What was Frobisher’s secret? It is hard to know. He was fearless, impetuous, violent and volatile (indeed, at times frankly unstable), with a yearning after glory and recognition, and only the tiniest reserve of respect for merchants. His education had been atrocious. But this was the man who in 1574 went to the Muscovy Company with that familiar proposal: like Anthony Jenkinson and Sir Humphrey Gilbert before him, Frobisher wanted to find the empire of Cathay.
Frobisher’s pitch to the company was as blunt as the man himself. He confronted the grandees of the Muscovy Company head-on. He knew that any northern voyage to find Cathay was reserved to the company by its charter. He knew, too, that in twenty years no such voyage to furthest Asia had been successful, though the company had begun to map the northern coasts of Russia east of the White Sea, and an early voyage, led by the intrepid Stephen Borough, had sailed in 1556 as far as Nova Zembla (Novaya Zemlya).5 Frobisher would go west, to find what he and his backers believed would be a straightforward north-western passage to Cathay.
London’s Russia merchants paid Frobisher the courtesy of hearing his case in person; one of the officials in the room was Michael Lok. But, not surprisingly, the company refused. A decade earlier that would have been the end of the matter – Gilbert and Jenkinson had got nowhere. But with powerful support, Frobisher kept on pushing, with the result that the company was told by the queen’s government either to send out its own expedition to find Cathay or to allow Frobisher a licence to make the attempt himself. The Muscovy Company agreed to that licence in February 1575. Really it had little choice: at Muscovy House there was now nothing less than a sizeable corporate earthquake, for its monopoly on the exploration and exploitation of the northern seas and continents, two decades old, was at last broken.6
But the challenge in early 1575 was really Martin Frobisher’s. To have a licence to find Cathay was one thing, to put together an actual expedition able to get to Asia was something else entirely. Someone had to knock the project into shape – to raise money, to find ships and crews, and to put in place all the training that was necessary for such an ambitious voyage. That someone was Michael Lok, who must have detected in Frobisher’s pitch at least the germ of a viable expedition. Lok later wrote about his own role, admittedly with some self-puffing. He explained how he had taken Frobisher under his wing:
finding him sufficient and ready to execute the attempt of so great matters, I joined with him, and to my power advanced him to the world with credit, and above my own power for my part furnished him with things necessary for his first voyage lately made to the northwestward for the discovery of Cathay and other new countries, to the intent the whole world might be opened unto England which hitherto hath been hidden from it by the slothfulness of some, and policy of other.7
Here was a project for the clever and restless Michael Lok to get his teeth into. He rallied his contacts in London’s mercantile world, characters like Thomas Randolph (a former ambassador to Russia who had loathed his time in Moscow), Anthony Jenkinson and even Sir Thomas Gresham. Lok worked hard to get the support of the city establishment.8 The task he set for himself was formidable: as well as putting ships to sea, it was to turn an unpredictable gentleman-pirate into the plausible discoverer of the empire of the Great Khan.
There was no quick or easy success. At first, in 1575, Lok and Frobisher failed to raise money for the venture. But in 1576 that began to change, and Lok at last found investors willing to put their money into the expedition, ‘divers persons of honour and worship’, men and women of noble and knightly rank as well as city merchants.9 This in itself was a major step forward, for one of the many challenges to overcome was Frobisher’s unsavoury reputation and doubts as to his abilities as the captain general of such a voyage.10 Interest in the venture began gradually to build. In early 1576 the poet George Gascoigne wrote a preface to Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s until then private paper on his own proposal for a Cathay voyage ten years earlier. Entertaining himself one day in Gilbert’s library in Limehouse, a few miles out of London, Gascoigne came across Sir Humphrey’s old Cathay manuscript. Knowing, as he put it, that ‘Master Frobisher (a kinsman of mine) did pretend to travail in the same discovery’, Gascoigne asked for Gilbert’s permission to read it.11 Sir Humphrey allowed him to do more than that, and with Gascoigne’s introduction it was printed in London in April 1576. John Dee noticed the pamphlet: ‘a little English book,’ Dee called it, ‘containing some very probable reasons, tending to the persuasion of the same course and voyage’.12 The possibilities were at last beginning to click.
