by John Butman
As it turned out, Frobisher’s flagship had not, in fact, gone down. It had come through the storm, albeit badly damaged: the “extreme foul weather” had sheared off the top mast and blown it overboard. But Frobisher was not Kindersley, and whatever his crew thought, he had no intention of abandoning his quest to achieve the one great thing still “undone” in this world. As George Best reported, Frobisher had “determined and resolved with himself” to prove the existence of the Northwest Passage “or else never to return again.” His words echoed those of Richard Chancellor more than twenty years earlier.7
Frobisher continued to head northwest, and in late July “he had sight of a high land,” and he named the promontory “Queene Elizabeth’s Forland,” the first piece of the American continent to be named after an English monarch. (It is now known as Resolution Island, which lies off the southern coast of Baffin Island, some five hundred miles west of Greenland.) Once again, however, Frobisher was frustrated in his attempt formally to claim the land, because a surging current, drifting icebergs, and howling winds prevented a landing. He pressed ahead, and the next day the land opened to reveal a wide strait—an ocean passageway between two bodies of land—and he “conceived no small hope” that this was what he had come to find: the Northwest Passage.8
Frobisher sailed the Gabriel about sixty leagues west into the strait—about two hundred miles. On the starboard side of the ship was Asia, or so Frobisher believed. The land on the port side was, he assumed, America. He took the liberty of naming the passage after himself—following the precedent set by Magellan, who had named an equivalent strait that provided passage round the southern tip of the American continent. Also, in a striking gesture of comradeship, he named some of the islands in the strait after members of the crew—Hall’s Island, after the master of the Gabriel; Burcher’s Island, after the fleet’s carpenter; and Thomas Williams Island, after another mariner. For a while, at least, these humble English sailors could enjoy a kind of immortality on the other side of the world.
On one of the islands, Frobisher went ashore and soon found evidence of human habitation, including a recent fire where the embers still seethed. He climbed the highest hill and, from the summit, caught sight of several men “in small boats made of leather” in the distant waters. When it looked as if they were heading toward the ship’s boat, which they had hauled up on shore, he and his eight companions hurried down the hill, ready to defend themselves and their landing craft. But the local people—the Inuit—seemed to have had no malicious intent, and the two groups were soon sharing food and exchanging goods. “They came aboard” the ship, wrote Best, and brought “salmon and raw flesh and fish,” a welcome change of diet for the Englishmen after weeks of living on biscuit, stockfish, and salted beef. They exchanged the skins of seals and polar bears—gifts that were highly prized in England. The English had a store of fine cloth, which the investors had supplied in order to test the market for the country’s premier commodity. But the Inuit were far more interested in the manufactured items that the sailors had to offer—“bells, looking-glasses, and other toys.”9
Over the next few days, Frobisher’s sailors continued to engage with the Inuit and “began more easily to trust them.” Conversation, however, was not easy. “They spake,” reported Christopher Hall, “but we understood them not,” and so the strangers relied largely on gestures to communicate with each other.10 But Hall did his best to understand them, and, like Towerson many years before, he drew up a list of key words:
Argoteyt—hand.
Accaskay—ship.
Callagay—a pair of breeches.
Mutchater—the head.
