“choked up” with “many walles, mountaines, and bulwarks of yce.” Off the
Foreland and, as they supposed, about the entrance to the “straits” they
were buffeted by high winds and “forced many times to stemme and strike
great rockes” of ice. Soon the fleet was dispersed. The “Judith,”
carrying the lieutenant-general, Fenton, disappeared. The “Michael” had
been early lost from sight by her companion ships. Of those which
remained in company the bark “Dennis” shortly foundered, having received
a crushing blow against a rock of ice. As she took the blow she
signalled her danger by a shot from her great gun, and, fortunately,
such quick aid was rendered by the other ships with their shipboats that
all her men were saved. With her went down a part of the frame of the
house to be erected for the band assigned to winter at Meta Incognita.
Next a savage tempest suddenly arose, blowing from the sea “directly
upon the place of the straits,” and various devices had to be resorted
to to save the ships from destruction. Some getting a little sea room
took in sails and drifted. Some were moored to great “islands of ice”
and rode under their lee. Others were so shut in that they were at the
mercy of the ice. To break its force, “junckes [junks] of cables, beds,
masts, planks” were hung over their sides, while the mariners stood for
hours beating it off with pikes, oars, and pieces of timber. Four—the
“Anne Francis,” Best’s ship, the “Moone,” the “Francis of Foy,” and the
“Gabriel”—being farthest from shore, and fast sailers, weathered the
tempest under sail; and by noon the next day they had got off at sea
clear of ice. And here by night of the following day they were joined by
the rest of the fleet, which had escaped with a turn of the wind that
had broken their ice barriers. Now joyous in fellowship again, they all
“played off” more to seaward, there to abide till the ice had further
cleared from before the entrance to their “straits.”
On the seventh of July they “cast about toward the inward” for another
attempt. Shortly they sighted land, which was before them in form like
the North Foreland, or Hall’s Island. But there was a difference of
opinion as to whether it was or was not. The coast being veiled in fog
was difficult to make out. After a while a height was discerned which
some were sure was Mount Warwick. Yet they marvelled how it was possible
that they should be so suddenly “shot up” so far into the “straits.” The
captain-general sent his pinnace the round of the fleet to take a census
of the opinions of all the captains and masters. As the matter grew more
doubtful Christopher Hall, the chief pilot, whose knowledge of this
Foreland, to whom his name had been given, was the more intimate,
“delivered a plain and publique opinion in the hearing of the whole
Fleete, that he had never seene the foresayd coast before, and that he
would not make it for any place of Frobisher’s Straits.”
They were, in fact, southwestward of Queen Elizabeth’s Foreland, and at
the entrance to Hudson’s Strait, to be rediscovered or re-explored
thirty-two years afterward by Henry Hudson, and so named for him.
The fog continued to hang about them “thick and dark,” and on the tenth
they were again partly dispersed. The “Thomas Allen,” aboard of which
was the chief pilot with Captain Yorke, having lost sight of the
admiral, turned back to sea with two others in her company. The “Anne
Francis,” finding herself alone, also put to sea, to remain till the
weather should permit the taking of the sun’s altitude. The “Ayde” kept
on the course, and leading the rest of the fleet, passed into the
“doubtful” strait.
Up this broad passage the “Ayde” and her consorts sailed for “about
sixty leagues,” having “always a faire continent upon their starreboard
side, and a continuance still of an open sea before them.” Frobisher was
the first to realize that they were on a new and unknown water. Yet he
dissembled his opinion and continued to persuade his associates that it
was the right way, by such policy meaning to carry them along with him
for further discovery. This he was said to have afterward confessed when
he declared that “if it had not bene for the charge and care he had of
the Flete and fraighted ships, he both would and could have gone through
to the South Sea [the Pacific] ... and dissolved the long doubt of the
passage” to “Cathay.” While he may have been more or less impelled to
his adventures, in common with his chief backers, by the “lust for
gold,” he was above all moved by the spirit of the true discoverer: a
merit in his performances which some popular historians have failed to
recognize.
When at length he turned the fleet and they sailed back to the entrance
of this strait, he found a way into the “old strait” by the inside of
Queen Elizabeth’s Foreland, thus incidentally discovering that to be an
island. Now within the “proper strait,” after many perils overcome in
making it, some of the dispersed ships were met, and others heard from.
