Frobisher

Frobisher, SIR MARTIN, one of the great Elizabethan seamen, was born in Yorkshire, either at Altofts (near Wakefield) or at Doncaster about 1535. Sent to sea as a boy, he traded to Guinea and elsewhere, and seems at an early age to have become possessed by his life-long dream of a north-west passage to Cathay. After long solicitations he was enabled, chiefly by help of Warwick, to set sail northwards round the Shetland Islands, 7th June 1576, with the Gabriel and the Michael of 20 tons each and a pinnacle of 10 tons, with a total complement of thirty-five men. The pinnacle was soon lost in the storms that followed, and the Michael deserted, but Frobisher held on his adventurous course, was almost lost on the coast of Greenland, and reached Labrador on the 28th July. From Hall's Island at the mouth of Frobisher Bay his men carried away some 'black earth,' which was supposed in London, whither he arrived on October 9th, to contain gold. Next year a new expedition was fitted out with much enthusiasm, the queen herself supplying from the royal navy a vessel of 200 tons. The country around Hall's Island was formally taken and named Meta Ineognita, and abundance of the black earth was brought to England. Yet another and well-appointed expedition was despatched in 1578, but was harassed by storms without and dissensions within, and returned home with a great cargo of the ore, from which, however, no more gold could be extracted. Of Frobisher we hear but little during the next few years, but in 1585 he commanded a vessel in Drake's expedition to the West Indies, did good service in the preparatory task of hampering the designs of Spain, and in the struggle with the Armada covered himself with glory by his conduct in the Triumph, and was rewarded by the honour of knighthood. Frobisher next married a daughter of Lord Wentworth, and settled down as a country gentleman, but was soon again at the more congenial task of scouring the seas for the treasure-ships of Spain. At the siege of Crozon near Brest in the November of 1594 he received a wound of which he died at Plymouth on the 22d of the same month. His Three Voyages were edited by Admiral Collinson for the Hakluyt Society (1867). There is a Life by Rev. F. Jones (1878).