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First Western Thrust

AT THE TIME THAT the Muscovy Company and the Dutch were pushing eastward into the Arctic, the English sought the elusive passage to Cathay through the Arctic regions of the western hemisphere.

It was an Italian navigator in the service of King Henry VII of England, Giovanni Caboto — John Cabot — who was the first to follow upon Columbus’s initial voyages to “the Indies” half a decade earlier. Armed with the royal commission from His Majesty awarding him “full and free authoritie, leave, and Power, to sayle to all Partes, Countreys and Seas of the East, of the West and of the North under our banners and ensigns with five shippes …,”[1] Cabot set off in 1497 from Bristol, England’s second-largest seaport.[2] The voyage was short-lived. He made landfall in Iceland, which in itself was of no major significance since English fishermen had already been harvesting those rich waters and the island was familiar to them. Details of this particular voyage and the subsequent one are not known, and much of what has come down to us is speculation. In Iceland some sort of critical dispute took place between Cabot and the crews, which sadly resulted in an empty-handed return home.

In May of the following year, Cabot set off again, this time with only one vessel, the fifty-ton Matthew. We know that the ship reached Dursey Head in southernmost Ireland, that they pressed on, that the ship’s crew was deeply frightened by icebergs, and that they landed somewhere in North America on June 24, 1497. But where, exactly? Possibly Cape Breton or Labrador or even in Maine, and conflicting claims are made on the matter. The most likely landing spot was Cape Bonavista in eastern Newfoundland. But what matters is that John Cabot is acknowledged as being the first European to have set foot in North America since the Vikings a half millennium earlier — of whom nothing had been known at the time. Back in England, the delighted king received the explorer enthusiastically and awarded “to him that founde the new isle, £10,” a princely sum in those days. The prize was bestowed with no regard to the protestations of the Spanish Ambassador, who complained bitterly that in entering western hemisphere waters Cabot had trespassed illegally, for this was an allocation assigned to Spain three years earlier by His Holiness.

The significance to Arctic history of Cabot’s second voyage lies in the interest it generated for further search of a passage to Cathay. Hard on his heels, a series of explorers prodded the western hemisphere, seeking the riches of the East. In the south, there were such notables as Vespucci, who in 1499 landed in Guiana, Bilboa, and Panama; and Magellan, who landed in Brazil. In the north, Estevan Gomez explored the Maine coast in 1519; five years later, Giovanni da Verrazano became the first to sail north along the American coast exploring New York harbour, in the process. Jacques Cartier made three journeys to the New World and in 1541 planted the first European settlement in North America at Quebec City. These were Spaniards, Portuguese, and Frenchmen; the Dutch and the English all that time were focused on the Northern Sea Route.

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In 1566, the soldier and academic, Sir Humphrey Gilbert[3] effectively argued before Elizabeth I that exploration of a northeastern route to Cathay was too dangerous — “the air is so darkened with continual mists and fogs so bar the pole that no man can well see either to guide his ship or direct his course.” He persuaded Her Majesty that the passage laid west and he urged that England should not to be outdone by its European rivals in the business of North American exploration. The queen’s interest piqued, she agreed — in principle — to sponsor an exploration. The proposal received exhaustive study and then at last the required funds were raised and ships made ready. But by then ten years had passed and Gilbert’s personal interests had shifted elsewhere — to soldiering, the acquisition of land, and raising a family of six children.

Eighty years had passed since the pope divided the world between the Spanish and Portuguese. During that remarkable time a whirlwind of change had enveloped Europe — with global ramifications. Seeded by the Renaissance and Reformation, humanism and secularism had taken spectacular root, and the pervasive influence of the one Church was no more. Although God created the world, it was humans who had developed it. Man, it was now held, is master of his own destiny. Emphasis shifted from God and afterlife to the world of today — the world that was to be enjoyed. Things spiritual found themselves secondary to the things material.