Yacketrone—the little finger.11
In the course of the “conversation,” Frobisher gained what he deemed a far more significant piece of information. As he understood it, the passage “through the Straits into the West Sea” was not far away. One of the natives “made signs that in two days’ rowing” Frobisher could be there. What’s more, the Inuit seemed to suggest that he could show Frobisher the way, apparently promising that he would go ashore, get his kayak, and then act as their pilot.12
Frobisher, not wishing to lose his guide to Cathay, sent a party of five men to accompany the Inuit. But as the men’s craft approached the land, it drifted out of sight. For several hours, Frobisher was left wondering what had happened, and when neither the navvies nor the native returned, he feared the worst. As Lok recorded, Frobisher “judged they were taken and kept by force.”13
The loss of the five men and the ship’s boat put the whole expedition in jeopardy. Frobisher had vowed to achieve his goal or die in the attempt—and, if the Inuit were right, he was tantalizingly close: the western opening of the Northwest Passage into the Pacific Ocean was just a couple of days away. But now he had to face the reality of his situation. He had just one bark, no pinnace, no ship’s boat, and scarcely enough men to “conduct back his bark again” to England—and those men were exhausted.14
Frobisher opted to return to England, but he did not dare go home without proof of his achievements and determined there was only one import that would be genuinely convincing to the investors back at home: an Inuit. Accordingly, he “wrought a pretty policy” in order to “deceive the deceivers,” luring one curious Inuit, who was circling the Gabriel, by throwing a bell toward him so that it fell just short and into the water. He then rang “a louder bell,” and this enticed the man to paddle even closer to the bark, and as Frobisher leaned out to hand him the bell, he “caught the man fast, and plucked him with main force—boat and all—into his bark and out of the sea.” Once aboard, the Inuit resisted so fiercely that he “bit his tongue in twain.” For Frobisher, the man was “a sufficient witness” of his voyage “towards the unknown parts of the world.”15
As well as the Inuit, Frobisher and his men gathered a few items of interest to take home with them and to support their claim that they had reached a distant, exotic land. Among these was an odd-looking piece of rock picked up by Robert Garrard, one of the mariners. Frobisher thought it looked like a piece of sea coal, and although this bituminous rock is sometimes mistaken for gold because it can have a shine and variegated glitter, he considered it “a thing of no account.” He kept it as a “novelty… in respect of the place from whence it came.” But it was not, he thought, a precious souvenir.16
Finally, in late August, the Gabriel sailed from the newly named Frobisher Strait, reached the Scottish coast a month later, and came into the Thames in early October. Michael Lok, who had feared for his investment, jubilantly reported that Frobisher and the crew of the Gabriel were “joyfully received with the great admiration of the people.”17 For the triumphant entry into the Thames, Lok had acquired an ornamental globe, and Frobisher had this mounted on the bowsprit of his flagship.18
When Frobisher reached the dock “with his strange man of Cataye, and his great rumor of the passage to Cathay, he was called to the court and greatly embraced and liked of the best.”19 The Inuit caused a sensation. He was only the fifth recorded Native American to reach England—and few people had seen the last one, a king from Brazil, brought to the court of Henry VIII in the 1530s.20 Described by Best as Frobisher’s “new pray” and “strange Infidel,” the Inuit was, according to Lok, “such a wonder unto the whole city and to the rest of the realm that heard of it.”21 He was noted for his “very broad face,” his “very fat and full body,” and his little eyes and beard. His “long hanging” hair was “coal black” and tied in a knot. His complexion was “dark [and] sallow,” Lok reported, “much like the tawny Moors, or rather the Tatar nation, whereof I think he was.”22
Lok may have hoped to generate publicity by parading the man before the court, but the captive was clearly miserable—his countenance, noted Lok, was “sullen or churlish and sharp”—and he was likely in pain, given the wound to his tongue.23 Within days of reaching London, the man was dead, and he was buried in the churchyard at St. Olave’s, close to Muscovy House.24
> AS INTRIGUING AS the Inuit was to Londoners, the investors focused on Frobisher’s claim that he had entered the eastern end of the waterway to Cathay and christened it Frobisher’s Strait. Convinced that he was telling the truth, Lok and his fellow merchants moved fast to secure legal protection and thereby safeguard their investment. Toward the end of 1576, a royal charter was drafted for a new company, to be called the Company of Cathay. This left no doubt as to the ultimate goal of the merchants and their fellow investors. After more than two decades of missteps, Lok and his associates were determined to reach the land of the Great Khan.
