Martin Frobisher

• 1. Introduction

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  Martin Frobisher spent years searching for a passage to the riches of Asia and came home instead with 1,350 tons of worthless rock. The English sea captain, born around 1535 in Altofts, Yorkshire, devoted the most ambitious chapter of his career to a geological blunder on a scale that bankrupted his backers and sent his chief financier to debtors' prison. Yet the same man had already survived shipwrecks, imprisonment in a Portuguese castle in West Africa, repeated arrests at home, and years of piracy. And he would go on to command a squadron against the Spanish Armada and die from a wound taken at a siege in Brittany. How does a boy from a Yorkshire merchant family end up scouring the Arctic, fighting Spain, and lending his name to a bay that borders the capital of Canada's newest territory? The answers run through back-alley privateering deals, an Italian alchemist's sleight of hand, and a furious sea battle off the Isle of Wight.

• 2. A Dangerous Education

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  Bernard Frobisher, a merchant of Altofts in Yorkshire, died prematurely in 1542, leaving young Martin the third of five children with no father and a rudimentary schooling. The family passed into the care of an uncle, Francis Frobisher, and Martin was eventually packed off to London in 1549 to live with a maternal relative, Sir John York. York was a wealthy member of the Merchant Taylors with close connections to the royal government, and his household was a far more useful education than any classroom.

  In 1553, York invested in Thomas Wyndham's expedition to West Africa, comprising three ships and 140 men, and Frobisher sailed along in some unspecified role. The fleet plundered Portuguese ships near Madeira, then traded English cloth for 150 pounds of gold on the Gold Coast, then pushed south to Benin, where Oba Orhogbua agreed after some initial hesitation to trade 80 tons of melegueta pepper. Disease swept through the crew while the pepper was being gathered, killing Wyndham and many others. The surviving sailors abandoned one ship and, in their panic, left some crew members behind. Only 40 of the original 140 men made it back to England. Frobisher was among the survivors, a fact York apparently attributed to what he described as Frobisher's "great spirit and bould courage, and natural hardnes of body."

  The following year, despite the catastrophic losses, investors funded another voyage to Portuguese Guinea. Frobisher joined again, sailing as an apprentice merchant under York's trading representative, John Beryn. At the Gold Coast, the local governor demanded a hostage before opening talks. Frobisher volunteered, and discussions began. A Portuguese ship appeared offshore and fired on the English fleet. The expedition abandoned Frobisher and left. His African captors handed him to the Portuguese at their trading post of Mina, where he was locked in the castle of Sao Jorge da Mina. He spent roughly nine months there before the Portuguese authorities transferred him to Portugal. He eventually found his way back to England around 1558. This first encounter with the Lok family, who commanded the 1554 expedition, would matter greatly to his future.

• 3. Privateer and Prisoner

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  On the 30th of September 1559, Frobisher married Isobel Richard, a Yorkshire widow with two young children and a substantial inheritance from her previous marriage to Thomas Rigatt of Snaith. Their domestic life left few records, but by the mid-1570s Frobisher had spent her entire inheritance on his ventures and appears to have simply left her and her children behind. Isobel died in a poorhouse in 1588, an event the ambitious captain left unremarked.

  In 1563, Frobisher teamed with his brother John and a fellow Yorkshireman, John Appleyard, in a privateering venture. Appleyard held a license to seize ships of the French Catholic party and financed a fleet of three vessels. By May 1563, the operation had captured five French ships and brought them to Plymouth. The Privy Council promptly arrested Martin Frobisher, because his ship had also been part of the seizure of a Spanish vessel in which 40 Englishmen died. The pirate Thomas Cobham had led that attack and passed the Spanish cargo, tapestries and wine, to Frobisher. Possessing the goods was enough to send him to prison.

  He was released in 1564, bought two ships in 1565 - the Mary Flower and William Baxter - and was seized again when a storm drove him into Scarborough harbour and officials grew suspicious of his stated plan to trade on the Guinea coast. By October 1566, he was free again on condition that he not go to sea without a license. In 1568, he commanded the Robert in service to the exiled Cardinal of Chatillon and briefly moved in the company of privateers including John Hawkins and William Winter. Frobisher ignored the limitation to French Catholic targets and seized Protestant ships carrying English goods. In 1569, admiralty officers arrested him again, this time confining him first at Fleet prison and then at Marshalsea. He might have stayed there indefinitely had not the lord admiral, Edward Fiennes de Clinton, and the secretary of state, William Cecil, secured his release in March 1570. Starting in 1571, Frobisher became involved in several plots that cut against government interest, including a proposal to help the Earl of Desmond flee England, and a scheme to seize the Dutch port of Flushing for the Spanish king. He may have been working as a double agent, with the tacit knowledge of the Privy Council.

