Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

CHAPTER XI
BAFFIN BAY

Sir Humphrey Gilbert—Sir Martin Frobisher—His first voyage—The fateful stone—First meeting with the Eskimos—The Cathay Company—Second voyage—Third voyage—Frobisher builds a fort—The ships among the floes—Captain Hall finds the Frobisher relics—Adrian Gilbert—John Davis—His voyages and dealings with the Eskimos—Reaches and names Sanderson's Hope—The Traverse Book—William Baffin—His first voyage to Greenland—His fourth and fifth voyages—Discovers Baffin Land—Discovers Baffin Bay—Smith Sound—Jones Sound—Lancaster Sound—Baffin's farthest north—John Ross and Parry verify his discoveries.

In 1566 Humphrey Gilbert—who was as near to heaven by sea as by land—petitioned Queen Elizabeth for privileges in regard to discoveries "by the North-west to Cataia" as an alternative to a petition he, in conjunction with Anthony Jenkinson, had presented the previous year for a voyage by the north-east. He received no answer; but ten years afterwards, in support of this unanswered petition, he published his Discourse of a Discovery for a New Passage to Cataia. This met with approval, and led, with little delay, to the expedition under the Martin Frobisher who, among other noteworthy services, commanded the Triumph in the Armada fight to such good purpose that he was one of the five distinguished men knighted by Howard in mid-channel after the battle off the Isle of Wight.

Frobisher was a good seaman—but no mineralogist. Mainly at the expense of Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, and under the business management of that old seafarer, Michael Lock, of the Muscovy Company, he left Blackwall on the 7th of June, 1576, in the Gabriel of twenty-five tons, accompanied by the Michael of twenty tons—which deserted and returned as soon as difficulties arose—and a ten-ton pinnace, which ended by foundering off Greenland. All told, the expedition numbered thirty-five, of whom the Gabriel carried eighteen; and with these the voyage through the Arctic Ocean was to be made to China.

Leaving the Shetlands at her top speed of a league and a half an hour—which her master, good Christopher Hall, proudly recorded—the Gabriel sighted Cape Farewell on the 11th of July. Two days afterwards she was thrown on her beam-ends in a storm, and was rapidly filling with water flowing in at her waist when she was relieved by the loss of her fore-yard and the cutting away of her mizen-mast. Rounding the cape, steering westward when he could among the floating ice, Frobisher reached a high headland at the south-east end of what is now Frobisher Bay, which he named Queen Elizabeth Foreland. A few days afterwards Hall, out in a boat seeking a way through the ice for the ship, landed on what they called Hall's Island, and, noticing a fog coming on, left hurriedly, snatching up, as specimens of the plants, a few grasses and flowers, and, as a rock specimen, a heavy black stone picked up haphazard on the beach. The grass faded, the flowers perished, and the fateful stone remained.

SIR MARTIN FROBISHER

For fifty leagues Frobisher sailed north-westward into the bay, thinking it to be a strait with Asia on the right hand and America on the left. He landed at what he called Butcher's Island, saw "mightie deere which ranne at him and hardly he escaped with his life in a narrow way where he was faine to use defence and policie," and from a hill-top "perceived a number of small things fleeting in the sea afarre off whyche hee supposed to be porposes or seales or some kind of strange fishe but coming nearer he discovered them to be men in small boates made of leather," who only just failed in capturing his boat before he reached it. Subsequent conferences with the Eskimos ended in his losing the boat with five men who had gone ashore to trade; and finally, having lifted single-handed one of the interesting natives, kayak and all, into the Gabriel, he made sail for home.

When Lock went aboard on the ship's arrival there were no riches from Cathay, nothing worth mentioning beyond the Eskimo—who soon died—the kayak and paddle, and "the fyrste thynge found in the new land," the black stone. He carried away the stone, after chipping off a few fragments for the friends around, and after a week or two's consideration sent some of it to the Mint to be assayed. The report was not as he expected; the "saymaster" was of opinion that it was marcasite, that is, iron pyrites. Not satisfied, Lock sent some to another expert, who also said it was pyrites. Then he tried a third man, who could find no gold in it. And then he tried a fourth—this time an Italian—who gave him the answer he wanted: "A very little powder of gold came thereout."

Lock sent him some more, telling him frankly that three other assayers "could find no such thing therein," but again the Italian was equal to the occasion. "The xviii day of January," writes Lock, "he sent me by his mayde this little scrap of paper written, No. 1, hereinclosed; and thereinclosed the grayne of gold, which afterward I delivered to your majesty." For the Queen had become interested in the wonderful stone which was the talk of the town, its value increasing at every recital until many believed, as Sir Philip Sidney seems to have done, that it was "the purest gold unalloyed with any other metals."