Supporting what Dee called the ‘probable reasons’ for the likely success of the voyage was a map of the northwest passage shown in Gilbert’s short book. It has the distinction of being the earliest map of the globe printed in England. It was in fact a greatly simplified copy of the world map Abraham Ortelius had produced in Antwerp in 1564. The beauty of Gilbert’s map – the secret of its psychological power – lay precisely in that simplicity, for it showed a clear route to Asia northwest from England, at about the latitude of 60 degrees north, through a long strait between Greenland and America, and on to Japan, the Spice (Molucca) Islands and Cathay.13 No recent power had sailed the passage, though Gilbert (thanks to the elder Richard Hakluyt of the Middle Temple) had evidence of its navigability from Roman and medieval sources – the old cosmographical authorities still had their uses, at least when it suited the moment.14
Michael Lok threw himself at the project. They had two ships only, the Michael, which was specially refitted for the voyage, and the Gabriel, newly built by the royal master shipwrights Matthew Baker and John Ady. These vessels were impossibly small: Michael was a bark of between 20 and 25 tons; Gabriel a little larger at 30 tons, towing a 7-ton pinnace. What defies modern understanding is that these tiny wooden sailing ships were expected to sail through Arctic waters all the way to the other side of the world.
The two ships would carry men, food, weapons, trade samples of cloth, books and instruments. The instruments were of the kind that John Dee, Richard Chancellor and Anthony Jenkinson would have known so well: a terrestrial globe, armillary spheres, a universal dial and astronomical rings, an astrolabe, eighteen hour glasses and twenty compasses of various kinds, some of them bought from William Borough of the Muscovy Company, others made by Humphrey Cole, a talented London goldsmith who fashioned in his workshop devices as beautifully ornate as they were necessary for the survival of the ships and their crews.
The books Lok gathered together to take with them are an indication of the ambitions of the expedition, as well as of the obvious limitations of the Elizabethan understanding of the world. The pilots and other senior men of the venture, including Frobisher himself, were given crash courses in navigation, cosmography and geography in books that over the years any Londoner could have bought from the shops in Paul’s Churchyard: Robert Recorde’s treatise on the sphere, Castle of Knowledge (1556), William Cunningham’s Cosmographical Glass (1559), Thomas Hacket’s translation of André Thevet on America (The new found worlde, 1568), and even (though it seems extraordinary) the medieval Travels of Sir John Mandeville, picked up for a shilling, and complete with late fifteenth-century woodcuts of strange beasts. The only specialized texts were originals of Thevet in French (Cosmographie universelle and Les Singularitez de la France antarctique) and the Spanish Regimiento de navegación by Pedro de Medina, but these must have been of pretty limited use: Frobisher, for one, could barely read English.15
Lok and others worked with Frobisher and his masters on their skills in cartography and navigation using the great maps of Mercator and Ortelius, and providing blank sea charts to be filled in on the voyage. William Borough, an experienced pilot and cartographer who had worked in Russia, northern Lapland and the Baltic, drew a sea card on vellum for the northern portion of the British Isles, the west coast of Norway and various parts of the Arctic coasts. His brother, Stephen, was also recruited to give advice.
At Lok’s house in London in l
ate May, the experts met the ships’ officers who would go into those northern seas in Gabriel and Michael. John Dee was one of those experts, volunteering to help in any way that he could. Lok (so he wrote later) explained to Dee the purpose of the expedition as he saw it: the opening up of trade to the countries of what Lok called East India by way of a northwest passage, evidence of which Lok set before Dee in the form of books, charts, instruments and his own notes. Dee, according to Lok at least, was impressed, and shared his own researches. Dee himself wrote a few months later of Lok as ‘a virtuous gentleman and merchant, with zealous intent, for the advancement of God his glory, and the great commodity, and honour of this kingdom’, who had ‘procured unto him, worshipful, yea and honourable aid also: to set forth ships, for a northwest discovery’.16
By the summer of 1576 everything was ready. There was, naturally, a substantial outlay of money, for the ships, their rigging, weapons and ammunition, navigational instruments, food and drink, the crews’ wages and cloths to trade.17 Lok appeared to be meticulous in keeping the accounts. So confident was he that he put over £700 of his own money into a voyage that, on 6 June 1576, set off to find Asia.