• 4. The Northwest Passage Dream

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  Sebastian Cabot had tried to find a northern route to Asia in 1508. In the 1530s, Robert Thorne and Roger Barlow failed to interest Henry VIII in sailing directly over the North Pole to China. In 1551 a group of English merchants formed what became the Muscovy Company specifically to search for a northeast passage to Cathay, a venture that failed to find a route but did open trade with Russia. Humphrey Gilbert pressed the case for a northwest passage in the 1560s. The idea was in the air for decades before Frobisher acted on it.

  In 1574, Frobisher petitioned the Privy Council for permission and funding to seek a northwest passage to "the Southern Sea" and thence to Cathay. The council referred him to the Muscovy Company, which held exclusive rights to northern sea routes. Two years later he persuaded the company to license his expedition. Michael Lok, whose well-connected father William Lok had held an exclusive clothier's licence to supply Henry VIII with fine fabrics, helped raise enough capital for three small vessels: Gabriel and Michael, each around 20 to 25 tons, and an unnamed pinnace of 10 tons, crewed by 35 men in total.

  Queen Elizabeth sent word that she had "good liking of their doings." The ships weighed anchor at Blackwall on the 7th of June 1576, and as they headed downstream on the Thames, Elizabeth waved to them from a window of Greenwich Palace while cannons fired salutes and a crowd cheered. By the 26th of June the fleet had reached the Shetland Islands for repairs. A violent storm struck on the passage west; the pinnace was sunk and Michael turned back for England. Gabriel pushed on alone. Frobisher's crew sighted what they took to be the Labrador coast - it was actually the southern tip of Baffin Island, which Frobisher named Queen Elizabeth's Foreland. He entered the bay that would carry his name, believing it to be the entrance to the Northwest Passage, and sailed northwest up its length.

• 5. Five Men Lost, One Stone Found

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  On the 18th of August 1576, the expedition sighted Burch's Island, named for the ship's carpenter who first spotted it, and made contact with local Inuit. Frobisher arranged for one Inuit man to guide them through the region and sent five sailors ashore in a ship's boat to return him, with strict orders not to get too close to any of the others. The crew disobeyed. All five were taken captive.

  Frobisher searched for days without recovering the men. He eventually seized a local man in hopes of arranging a prisoner exchange. The captive bit through his own tongue rather than communicate with his fellow Inuit - and survived to reach England, where he died of cold taken at sea. Frobisher's five men were never seen again by their shipmates. Inuit oral tradition holds that the sailors lived among the Inuit of their own free will for some years before dying while attempting to leave Baffin Island in a boat they had built themselves.

  Frobisher turned for home and docked in London on the 9th of October. In the rush to depart, a black stone "as great as a half-penny loaf" had been picked up loose on the surface of Hall's Island by the shipmaster, Robert Garrard, who took it for sea-coal. Frobisher paid it no attention and kept it only as a token of possession of new territory. Back in London, Michael Lok took stone samples to the royal assayer at the Tower of London and two other expert assessors. All three declared it worthless marcasite with no gold. Lok then consulted an Italian alchemist in London, Giovanni Battista Agnello, who claimed the stone was gold-bearing. Agnello assayed it three times and displayed small amounts of gold dust. When challenged on why the other assayers had found nothing, Agnello replied: "Bisogna sapere adulare la natura" - one must know how to flatter nature. Lok wrote to the Queen in secret with the encouraging result, and the gossip from court spread across London about the gold powder Agnello claimed to be deriving from a northern rock.

• 6. The Ore That Ruined Everyone

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  In 1577, Queen Elizabeth lent the 200-ton ship Ayde to the Company of Cathay and invested a thousand pounds in the second expedition. Among those who acquired shares was the scholar John Dee, one of the leading intellectuals in England, who personally instructed Frobisher and navigator Christopher Hall in the use of navigational instruments and the mathematics of navigation. The fleet of Ayde, Gabriel, and Michael left Blackwall on the 27th of May 1577, officially carrying no more than 120 men; Frobisher had exceeded that quota by at least twenty and possibly forty, and letters from the Privy Council waiting at Harwich forced him to put convicts and several sailors ashore before sailing north.

  The expedition spent several weeks collecting ore, with orders from the Company of Cathay to defer further exploration of the passage. Three Inuit were forcibly taken from Baffin Island on this voyage: a man named Calichough, a woman named Egnock, and her child Nutioc. All three died shortly after arriving in England. Calichough died from a rib broken during his capture that eventually punctured his lung. Frobisher brought back roughly 200 tons of the ore.