First appeared the “Anne Francis,” which had long been “beating off and
on” before the Queen’s Foreland. At the meeting they joyously welcomed
one another with “a thundering volley of shot.” The next day the
“Francis of Foy” joined them, having fought her way through the ice out
of the “mistaken strait.” She brought tidings of the “Thomas Allen,”
which she had left at sea clear of the ice. Later the “Buss of
Bridgewater” showed up, and reported the “marvellous accidents and
dangers” she had experienced.
The latter’s men also declared that “Frobisher’s Straits” above were so
frozen over that it was “the most impossible thing of the world” to
reach the destined port—the Countess of Warwick’s Sound. This report
spreading through the fleet “brought no small feare and terror into the
hearts of many,” and murmurs against venturing further passed from lip
to lip. Some urged that a harbour be sought where the battered ships
might be repaired, and the fleet might await the dispersion of the ice.
Others mutinously declared that they “had as leave be hanged when they
came home as without hope of safetie to seeke to passe, and so to perish
amongst the ice.”
To all these murmurings of discontent, however, the intrepid Frobisher
lent a deaf ear, determined to reach the ultimate port or else to “burie
himselfe with his attempt.” But, as before, he dissembled. “Somewhat to
appease the feeble passions of the fearfuller sort,” he “haled on the
Fleete with beleefe that he would put them into harborow.” Accordingly
he went with his pinnace among the neighbouring islands as if searching
for a haven, but really to see if any ore might be found in them.
Meanwhile another “terrible tempest” suddenly came up from the
southwest, and once more the fleet were in part dispersed. It was the
twenty-sixth of July, and snow fell so hard and fast that “we could not
see one another for the same, nor open our eyes to handle our ropes and
sails.” The “Anne Francis,” the “Moone,” and the “Thomas of Ipswich”
again plied seaward. The rest of the fleet stayed by the admiral. When
the storm was spent these remaining ships under Frobisher’s lead had
pushed through the ice up the bay, “with incredible pain and peril,” and
at last reached the goal, dropping anchors in the Countess of Warwick’s
Sound on the thirty-first of July. At the entrance to the haven, when
all hardship was thought to be over, the “Ayde” narrowly escaped sinking
through contact with a “great island of ice.” Here, to their
astonishment, the new-comers found arrived before them the “Judith” and
the “Michael,” both of which had been mourned as lost. The happy meeting
was celebrated with more exchange of thundering salutes from the great
ordnance. Then all came together in a service of praise and
thanksgiving, and the minister of the fleet, Master Wolfall, preached a
“goodly sermon” to a kneeling company on the “Ayde.”
No time was lost in getting to work at the “mines.” Immediately upon
landing on the Countess of Warwick’s Island Frobisher assembled his
council of captains and orders of government were adopted. On the first
of August the whole company were mustered on shore, the tents set up,
and everything got in readiness for operations. On the next day the
orders of the council were published and proclaimed by sound of the
trumpet. On the next, all were diligently employed in their several
classes, the miners plying their trade, the goldfiners trying the “ore,”
the sailors discharging the ships: the gentlemen labouring as heartily
as the “inferior sort” for “examples sake.” Meanwhile Frobisher was
busied in seeking new mines in neighbouring parts. On the ninth of
August preparations were made to set up the house for the one hundred
men assigned to remain here a year. But half of the frame had been lost
with the foundering of the “Dennis,” and the remaining parts, brought
out in others of the ships, were imperfect, pieces having been used for
fenders in the battles of the ships against the ice. Provisions also
were short, the “Thomas of Ipswich” having carried most of the supplies
intended for the temporary colonists. Captain Fenton offered to stay
with sixty men, and the carpenters and masons were asked how soon they
could build a house for this smaller number. They replied, in eight or
nine weeks, provided enough timber could be found. Of course this would
never do, for the fleet must depart much before that time or else be
frozen in for the winter. There remained no alternative, and so the
general and council were forced reluctantly to decide that the plan of a
habitation for this year must be abandoned. Later in the month, however,
a little house of lime and stone was erected under Captain Fenton’s
direction for possible occupation another year. And when at length the
company were making ready to leave the place, this house was stocked
with the trifles they had brought for traffic with the natives—bells,
whistles, knives, looking-glasses, combs, pins, leaden toy men and
women, some on horseback some on foot—"the better to allure" the
“bruitish and uncivill people to courtesie” against another coming of
the Englishmen.