Commerce and trade blossomed throughout Europe, with the dockyards of London and Amsterdam being particularly busy. Demand burgeoned for silks and fine textiles, for ebony, spices, and other exotic commodities of the east. The wharfs and quays of European harbours teemed as never before with merchants and enthusiastic buyers clamouring for such items as nutmeg, cloves, cardamom, ginger, peppers, and cinnamon. The spice trade soon came to dominate the marketplaces and in England, it’s fair to say, spice became the business of the nation.

By the mid-sixteenth century, the overland free flow of goods from the East had long been staunched by the Ottomans. With the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Turks virtually closed the vital Silk Road — traders could pass only by paying exorbitant taxes. Da Gama’s voyage around Africa into the Indian Ocean, and Magellan’s expedition around South America into the Pacific offered fresh avenues for eastern trade. The passage around Cape Horn and across the Pacific was inordinately long and expensive, while and the route around Africa was equally arduous as well as dangerous — Portuguese and Spanish warships patrolled the waters and Barbary pirates delighted in capturing English sailors, whom they sold as slaves.

Little wonder that Gilbert was successful in tweaking the queen’s interest in another expedition to America. A Northwest Passage for the traders would indubitably prove more efficient, less hazardous, and less expensive. In view of Gilbert’s lack of enthusiasm in leading the expedition, Martin Frobisher was commissioned to take command — an appointment that became the opening salvo of a series of Arctic explorations by England in America. In the forty-year period, 1576–1616, fourteen English explorers sailed into those distant reaches, some undertaking more than one voyage — the siren song of the Arctic had unquestionably resonated.

Sir Martin Frobisher explored the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and penetrated Baffin Island’s Frobisher Bay. An explorer and venture capitalist, his hopes of great wealth were falsely placed in the tons of “wonders stone” believed to contain gold.

Frobisher, one contemporary wrote, was “an eminent seaman and a great discoverer,” while another called him “a knave and a scoundrel.” Both were probably right. An adventurer and fortune-seeker he certainly was, whose early career progressed from trade in West Africa to privateering in the Mediterranean. Thrice he was arrested and charged with piracy, but never brought to trial. But he finished his career with distinction as a vice-admiral and had fought side by side with Sir Francis Drake in helping to defeat the Armada, for which he received a knighthood. Following that decisive battle, he continued to harass and engage the Spanish until his death in 1594 of a gunshot wound received off the coast of Spain.

From boyhood, Frobisher had dreamed of establishing a trade route to India and China through the North; speculation and rumour had long been had that the entrance to the waterway through the Arctic was there, awaiting discovery. A Portuguese mariner by the name Martin Chacque was said to have sailed west to east through Arctic waters in 1556, emerging into the Atlantic at latitude 59°N (northern Labrador). A certain Salvaterra, “a gentleman of Victoria in Spain,” landed in Ireland in 1568 en route home from the West Indies, affirming the existence of the passage. He subsequently informed Frobisher of a Mexican friar, Fra Andrea Urdante, who claimed to have sailed from the south seas to Germany via the Northwest Passage, also from west to east. Such were the tales circulating of the elusive route that enflamed Frobisher’s determination to penetrate the Arctic waterways. He noted reassuringly that Salvaterra “offered most willingly to accompany me in this discovery, which it is likely he would not have done, if he had stood in doubt thereof.”[4]

For Frobisher it was not merely the kudos of successful discovery that motivated him. His entrepreneurial self was conscious of fresh market potential for English woollens and of untapped sources of furs and minerals. All this was wildly enticing, and the potential returns, he calculated, would far exceed anything that piracy or the slave trade could bring. While still in his twenties he began seeking financial backing for an exploration, but that was long in coming; it took fifteen years. In 1574, he managed to catch the ear of the Earl of Warwick, who exerted sufficient political pressure on the Muscovy Company to have it endorse the project and raise the required capital. So it was that Frobisher found himself in charge of a fleet of three small vessels being made ready to sail out of London’s shipyards — the three-mast, twenty-five-ton Gabriel, the twenty-ton Michael, and a nameless pinnace, together bearing a complement of thirty-five men.[5]

