Of the two, the Spanish settlements on the American coasts with the mines behind them drew the eyes of the adventurer, who secured his prizes at the sword's point, but Asia was the more tempting to the trader. The former dreamed of the sack of opulent cities; the latter dreamed of bustling wharves, and barter, and English ships coming home laden with spices and silks, the peaceful spoils of the market place and the tropical forest and the shark-haunted seas.
How to reach India "by a quick route, without crossing the sea paths of the Portuguese and the Spaniards," this, in a word, was the origin of the long and arduous search for the Northwest Passage.
It was the general belief that America was an island, but the size and shape of it was still only imperfectly known. That there was a water way round the southern end of the great continent had been proved by Magellan, who, in his voyage round the world, had passed through the straits that bear his name. The question now was, did a similar waterway exist at the northern end?
They believed that America tapered to a point northward, as it did southward. They little realized how the northern continent spread itself out into the cold Arctic seas, and with what a network of islands and ice floes it ended.
And so they sent out ships to search for a water way through those inhospitable seas, and the first to go was an Englishman, Martin Frobisher.
Greatly did he dare. We in these days of perfectly appointed ships, built of steel and driven by steam, can appreciate the hardihood of this hero and his crews, setting forth in two tiny craft of twenty-five and twenty tons burden, respectively, to solve the riddle of the northern seas! They sailed away—Queen Elizabeth herself waving them adieu from the windows of her palace at Greenwich—on June 12th, 1576, and a month later they were off the coast of Greenland.
Then came stormy weather. A pinnace with her crew of four was sunk, and Frobisher found himself alone—one ship among the never-ending ice. For his consort had gone home, discouraged by the forbidding outlook.
But almost immediately after this disappointment there came a gleam of hope. He beheld what appeared to be a passageway trending westward. It seems that this is still called Frobisher Bay. As he sailed through he thought that he had Asia on one side and America on the other. It was but a happy delusion. The projecting corner of Asia was far away; he was only abreast of what has since been named Baffin's Land.
Frobisher's second voyage, made in 1577, was rather a gold quest than a journey of discovery. A lump of stone (probably iron pyrites) had been brought home by one of the sailors as a souvenir of the first voyage. The particles of gold in it fired the fancies of some Londoners with the idea that Eldorado might perhaps, after all, be among the northern ice.
So Frobisher's ships went out again, and brought home something like 200 tons of the black stone. A third time they made the voyage, no less than fifteen ships taking part in the expedition, the object of which was to establish a sort of settlement for the working of the supposed "gold mine." But nothing came of the attempt. Bewildering fogs and perilous storms and threatening icebergs beset the puny fleet; sickness followed hard upon the exposure and privations long endured by the poor fellows who manned it, and at last the scheme was abandoned.