Toward the middle of August the “Thomas Allen” had joined the fleet
here, and her company were working a “mine” which Captain Yorke had
found on an island by Bear’s Sound, which he called the “Countess of
Sussex Mine.” Near the end of the month the “Anne Francis” and the
“Moone” had arrived. Now the fleet were once more together, excepting
the lost “Dennis” and the “Thomas of Ipswich,” supposed also to be lost.
The “Thomas of Ipswich,” however, as subsequently appeared, had, after
the tempest of July twenty-six, when she was at sea in company with the
“Anne Francis” and the “Moone,” turned about under the cover of night,
and scudded home for England.
The “Anne Francis” came up laden with ore which she had taken on an
island in a harbour of Queen’s Foreland, which Best had found, and which
he reported was in such abundance there that if its goodness equalled
its plentifulness it “might reasonably suffice all the gold-gluttons of
the world.” The adventures of this ship after the tempest of the
twenty-sixth of July—which the chroniclers distinguished as “the day of
the great snowe”—were remarkable in several respects, and Captain Best
showed himself to be of the same heroic mould as Captain Frobisher. When
she, with the “Moone” and the “Thomas of Ipswich” had been for a long
time beating about off “Queen’s Foreland,” and were bruised and battered
from their contacts with the ice, Best called the several captains and
masters to a conference in her cabin. Having grave doubts as to the fate
of the rest of the fleet, and considering the sorry condition of their
own vessels, together with the lateness of the season, a proposal to
abandon further efforts and turn their prows homeward was earnestly
debated. Both sides having been fully heard, Best rendered the decision.
It should never be spoken of him, he declared, that “hee would ever
return without doing his endeavours to finde the Fleete and know the
certaintie of the General’s safetie.” It was therefore agreed that first
a fit harbour should be sought; that this found, the pinnace brought out
in parts on the “Anne Francis” should be put together; and that then,
leaving the ships in the harbour, he himself would take the pinnace and
push up the “straits” to prove if it were possible for the ships to
break through the ice and reach the Countess of Warwick’s Land; and also
to seek tidings of Frobisher and the rest of the fleet. In the meantime
the skippers were to keep the craft together as near as they could, “as
true Englishmen and faithful friends should supply one another’s wants
in all fortunes and dangers.” Only the next night, however, the company
of the “Thomas of Ipswich” was lost, and the “Anne Francis” and the
“Moone” alone remained to pursue the adventure as agreed. Harbour was
found by Best at an island lying under “Hatton’s Headland,” where he
discovered the promising ore. For this “good hap” he called the island
“Best’s Blessing.” Here his miners were put to work on the ore, while
the carpenters toiled at building the pinnace. How this was done with
the shifts they were put to for tools and materials is best told in
Best’s words:
“They wanted two speciall and most necessaire things, that is, certaine
principall tymbers that are called Knees, which are the chiefest
strength of any Boate, and also nayles, where withall to joyne the
plancks together. Whereupon having by chance a Smyth amongst them (and
yet unfurnished of the necessary tooles to worke and make nayles
withall) they were faine of a gunne chamber to make an Anvile to worke
upon, and to use a pickaxe in stead of a sledge to beate withall, and
also to occupy two small bellowes in steade of one payre of greater
Smiths bellowes. And for lacke of small yron for the easier making of
nayles, they were forced to breake their tongs, grydiron, and fire
shovel in pieces.”