The expedition set off down the Thames on July 7, and in sailing past Greenwich, Her Majesty honoured them by a gracious wave of the hand from a palace window. Within days of passing the Shetlands, the little fleet was hit by an uncommonly fierce storm, fierce enough to sink the tiny pinnace with its four-man crew. Days later near Greenland, the crew of the Michael became so terrified by the threatening ice amassing about them that they simply refused to sail farther and forced a return home. Frobisher aboard the Gabriel, however, pressed forward and on the 28th he sighted the north coast of Labrador. Paralleling the coastline in a northerly direction, the shores of Baffin Island eventually loomed into view. In following its coastline west, Frobisher found himself sailing for a long spell in a broad channel and here the explorer’s heart no doubt beat faster — surely this was the start of the waterway of their search. The disappointment must have been palpable when after some fifty miles into the channel he came to a dead end. The channel in fact proved to be nothing more than a fjord — Frobisher Bay, some thee hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle, at the head of which today stands the town of Iqaluit.

Despite the sail’s anticlimactic dead end, one notable outcome of the foray was the first post-Columbian European encounter with Arctic natives. The initial meeting with these natives was friendly, with the Inuit readily coming on board the Gabriel where they were entertained cordially. “They be like Tartars,” reported the ship’s captain, “with long black hair, broad faces and flatte noses, and taunie in colour, wearing seale skinnes, and so do the women, not differing in the fashion, but the women are marked in the face with blue streekes down the cheeks and round the eyes.”[6] Meat and furs were traded for knives and bells and so amiable were these exchanges that five of the crew volunteered to row their newfound friends back to shore — not, however, before being strictly admonished by the captain that they on no account find themselves out of ship’s sight. The men never returned.

For three days Frobisher lingered in the area, hoping that the missing men would reappear. As for the Inuit, they too seemed to have disappeared until, on the fourth day, at a far distance, a native was spotted in his kayak. With the rigorous tinkling of bells and welcoming waving of arms, the unsuspecting fellow was lured alongside the Gabriel. As he stretched up to receive a proffered bell, the sailors “caught the man fast and pluncked him with maine force, boate and all, into the ship out of the sea.”

With no sign of his lost men, the season rapidly advancing, and with “the strange infidel” safely stowed away, Frobisher ordered a return home. Weeks later, the Gabriel sailed into London amid much joyous acclaim. Frobisher was greeted as a hero for not only had he and his ship survived, having been taken earlier for lost, but carrying with them a “strange man and his boate, which was such a wonder onto the whole city and to the rest of the realm … [Frobisher] was highly commended … for the great hope he brought of the passage to Cathay.” His unfortunate prisoner, however, “had taken a cold at sea, soon died.”

And then, a sensational turn of events. The returning sailors had carried home souvenirs of their adventurous journey, and among them one Seaman Hall brought an unusual black stone. His wife inadvertently cast it into the fireplace, but soon spotted, it was withdrawn and doused with water. It now “glistened with a bright marquesset of golde.” The wondrous stone was taken to three assayers, two of whom thought it to be white pyrites, whereas the third convincingly pronounced it to contain gold.

The rush was on. Within five months of Frobisher’s return, he was off again to the Arctic, this time not so much to seek the way to Cathay, but to mine more black rock. Funding for this second expedition had been gathered effortlessly; the queen herself subscribed £1,000, having received the hero “with gracious countenance and comfortable words.” His backers directed him strictly to search “for the Gold Ore, and to deferre the further discoverie of the passage until another tyme.” On May 31, 1577, the 120 men of the four heavily equipped ships, having “received the Sacrament and prepared themselves as good Christians towards God,” sailed forth. On July 4, Frobisher reached Greenland’s mountainous coast at 60°30', where the icebergs they had been encountering appeared larger than ever. He marvelled at the size of these “islands of ice,” some he reckoned to be a half-mile in circumference. Mostly, however, he was stunned to find that they were of fresh water, which led him to believe that they “must be bredde in the sounds or in some land neere the pole.” He concluded, furthermore, that if such were the case, the “maine sea freeseth not, therefore there is no mare glaciale, as the opinion hitherto hath been.”