It was an audacious move. While they had been given permission to conduct a voyage, Lok and his associates were now proposing to establish a commercial organization that would threaten the monopoly rights of the Muscovy Company. But the audacity was typical of the new company’s leading members—Gresham, Burde, Bond, Duckett—who had built extensive mercantile operations outside England. According to some “articles of grant” that were drafted—and required the queen’s signature if they were to become effective—the investors were to have the “power and authority” to choose a governor, two consuls, and twelve assistants.25 The provision for a single governor is significant. Clearly, the Company of Cathay did not want the kind of internal conflicts that were causing strife at the Muscovy Company, which had two governors.
Michael Lok was named the first governor for life and Frobisher received the exalted designation of “High Admiral of all seas and waters, countries, lands, and isles, as well as of Cathay as of all other countries and places of new discovery.” In addition to their extravagant titles, Lok and Frobisher were to be granted one percent “of all the wares, goods, and merchandise that shall be brought into England or other countries.”
The draft charter defined the mercantile mission of the Company of Cathay, providing it with the monopoly “to seek, discover, and find whatsoever seas, waters, isles, lands, regions, countries, provinces, and other places whatsoever.… which before this time, and before the late voyage of discovery made by Martin Frobisher to the north-westwards hath been unknown, or not commonly frequented, by the subjects of our realm of England for trade of merchandise.”
After some deliberation, the articles of the charter were “fully agreed” by the Company of Cathay.26 Cecil, who reviewed the document, jotted down the names of a number of the company’s members, including Gresham, Bond, Burde, Duckett, William Winter, Edmund Hogan (who was elected treasurer), Thomas Randolph—and two other interesting participants: Anthony Jenkinson, who had pioneered the overland route toward Cathay, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert.27
Gilbert had been an enthusiastic supporter of the first voyage, collaborating with Michael Lok, who described him as “a great good willer to this like enterprise.” Lok knew about Gilbert’s “diverse good discourses in the favour” of the Northwest Passage—namely, A Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia—and worked with him to get the unpublished manuscript into print. It was hoped that the treatise would make prospective investors “see many good causes to move them to like well therof.”28 In the end, however, Gilbert’s tract was not published until April 1576—too late for it to have any real impact on the financing of the first voyage.
Now, ahead of the second voyage, potential investors had the opportunity to read Gilbert’s discourse and reflect on the broader vision of the Company of Cathay. In the treatise, Gilbert asserted that Cathay was no “Utopia, or any country fained by imagination,” but rather “a country, well known to be described and set forth by all modern geographers.” He argued that “the passage thereunto, by the Northwest from us, through a sea which lies on the northside of Labrador, [was] mentioned and proved, by no small number of the most expert, and best learned amongst them.”29
To provide visual support for his written arguments, Gilbert prepared “a rough draft of a universal Map.” Today, it looks rudimentary, a mere sketch. But in the 1570s, it was groundbreaking—the first map of the world to be published in England. Strikingly, it showed an open channel separating the northern coast of the “island” of America and a landmass labeled “Anian.”30 In doing so, Gilbert was lending credence to the idea that there was a “strait of Anian,” a Northwest Passage that had first appeared on maps in the early 1560s and that can be traced back to Marco Polo.*
If England could successfully navigate this strait or passage, Gilbert argued, she could find “a far better vent” for its cloth than “yet this realm ever had.”31 At the same time, he contended, she would have access to countries beyond the jurisdiction of Spain and Portugal “where there is to be found [a] great abundance of gold, silver, precious stones, cloth of gold, silks [and] all manner of spices.”
But Gilbert was not just concerned with navigating the Northwest Passage. He proposed that the English should start “inhabiting for our staple some convenient place of America… where it shall seem best for the shortening of the voyage.” In effect, he was proposing a new Calais—but one established along the Northwest Passage. This would be a stepping-stone en route to Cathay. It was bold thinking. But Gilbert envisioned more than a trading outpost. As he explained, “We might inhabit some part of those countries, and settle there such needy people of our country, which now trouble the commonwealth, and through want here at home, are enforced to commit outrageous offences, whereby they are daily consumed with the gallows.”
