Frobisher (1577)
Frobisher, Sir Martin (1539?-1594). De Martini Forbisseri Angli navigatione in regiones occidentis et septentrionis [...]. Noribergae: C. Gerlachin & H. I. Montani, 1580.
Sir Martin Frobisher, the first Englishman since the Cabots to look for a Northwest Passage to Asia, was probably born in 1539. During the 1550s he participated in at least two commercial expeditions to Guinea. From the early 1560s on, he looked for sponsors who would agree to finance a voyage to Asia via the Northwest. In the meantime he devoted himself to commerce and sometimes to privateering: he was incarcerated at least three times on a charge of piracy.
After finally obtaining the necessary funding for his plan, Frobisher set sail on July 1, 1576. He reached Baffin Island and managed to enter the bay that now bears his name, thinking that he was somewhere between America and Asia. He returned to England in October, bringing back, among other things, a piece of shiny black rock he had picked up in the bay. London experts declared that it contained gold.
As a result, Frobisher's sponsors founded the Cathay Company and put him in command of a new expedition. However, the search for the Northwest Passage was put off until later: Frobisher was to search only for gold-bearing ore. In 1577 he set out with three ships, stayed for close to a month in Frobisher Bay, on Countess of Warwick Island, and then returned to England with 200 tons of ore. In 1578 Frobisher set out again at the head of a third expedition composed of 15 ships and carrying the necessary equipment for spending a winter there. But after his return to England in 1579 the ore he had brought turned out ultimately to be without value, and the Cathay Company was ruined. In the following years Frobisher continued his career in the navy. He died in 1594 of the after effects of a wound he had received during a battle with the Spanish.
If Frobisher did little to advance the knowledge of the Northwest Passage, he did at least call attention to the existence of Hudson Strait, while passing on valuable information about Arctic navigation to his successors.
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