The ice prevented a landing and the small fleet continued on until it arrived to its destination, the strait on Baffin Island where Hall’s black stone had been found. While the party of miners accompanying the expedition oversaw the excavation of the esteemed ore, Frobisher launched a search for his five missing sailors. The men were not found, but they discovered remnants of English shoes and clothing, some with arrow holes in an abandoned Inuit camp — foul play seemed obvious. One search party encountered a party of natives who initially appeared welcoming. The face-to-face encounter seemed friendly enough, but then it soured and became increasingly heated. Finally, the “savages … so fiercely, desperately, and with such fury assaulted and pursued our generall and his master … that they chased them to their boates, and hurt the generall in the buttocke with an arrow.”

The search for ore on the north side of the bay proved disappointing, so it was moved to the south side. On that shore, much excitement was generated by the discovery of “a great dead fishe, twelve feet long, having a bone of two yards long growing out of the snoute or nostril” — a narwhal. Shortly after they established themselves and began the search in earnest, another party of natives was encountered, and these Frobisher determined to capture. In the ensuing melee, five Inuit were killed and the rest ran away. Two women, however, were captured, “whereof the one being old and ugly, our men thought she had been the devil or some witch, and therefore let her goe,” but the other one was retained, an attractive young mother with a howling baby on her back. During the struggle, an arrow had pierced the infant’s arm and “our surgeon meaning to heale her child’s arme, applied salves thereonto.” The frightened woman grew suspicious of the medication, brushed it off, and “by continuuale lickng with her owne tongue, not much unlike our dogs, healed upthe childe’s arm.”

Using the mother and child as hostage, a parlay was successfully established with the natives, during which Frobisher was given to understand that the five missing men were alive, but were located at some distance. He penned a letter to them, which the natives were instructed to deliver on pain of the mother and child’s death. The reassuring preamble is notable [spelling, in modern English]:

In the name of God, in whom we all believe, who, I trust, has preserved your bodies and souls among these infidels, I commend myself to you. I will be glad to seek by all means one can devise for your deliverance, either with force, or with any commodities within my ships, which I will not spare for your sakes, or anything else I can do for you.

The letter goes on to explain that his men are to inform the “savages” that unless they are immediately and safely delivered, mother and child would die and that “I will not leave a man alive in their country.” The natives were dispatched, but alas without result — they neither returned nor did the Englishmen reappear.

The mining operation had been progressing satisfactorily, but the season was rapidly advancing. Apart from not finding his missing men, it had been a successful mission and since Frobisher had been ordered “to deferre the further discoverie of the passage till another tyme,” he ordered preparations for a return home. For the next twenty days every person present was put to work loading onto the vessels two hundred tons of the sought-after ore, and on August 22 they set sail, not however, before taking a third native hostage.

In England, samples of the ore were delivered to experts, but no consensus was reached on their value. Investors and refiners were at loggerheads, but the queen and her officials remained firm in their convictions that a unique source of gold had in fact been uncovered. So delighted was Her Majesty with prospects of “great riches and profit, and the hope of the passage to Cathay,” that a fleet of fifteen ships was made ready for yet another expedition to the recently discovered land, which the Queen had named Meta Incognita. Frobisher was made an admiral and had a gold chain planted about his neck by his monarch.

On May 31, 1578, the fleet put out from England, with a twofold purpose: first, to return with a substantial cargo of ore, and second, to establish a mining colony in the new land — a hundred men had signed on to spend a winter on Meta Incognita, mostly miners, carpenters, and soldiers. Stowed in the ships’ holds were all the material and equipment required for the building of a walled fortress-like shelter of 9,500 square feet, complete with bastions. On arriving at Frobisher’s strait, they found it nearly chockablock with icebergs, one of which was fatally encountered by the one-hundred-ton bark Dennis. The ship sank, but its crew was saved. The unfortunate aspect of the loss, however, was that the vessel carried most of the expedition’s construction supplies. Following this critical setback, further bad luck befell the ships. A brutal storm hit the anchored fleet and the vessels were dispersed, some driven farther into the strait, others were swept out to sea by drift ice, with most sustaining damage. Once reassembled and repaired, a period of fogs, heavy mists, and snows brought work to a stop, all this resulting in time lost.