That first voyage was not the great breakthrough to Cathay that Lok and Frobisher had expected it would be. It turned out to be a four-month reconnaissance of Arctic waters and islands, during which the crews of Michael and Gabriel encountered great icebergs and Inuit in kayaks. It was the first encounter with unknown places and strange peoples: tentative, noteworthy, but hardly the beginning of a mercantile revolution for London, queen and kingdom. And yet within a few days of the arrival home of Gabriel in London, there quickly came into view a new possibility – not of Cathay, but the discovery of gold.
It began with a rock the size of a small loaf of bread. The sailors had brought back from their adventure all kinds of souvenirs. When they had gone ashore, some had collected flowers, others grass. On Little Hall Island in the Labrador Sea, Master Robert Garrard had picked up ‘a piece of a black stone, much like to a sea coal in colour which by the weight seemed to be some kind of metal or mineral’. At first Frobisher had thought nothing of it, but he and Garrard kept the stone ‘in respect of the place from whence it came’.18 Back in London, it was on board Gabriel that Frobisher gave the stone to Michael Lok. The day was Saturday, 13 October 1576.
It changed everything. What Frobisher had found, or so it seemed, were islands full of precious metals, confirmed as such from the single sample by a Venetian goldsmith living in London who tested the stone and found it to contain a grain of gold. Now Lok and Frobisher worked furiously to rally interest and support, and Lok secured a licence to transport the ore to England.19 He became a frequent visitor to the queen’s secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, who was a very long way from being entirely convinced by Frobisher’s ore; but nevertheless Elizabeth’s Privy Council threw its weight behind a second voyage, even going so far as to order grain from Essex to London to make biscuit ‘necessary for the furniture of certain barks of Martin Frobisher and others now intending a voyage to the seas’.20
In the spring of 1577 Frobisher and Lok were busy in London planning the next phase of the expedition. Lok drew up a constitution for what he called the ‘company of Cathay’, modelled on the charter of the Muscovy Company. This was plausible enough to take a few minutes of Lord Burghley’s precious time, but really the company was a corporate illusion; it never existed in any practical sense.21 The search for Cathay was slowly becoming a secondary consideration, though notionally Frobisher’s ambition was still to discover Asia. At about the time Lok was drawing up his company’s charter, Richard Willes, editing one of Richard Eden’s translations, put into print his view that Master Frobisher’s forthcoming ‘prosperous voyage, and happy return’ would once and for all decide the old debates about the northwest sea route to Cathay.22 A writer in Frobisher’s circle, George Best, was much nearer the mark: ‘the hope of more of the same gold ore to be found, kindled a greater opinion in the hearts of many, to advance the voyage again’.23
On the decidedly wobbly foundation of the company of Cathay, Michael Lok built up a formidable group of investors: nine of Elizabeth’s privy councillors, a good number of the English nobility and court gentry, city grandees such as Sir Thomas Gresham, veteran merchants and travellers like Anthony Jenkinson – and indeed the queen herself, usually parsimonious to a fault, to the tune of £1,000.24 On the instructions of the Privy Council, every element of the voyage – navigation, shipping and budgeting – was closely inspected by experienced men, of whom Lok and Jenkinson were two.25 Once again, corporate and mercantile London fitted hand in glove with the political establishment in Westminster: neither could afford for Frobisher to fail.
The Royal Exchange and Paul’s Churchyard were buzzing with news and gossip. Scribblers were busy, as printers dashed off to the Stationers’ Company to register poems and ballads like ‘Farewell to Master Frobisher and the other gentlemen adventurers who labour to discover the right way to Cathay’.26 (Thomas Hacket would certainly have done a better job with the title.) Hopes for the voyage were huge. It was the beginning of the celebrity of the redoubtable Martin Frobisher.
