain. And in 1594 Queen Elizabeth, having engaged to help King Henry the Fourth of France against the Spaniards, he was sent with four vessels to protect the coasts of Normandy and Bretagne from their attacks.

On being told that they had seized the Fort of Croysson, near Brest in Bretagne, and that Sir John Norris was trying to regain it, he hastened to land his troops and join the English and French. With the help he afforded the fort was taken; and although he was wounded severely during the assault, he brought back the fleet in safety to Plymouth.

Soon after he arrived, however, his wound proved mortal, through the carelessness, as it is said, of his surgeon, and England lost the services of one of her bravest and most faithful officers. His chroniclers say of him that he was courageous, clever, upright, hasty, and severe. He was not the less a hero because he did not succeed in his undertakings; his attempts were made in an earnest and faithful spirit, and his example served to encourage other men to embark in fresh voyages of discovery, which proved more fortunate than his own.

It is said that some of the ore he brought home the third time did not prove to be gold, and Queen Elizabeth therefore renounced the idea of a fourth expedition.

In her wardrobe of jewels she preserved the bone of a strange fish, "like a sea-unicorn," the mariners had found on their second voyage, embedded in the ice. "The fish was twelve yards long," round like a porpoise, with a bone of two yards growing out of the snout or nostrils.