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The Arctic Voyages of Martin Frobisher, Volume 28 - An Elizabethan Adventure (Hardcover, illustrated edition)
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The Arctic Voyages of Martin Frobisher, Volume 28 - An Elizabethan Adventure (Hardcover, illustrated edition)
Series: McGill-Queen's Native and Northern Series
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From the book: "They were five weeks out of England, driving
through a storm on the icy edge of the world, when a sudden blast
knocked Gabriel on her side. The helmsman tried frantically to turn
the tiny ship into the wind that pinned it down, but the rudder had
lifted clear of the surface and took no purchase. Water poured over
the side, roaring into hatches as the wind drove the vessel across
the waves and the crew clung frozen in despair. Only the captain
acted, scrambling along the almost-horizontal upper sides, casting
off lines to spill wind from the sails, forcing the crew into
action to cut away the mizzenmast and the broken foreyard, then
preventing them from doing the same to the mainmast. Finally
Gabriel rose sluggishly, heavy with seawater but steering slowly
off the wind. A tangle of broken rigging and sodden sails, she
wallowed before the storm through the remainder of the day and all
of the following night, while the captain restored order and set
men to pumping the ship dry." Under orders from Queen Elizabeth I,
Gabriel's captain B privateer and adventurer Martin Frobisher B
took up the search for a northwestern route to Asia. A few days
after enduring the storm of 14 July 1576, Frobisher sighted the
most easterly outlier of Arctic North America and for the first
time England became aware of this vast northern region. Over the
next three summers it would be the scene of an adventure involving
the fruitless search for a northwest passage, the first attempt by
the British to establish a settlement in the New World, and the
first major gold-mining fraud in North American history. Over 1,200
tons of rock were mined from Baffin Island and shipped to England,
where they were found to contain not an ounce of gold. Yet
Frobisher's claim of possession established British interest in
northern North America and was the first step in the eventual
establishment of British sovereignty over the northern half of the
American continent. Using reports from the men who participated in
the venture, details preserved in the oral histories of the Inuit,
and archaeological information recovered from the sites of
Elizabethan activities on Baffin Island, Robert McGhee describes
Frobisher's expeditions and offers new insights into this audacious
venture. The story ends on an ironic note B the capital of the new
Territory of Nunavut, which restores to the Inuit a measure of the
sovereignty claimed for England by Frobisher, lies at the head of
the bay named after him, where over four centuries ago the English
first ventured into Arctic America.
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