And the second voyage was indeed suitably heroic, with great storms and battles with ‘fierce and bold people’. Frobisher himself went ashore and returned to his ship ‘with good news of great riches’ he had discovered in the bowels of the barren mountains of Baffin Island.27 The expedition even returned months later to England with Inuit captives: a man and a young woman with her baby. This became global news. Frobisher’s capture of these people of the Arctic – ‘those that killeth the seals’ – was known in Moscow, from a Russian source, over a year later.28
Frobisher was interested above all in the ore that was ready to be mined. About 200 tons of it was loaded onto the ships. Frobisher’s belief (and surely Lok’s too) was that this precious cargo would pay for both the first and second voyages as well as offering ‘sufficient interest’ to the expedition’s investors. One of the members of the crew wrote, with the kind of prescience he himself was unlikely to have recognized at the time: ‘The stones of this supposed continent with America be altogether sparkled, and glister in the sun like gold: so likewise doth sand in the bright water; yet they verify the old proverb: All is not gold that glistereth.’29
Frobisher was back in England in September and embraced at Elizabeth’s court, where the news was that he had returned with ore to the value of anything between £80,000 and £100,000. Rewards and a knighthood seemed certain.30 He had pushed through into ‘Meta Incognita’. And in those ‘unknown limits’ was fantastic wealth waiting to be gathered in. At an audience with the queen herself, Frobisher spoke of the riches he had brought home ‘and so great promises of the infinite treasure of this new land, whereof he would possess her majesty surmounting the treasure of the Indies of the king of Spain, whereby he would make her majesty the richest prince in all Europe’.31
Frobisher’s three Inuit captives added to his celebrity. They were gaped at by the people of Bristol and painted in watercolour by the artist John White. All died within weeks of arriving in England, the man of injuries sustained during his capture, the young woman probably of measles. A wet nurse was provided for her baby boy, and they were taken up to London and lodged at the Three Swans Inn. The baby died in late November 1577 and was buried in the churchyard of St Olave, Hart Street, in the shadow of Muscovy House.32 In London a few months later, one printer obtained a licence for ‘A description of the portraiture and shape of those strange kind of people which the worthy Master Martin Frobisher brought into England’.33 To Elizabethans, they were at best specimens and curiosities.
Of greatest importance was the ore ‘from the parts of Cathay discovered by Martin Frobisher’, which, on the special orders of the queen’s Privy Council, was brought to London in conditions of high security.34 In and around the city it was smelted in purpose-built furnaces, and Michael Lok recruited for that task specialist German min
ers, of whom the most senior was the Saxon metallurgist Jonas Schutz, with the help also of the goldsmith Humphrey Cole.35
By now the stakes were very high indeed. A great deal rested on the success of extracting precious metals from the ore: money for the two voyages, the hope of funding a third, handsome returns for the investors, and of course riches, honours and plaudits for Frobisher. By February 1578, with little sign of much progress, Frobisher’s fragile patience was frayed, so much so that he marched to Lok’s house ‘in great rage’ and dragged Lok and others over to Schutz’s workshop on Tower Hill. There they found Schutz stripped almost naked because of the heat and choking on the poisonous fumes. Frobisher, by Lok’s account, ‘reviled him with villainous speech for that he had not finished his work and drew his dagger on him and threatened him with oaths, that he would strike it in him’ if he failed to complete the job quickly. Frobisher was desperate for everything to be settled in preparation for a third voyage.36
Three weeks later, in a happier encounter, Frobisher and Lok met the commissioners of the venture at Muscovy House to receive the final judgement on the ore. It was held to be valuable.37 This test was key; the numbers were everything. The ore had produced grains of silver that suggested a ton of it would make £23 and 15 shillings. Taking into account the costs of transporting the ore back to England, for every £8 spent on the venture, each investor would receive £5 more. So the effort was worth it. The commissioners made their report to the queen’s Privy Council, and the council approved the third voyage whose purpose was to exploit ‘the great riches of the mines of gold found in the new countries’.38
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