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