This argument for a colony—as a trading post and a place to rid England of the vagrants and vagabonds of society—had been drafted before Gilbert went to Ireland. Now, in the light of Frobisher’s discoveries, it took on new relevance. Gilbert’s participation in the Company of Cathay suggests that he thought this new corporation could help him see some of his ideas come to fruition.
IN AN EFFORT to build momentum behind the planned second voyage, Lok and his associates worked closely with the Privy Council, which had Elizabeth’s support. The queen let it be known that she would lend her royal ship, the Ayde, to serve as flagship for the second voyage—a significant sign of her support and increased interest. The council also dispatched letters to the Council of the North—the queen’s administrative assembly that implemented royal policy and, among other things, oversaw merchants in York, Newcastle, and Hull—and to the Mayor of Bristol. These urged them to make an investment, since the next Frobisher voyage “will be beneficial both to the whole realm and particularly to such as are venturers.”32
Meanwhile, Lok commissioned a Dutch painter, Cornelius Ketel, to create portraits of some of the key figures associated with the enterprise—not only Frobisher, the Inuit, and Lok himself but also the Gabriel, probably the first English ship to be honored in this way.33 These paintings were presumably intended to hang someday in the company’s hall, although the investors had not yet acquired a corporate headquarters.
The Inuit was already dead by the time Ketel worked on the portraits, but Lok showed striking foresight by hiring a Dutch engraver to prepare a wax death mask, and it was this that Ketel used to paint several pictures of the man in his Arctic garb. Although Ketel’s portraits of the Inuit have not survived, such was the man’s celebrity that other images of him were produced, probably derived from Ketel’s work. One of these shows the man wearing his warm hooded suit, complete with kayak paddle, bow, and two arrows. In the background, Frobisher is depicted at the moment when he, leaning over the edge of the Gabriel, grabbed the Inuit and plucked him out of the water, kayak and all.34
Of the Ketel portraits, only Frobisher’s has survived the rigors of time. It shows a giant broad-chested man standing in front of a globe and bearing a pistol and sword. Beneath his silk and linen, the subject seems to convey a simmering anger, a hint of danger. Frobisher was not a man to be trifled with. As the investors came to realize, he was just the kind of person needed to lead another perilous mission into the unknown. The concerns about his character, which had put off investors before the first voyage, were apparently allayed by his triumphant return.
These various marketing efforts, as clever as they were, did not raise the entire amount needed. At the end of March 1577, a special commission, established by the Privy Council to oversee the preparation of a second voyage, met to consider the feasibility and finances of the venture. Lok was a member of this commission, along with Sir William Winter, Winter’s brother George, Anthony Jenkinson, Edmund Hogan, and Thomas Randolph. They had some good news to report: after completing interviews with Frobisher and his crew, they sent a note to William Cecil and his fellow privy councillors, informing them that “the supposed Strait” was, as far as they could tell, “a truth, and therefore a thing worthy, in our opinions, to be followed.”35
There was also some bad news. Only forty-five men and women had agreed to subscribe and become, in effect, inaugural members of the Cathay Company. There were some significant subscribers. The queen was the single largest investor, contributing five hundred pounds—followed by Lok (three hundred pounds), Gresham (two hundred pounds), and William Bond’s son (two hundred pounds), his father having died on the eve of the first voyage. Among the courtiers were the Dudley brothers, Ambrose and Robert, their sister, Mary Sidney—Sir Henry’s wife and Elizabeth’s loyal lady-in-waiting—and her son Philip. Also, Sir James Croft, closely associated with Irish colonization and now controller of Elizabeth’s household, pledged fifty pounds to the venture.36
All told, these investors pledged £3,225—scarcely enough to cover the estimated cost of £4,500 for a second voyage to Frobisher Strait. The project seemed in danger of foundering for lack of funds until a startling new piece of information came to light that completely changed the nature of the enterprise.