  The third expedition, in 1578, was the largest yet: fifteen vessels, over 400 men, including 147 miners, 4 blacksmiths, and 5 assayers. The Queen herself named the territory Meta Incognita, Latin for Unknown Shore. On the outward voyage, the 100-ton barque Dennis was wrecked on an iceberg. The fleet was driven up a waterway Frobisher named Mistaken Strait - now known as Hudson Strait. Dissension among the crew and officers prevented the founding of a colony. The fleet left on the last day of August 1578 and reached England in early October, though the vessel Emanuel was wrecked on the west coast of Ireland. In total, 1,350 tons of ore were shipped back to England and taken to a smelting plant at Powder Mill Lane in Dartford. After five years of assaying, every last ton proved to be worthless rock containing hornblende. The Cathay Company went bankrupt. Michael Lok was ruined and sent to debtors' prison multiple times.

• 7. Against the Spanish Armada

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  After the debacle of Meta Incognita, Frobisher secured a captaincy through Sir William Wynter, one of the Queen's most trusted naval commanders, and sailed in early March 1580 to help suppress the Desmond rebellion in Ireland. In 1585, the Queen appointed him vice-admiral of Francis Drake's fleet for raids on Spanish ports and shipping in the West Indies, with his flagship the Primrose. Shortly after the voyage began, Frobisher was admitted to a select advisory group around Drake alongside Christopher Carleill, Nichols, and Fenner.

  On the 20th of July 1588, the Spanish Armada set sail from Corunna in Galicia to escort the Army of Flanders, led by the Duke of Parma, toward England. Sir Francis Walsingham dispatched a message to Whitehall reporting the sighting at the entrance to the Channel the same day. When the two fleets first engaged, Frobisher commanded Triumph, the Royal Navy's largest ship, leading a consort that included Merchant Royal, Margaret and John, Centurion, Golden Lion, and Mary Rose.

  Lord Howard reorganized the English fleet into four squadrons, placing Frobisher in command of one. On the morning of the 21st of July, Frobisher in Triumph, Drake in Revenge, and Hawkins in Victory attacked the seaward wing of the Spanish formation and damaged San Juan de Portugal, the ship of vice-admiral Juan Martinez de Recalde. Later that same day, Frobisher and Hawkins engaged Pedro de Valdez, commander of the Andalusian squadron, though de Valdez did not surrender his ship, Nuestra Senora del Rosario, until Drake came to their assistance the following morning, a development that apparently infuriated Frobisher.

  At dawn on the 25th of July, Frobisher's squadron was the only one positioned landward of the Armada, lying inshore off the Isle of Wight in a dead calm. He engaged the Duke of Medina Sidonia's flagship San Martin directly. When the wind rose and Spanish galleons moved in to protect their flagship, Triumph was trapped on the lee shore off Dunnose cape, with more than thirty Armada ships bearing down on her. Frobisher used his ship's boats to manoeuvre Triumph clear and escaped when the wind shifted again. On the 26th of July, Lord Howard knighted him aboard the flagship Ark Royal, alongside Sheffield, Thomas Howard, and Hawkins. The decisive action came on the 29th of July 1588 on the shoals off Gravelines, where Frobisher, Drake, and Hawkins hammered the Spanish fleet with their guns and five Spanish ships were lost.

• 8. The Final Wound

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  In 1590, Frobisher returned to his native Altofts and found himself welcomed by the peers and landed gentry of Yorkshire as an honoured guest. He paid particular attention to Dorothy Wentworth, a daughter of Thomas, 1st Baron Wentworth, who had been recently widowed by the death of her husband Paul Withypool of Ipswich; she became his second wife sometime before October of that year. In November 1591, he purchased the leasehold of the manor of Whitwood in Yorkshire from the Queen for an unstated sum, and of Finningley Grange in Nottinghamshire for £949. He made Whitwood his primary residence as a landed proprietor, though country life left him little leisure.

  The following year Frobisher led an English fleet tasked with blockading the Spanish coast and intercepting the Spanish treasure fleet. The expedition was organised principally by Walter Raleigh and the Earl of Cumberland. Raleigh had been commissioned to lead it on the 28th of February, but the Queen was reluctant to send her favourite to sea. Raleigh, with no experience commanding fleets, recommended Frobisher in his place. Frobisher's squadron patrolled the waters off Portugal near the Burlings while other squadrons sailed for the Azores, where they captured the richly laden Madre de Deus - a prize that came to Frobisher's displeasure rather than his gain.

  In September 1594, Frobisher led a squadron that besieged Morlaix and forced its surrender. The next month his squadron took part in the siege of a Spanish-held fortress at Fort Crozon, near Brest. A musket ball struck him in the thigh during the fighting. The surgeon who extracted it left the wadding behind. The resulting infection killed him days later at Plymouth on the 22nd of November 1594. His heart was buried at St Andrew's Church, Plymouth. His body was carried to London and buried at St Giles-without-Cripplegate on Fore Street. The bay he had mistaken for the entrance to the Northwest Passage now lies close to Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, a territory that did not exist until 1999, more than four centuries after Frobisher first sailed into its waters.