With the loss of the building material it was deemed impractical to pursue the colonization project — something perhaps for the future. But the mining proceeded. Much to their satisfaction, an especially bounteous amount of the black ore was found on “a great black island … as might reasonably suffice all the gold gluttons of the world.” Work on excavating the rock got underway in earnest with vast quantities of the stuff being loaded on board the vessels — nearly two thousand tons of it.

On August 31, the ships set off for home and after fighting their way through a series of storms — “many of the fleete were dangerously distressed and were severed almost all asunder” — they made it back. Prior to departing “the black island,” Frobisher ordered the erection of a small house of stone and mortar, fourteen feet by eight complete with a wooden roof, an experiment to see how such a structure might weather an Arctic winter. Three hundred years later, it was discovered still standing.

All attempts to find gold in the mass of stone carried home came to naught. Five long years passed before the specialists investigating the material reluctantly agreed that the black rock contained no gold. So disheartened was everyone with the disappointing results — investors, refiners, the queen and above all, Frobisher — that further expeditions to the Arctic came to a temporary halt. The vast heap of Baffin Island stone was crushed and put to use in the construction of country roads. A princely sum totalling £20,160 had been spent on Frobisher’s three attempts — an enormous amount when one considers that the cost of building the Gabriel was £83. And such was the disappointing conclusion to the earliest European effort to exploit the Arctic’s natural resources. All the while, the veil of the Arctic Siren continued to envelop the coveted Northwest Passage.

The three Inuit hostages brought to England by Frobisher — a male, a female, and an infant — created a sensation. Londoners flocked to view “the savages,” and their every aspect was enthusiastically commented upon and discussed. The pathetic captives, however, were not long for the world; all died within months of landing in the strange land. An autopsy on the man showed that two broken ribs had punctured a lung, which “had excited inflammation and the condition of the lung had, in the course of time, become putrified as a result.”[7] Their misfortune was to have fallen into Frobisher’s hands all because of the enmity that had coloured the exchanges following the disappearance of the five crew members. What had happened to the lost shore party? Did the sailors go astray on their own, perhaps jumping ship? Or had the men been kidnapped by “the infidels”? Whatever the case, the Baffin Island natives were believed to have been involved.

And what of the natives — whence had these people come and who were they? How did these tenacious folk manage life along the ice-encrusted shores of the Arctic’s frozen expanses, in that harshest of all climates?

For starters, it should be noted that in bygone days all peoples of those regions were called Eskimo or Esquimaux — literally, “eaters of raw meat.” The term, however, was found to be pejorative, and today the native people of northern Canada, Greenland, and the north slope of Alaska are referred to as Inuit, the native word for “men.” The other group of Eskimos, the peoples of Siberia and the Pacific shores of Alaska, falls under the name Yupik.

Frobisher’s Inuit were descended from settlers who had migrated to Alaska from Siberia after the end of the Ice Age eleven thousand ago. At the time, the Bering Strait separating North America from Asia continued to be bridged by glacial ice. Solid evidence shows that today’s Inuit share a common ancestry with the Mongols and quite likely with the Koreans, as well. Around 1000 A.D., a migration of the peoples inhabiting western Alaska took place — a movement east with an eventual fanning out to various parts of the Canadian Arctic and Greenland. These people of the so-called Thule culture displaced those already there, a distinctive tribe of large, strong, and innocent peoples called Tuniit, identified by archeologists as being of the Dorset culture. The origins of the Tuniit are not understood, but artifacts have been uncovered in the Canadian Arctic that are nearly identical to those found near Lake Baikal and elsewhere in Siberia. Since the Russian finds are eighteen thousand years old, Canadian archeological evidence points to the Tuniit as appreciably predating the incursion of the Inuit. (The oldest settlement in North America today having a continuous history of unbroken human habitation is the Alaskan village of Port Hope, 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the Chukchi Sea — some two thousand years old.)