At length on the seventeenth of August the boat, although hung together
only by the strength of the nails, and lacking some of the principal
knees and timbers, was pronounced finished, and Best made ready for his
voyage. Veteran seamen strongly advised against the venture in such a
frail craft, assured that it could have only a fatal end. Thereupon he
called for the best judgment of the master and mariners of his ship upon
the matter, and to foster a favourable decision, he urged the absolute
necessity for the voyage now that ore had been found, to seek with
Frobisher’s company the goldfiners who alone could test the value of
their “find.” This court of last resort decided that by careful handling
the pinnace might suffice. Then the master’s mate and Captain Upcot of
the “Moone” volunteered for the voyage. Others were quick to follow
their example; and on the nineteenth Best set off with a goodly crew,
the whole company comprising twenty men. With much rowing and cautious
sailing, and hugging the shore, they got on without the disaster
predicted. On the second day out they had sight of the Countess of
Warwick’s Sound in the distance from a hilltop on shore where they had
landed for observation. Again afloat, soon smoke was seen rising from a
fire under a hillside. As this point was approached people were observed
and apparently signalling them with a flag or ensign. They suspected
that this was a trick of natives, for they saw no ship. Coming nearer
tents were seen, and it was perceived that the ensign was “after the
English fashion.” They fancied that some of the fleet had been brought
up thus far and wrecked, and that they had been spoiled by the natives,
who were now signalling them likewise into danger. Then, true Englishmen
that they were, they resolved to have that flag, or, “els to lose their
lives.” So they made for it, and to their great surprise and joy they
found it to be a signal of their own countrymen. When within hailing
they shouted “What cheer?” The response came cheerily back, “All’s
well.” Then “there arose a sudden and joyfull outshoote [shout] with
great flinging up of caps, and a brave voly of shot to welcome one
another.” The group thus so happily met were a party working the “mine”
on the Countess of Sussex Island. They, in their turn, had supposed when
they signalled that Best’s company were survivors of a wreck of one of
the ships. From this point the shaky pinnace hastened into the Countess
of Warwick’s Sound, where Frobisher and the rest were met with as joyous
greetings. Best displayed his samples of ore, and the goldfiners, trying
them, “supposed” them to be “very good.” Accordingly Frobisher directed
him to freight his ship at Best’s Blessing, and then bring her up. So he
returned as he came, and found her already laden. The next day she
sailed, and arrived with the “Moone” at the rendezvous on the
twenty-eighth of August.
On the thirtieth the work at the Countess of Warwick’s Island was
finished and the fleet were prepared for the homeward voyage. Frobisher
endeavoured to persuade his council of captains to make one more effort
at further discovery. He would “not only by Gods help bring home his
shippes laden with Ore, but also meant to bring some certificate of a
further discovery of the Countrey.” His associates were loth to fall in
with the proposal, considering the time spent in the “mistaken straits,”
and holding that discovery to have been something gained, in that
thereby the hope of a passage to Cathay was “much furthered and
encreased”; yet loyal to his leadership they were willing as he should
appoint to “take any enterprise in hand.” Although the conclusion was
reached that under all the circumstances “the thing was impossible,”
Frobisher himself took his pinnace and explored some distance farther
northward.
On their last day ashore the remnants of the frame of their timber house
were buried, and about the lime and stone house were sown peas, corn,
and other grain “to proove the fruitfulnesse of the soyle against the
next yeere.” These things done, formal leave of the place was taken. The
company being assembled, Master Wolfall preached another “goodly”
sermon, and celebrated a communion. The next day, the thirty-first of
August, all embarked, and the fleet, with the exception of the “Judith”
and the “Anne Francis,” which tarried to take in fresh water, hoisted
sail for home.
Now new perils were to beset them. The “Buss of Bridgewater” and the
barks “Gabriel” and “Michael,” not fully laden, put into Bear’s Sound to
take on a little more, the others meanwhile waiting for them farther
down the bay. Frobisher also went ashore in Bear’s Sound to superintend
the lading; and so did Best, the latter to take off his miners and their
trappings here, in his rickety “kneeless” pinnace. That night an
“outrageous tempest” fell upon them and created a general havoc. The
fleet down the bay were beaten with such vehement “vigor that anchor and
cable availed nought.” They were driven on “rockes and Ilands of yce”
and not one escaped damage. The “Judith” and the “Anne Francis” had now
joined them. Frobisher could not reach his ship and was compelled to
board the “Gabriel.” Best and his men had the roughest time of it. Their
crazy pinnace was taken in tow by the “Michael” and rushed through the
icy waters till the “Anne Francis” (which with the “Judith” had now
joined the fleet) was reached. They scrambled aboard the “Anne” in
panicky haste, and as the last man mounted her side the pinnace
“shivered and sank in pieces at the ship’s stern.” Thus fitly ended the
career of this astonishing craft. Unseaworthy from the start, she had
indeed performed wonders, and had miraculously held her own till her
full work was done.
Again the fleet was dispersed, not to come together through the
remainder of the voyage. The “boystrous blasts” continued so fierce and
constant that all were blown homeward “will we or nill we” (willy nilly)
at a clipping pace. “If by chance any one Shippe did overtake other by
swiftness of sayle, or mette [met] as they often did, yet was the rigour
of the wind so hideous that they could not continue company together the
space of one whole night.” The “Buss of Bridgewater” took her course
alone to the southeast of Greenland, and discovered on the way, in
latitude fifty-seven and a half degrees north, a phantom island,
“seeming to be fruitfull, full of woods, and a champagne country.” It
was named “Buss Island,” and got onto the maps; but it was never again
found. The other ships came limping home one by one, and by the first of
October all had arrived, “some in one place and some in another.” Of the
whole company that went out forty had perished during the expedition.
There is no record of public demonstrations at this home-coming, or of
elation over the precious freight of the battered ships. During the
absence of the voyagers a mystery which had been thrown over the ore
previously brought had deepened, and now there was a growing suspicion
that it was not the profitable thing that had been supposed. Indeed,
before this expedition had started out from England a pretty sturdy
quarrel had developed among the assayers. Now the breach between them
had widened. There was, too, a rupture in the councils of the Company of
Cathay. A sorry situation, therefore, was met by the returned voyagers.
Frobisher fell upon evil days. Charges of broken promises were brought
against him. He retorted with similar charges against the management of
the promoting corporation. Finally, the Company of Cathay went to
pieces, the adventurers lost heavily in their investment, while of the
ore of the last voyage, so laboriously gathered and safely brought to
port through such perils, nothing more was heard.
Thus dismally closes the story of the Eldorado of the Northwest. Three
centuries afterward, in 1862, Captain Charles Francis Hall, the American
Arctic explorer, on a New England whaler, identified the Countess of
Warwick’s Island as “Kod-lu-narn,” the “Island of the White Man”; and
found, even then in a fair state of preservation, the little house of
lime and stone, with a number of relics of its furnishings.
Frobisher, upon the sorry sequel of his third voyage, lost the queen’s
favour. He later regained it, however, sufficiently to secure his
employment in 1580 as captain of his majesty’s ship the “Foresight” in
preventing the Spaniards from aiding the Irish rebellion in Münster. The
next year, 1581, he was the chosen leader for a new voyage of
Northwestern discovery projected by the Earl of Leicester and others.
But when, before the sailing, in 1582, the instructions were changed for
the purposes of trade and not for discovery, he withdrew from the
enterprise in favour of Captain Fenton, his lieutenant-general in the
voyage of 1578.
In 1585–1586 he was in Sir Francis Drake’s warring expedition to the
West Indies, in charge of the “Primrose”; and in 1588 he commanded the
“Triumph” in the great fight against the Spanish Armada. It was then
that he received the honour of knighthood, being knighted by Admiral
Howard at sea for bravery. In 1590, 1592, and 1594 he was in other
engagements, vice-admiral to Sir John Hawkins in one; sent out by Sir
Walter Raleigh in another; and in the third with Sir John Norris at
Brest and Crozon. Wounded in the last fight while leading his men in
action ashore, and the victim of unskilled surgery, he died after
reaching Plymouth.
He was a brave and resolute man, harsh in bearing, with the rough manner
of the sailor, but generous and just.
XV
HAWKINS IN FLORIDA
A decade before Martin Frobisher had opened the north parts of the North
American continent to Englishmen, John Hawkins had surveyed the southern
tip at Florida, and upon his return had represented this fair and
favoured region, then to indefinite bounds included among Spain’s
American possessions, and in a corner of which France for more than a
year had maintained a slender foothold, as ripe for England to venture
in and colonize. His was the first account in detail of Florida by an
Englishman, and it was the germ from which fruitage later developed in
Raleigh’s schemes.
Hawkins’s were purely trading voyages, and he was a fighting trader,
demanding the open market for his wares at the point of the sword when
it was denied him by representatives of foreign governments. His wares,
too, were more or less fought for. The most profitable of them were
Negroes seized on the African coast and bartered into slavery in the
West Indies and on the Spanish Main—along the north coast of South
America. He was the first (or his father before him as some historians
say) to bring the African slave trade into English commerce, and to
plant Negro slavery in America. Discovery was only an incident in the
pursuit of his trade. Yet what he accomplished in this direction was of
no slight import, since it opened the way to others of loftier aims.
While his fame is tarnished by the blotch of traffic in human beings (in
his day, we must remember, deemed by the godly and godless alike as not
an unrighteous traffic), it is enduring by virtue of heroic deeds, and
his place is fairly with the great English captains of the sea who had
part in the beginnings of America.
[Illustration: S^R. JOHN HAWKINS.]