The Pirate Queen (35 page)

Tentative steps were made to capture some native or other by what is often called “silent trade” where one group lays down gifts on the ground and goes away then the other does the same, and so it continues until they feel confident enough to meet face-to-face. The English were the first to do this, and the Inuit followed suit. After several such exchanges, Frobisher and his second in command, Hall, entered the clearing unarmed. Again the Inuit followed their example. Presents were exchanged. Then Frobisher, in an act of unwarranted and cold-blooded treachery, signaled to Hall to pounce. But the Inuit were too quick and escaped their clutches. Their kinsmen surged forward from the shadows firing their arrows and
shouting. They chased Frobisher and Hall back to the boats, but in the skirmish, Frobisher justly received the ignominious wound of an arrow in his backside.
⁶

His pride had been grievously wounded, and the Inuit were cast as a “base, cruel and man-eating people.” When Frobisher was able to fight again, the English mounted a “counterattack” and captured an Inuit male. But Frobisher’s blood was up, and nothing short of a proper victory could assuage his ill temper. While ostensibly searching for their five abandoned seamen, they attacked another group of Inuit, brutally slaying several, and capturing a young woman and her baby. The babe had been wounded in the incident, yet there is no record of viewing this as either wrong or of any significance. Still, the three prisoners’ behaviors were observed by the expedition’s resident artist, probably John White, who would achieve fame later for the Roanoke voyages. White made a series of realistic sketches of the three of them, and they were significant in that they were the first English sketches of native North Americans.

With these three prisoners under his belt, Frobisher had well and truly proved to his fellow adventurers that they had conquered these “crafty villains” in the name of the Queen of England. The mining operation was gaining pace by now, and over 140 tons had been laden onto the
Aid.
They had been away quite long enough, and with winter threatening, Frobisher announced that they had achieved the first two aims of their expedition. What had become of the abandoned English from the earlier voyage, they never asked, and they never learned.
⁷

They returned to Countess of Warwick Island, where they finally set up their mining operations after preliminary assays showed that the ore there was “favorable.” But they had already squandered four weeks of the arctic summer and, after mining only 140 tons of the black rock, headed smartly home.

As Frobisher expected, the Inuit captives caused a great stir, and at first, the court remained expectant of a windfall. But when the Tower’s assayer pronounced that the ore held no gold, Lok had it retested several times until, at last, a Dr. Burchet’s opinion had been purchased to state that it was worth at least £40 per ton.
⁸
Many of the shareholders began to query who Burchet was, and why it had taken so many assays to ascertain the ore’s value, so Frobisher and
Lok geared up quickly for a major mining expedition and third voyage. But even before it set sail, the ore’s estimated value began to plummet.

Nonetheless, Frobisher and his fleet of fifteen ships sailed on May 31, 1578—exactly one year after the second voyage had set out—from Harwich on what became his last voyage of discovery to the north of America. Sailing northward around the British Isles to the Orkneys, then west past Greenland, the fleet sighted Meta Incognita (the peninsula on Baffin Island) through thick fog. Frobisher and his men were swept into an unknown strait farther to the southwest by the current, prevented from taking any readings whatsoever due to the fog. But, in the confusion, they discovered another “strait” that Frobisher claimed to be the Frobisher Straits of the second voyage. This “Mistaken Straits”—better known today as the Hudson Strait—was undoubtedly Frobisher’s greatest discovery. While at first Frobisher pretended that it had been the same strait as he had previously found, Beste wrote in his diary:

And truly it was wonderful to hear and see the rushing and noise that the tides do make in this place, with so violent a force that our ships lying a hull were turned sometimes round about even in a moment after the manner of a whirlpool, and the noise of the stream no less to be heard afar off then the waterfall of London Bridge.
⁹

It was July 7, 1578, when the fleet entered the “Mistaken Straits.” Three days later, four ships were separated from the advancing fleet in the freezing fog, and decided to turn back. Frobisher and those ships still following him pressed on another estimated sixty leagues between never-ending skyscrapers of ice, whose summits remained perpetually shrouded in the arctic fog. Finally, after nine more days, with no immediate end in sight, he gave the order to return back through the strait, since he “both would and could,” Frobisher boasted, “have gone through to the South Sea” if he hadn’t had the entire responsibility for the welfare of his fleet and the expedition as a whole to consider.
¹⁰

Frobisher rightly reasoned that it was time to resume the main purpose of the voyage—gold mining. And so they returned to
Friesland (Baffin Island) where the gold mining “colony” was set up by the end of July. Yet it hadn’t been smooth sailing through to Baffin. When they were approaching, Baffin was still clogged with ice floes, and after some considerable grinding of wooden hulls against ice, with gentlemen adventurers manning the capstans like common sailors, offering sound advice based on their better education, they finally made landfall. Frobisher trudged across the ice and theatrically raised the flag of St. George, officially claiming the land for England.
¹¹

But a short while later, the
Dennys
, a 100-ton bark, was struck by an iceberg and sank within sight of the entire, stunned expedition. Fortunately her crew was spared, but the prefabricated “winter” house that had been brought from England partially assembled was lost with the
Dennys
.
¹²
Instead, stone (partially from ballast) and wooden structures were erected for shelter, and the adventurers settled into their mining operations at long last. What had begun two voyages earlier as the quest for a lucrative trade route to the East Indies and Cathay had clearly become a settlement in its own right searching for gold. By the end of August, over 1,370 tons of ore had been mined and loaded, and they headed for home.

Like Drake on his return from the West Indies, Frobisher had come back to a different England in September than the one he had left in the late spring. Michael Lok had been obliged to submit his accounts for an audit in August, and when the results regarding the value of the ore were other than those desired by Frobisher, he ordered a second official audit to be undertaken. Costs for the three voyages had risen to £20,345 ($6.96 million or £3.76 million today) with two-thirds of that attributed solely to the third voyage and the gold refinery built at Dartford. This was equivalent to one tenth of the national budget. Yet the investors had stumped up only £17,630 6s. 8d. ($6.03 million or £3.26 million today). The list of unpaid subscriptions read like a
Who’s Who
of Elizabethan England: Lord Burghley; Lord Admiral Clinton; the Earl of Sussex; the Earl of Warwick; Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon; Sir Francis Knollys; the Earl of Pembroke; Philip Sidney; Edward Dyer; Anthony Jenkinson; Dr. John Dee; and Thomas Randolph, to name just a few.

It wasn’t until January 1579 that the wages for the mariners and others involved in the voyage were settled, leaving an outstanding
deficit of £3,658 14s. 3d.—that is, until the refined gold could be sold. Frobisher distanced himself from Lok, rounding on him that he was a fraud, a knave, and a bankrupt. “I daily instructed him,” Lok ventured in his defense, “making my house his home, my purse his purse at his need, and my credit his credit to my power, when he was utterly destitute both of money, credit and friends.”
¹³

Even more damning was Lok’s description of his business partner after the initial ore discovery, while gold fever still swept the court: “Frobisher grew into such a monstrous mind that a whole kingdom could not contain it but already, by discovery of a new world, he was become another Columbus.”
¹⁴
Though Lok was putting up a spirited defense, the debts kept piling in, with claims from the ship owners mounting. When William Boroughs demanded £200 for his ship loaned to the Company of Kathai for the last voyage, and Lok was unable to pay, he was left no alternative but to declare bankruptcy. This had the effect of throwing the Company of Kathai into receivership—pending the sale of the ore—not to mention Lok’s spending a spell in the dreaded Fleet Prison as an undischarged bankrupt.

The only problem in selling the ore was that from the haul of well over a thousand tons of black, gleaming rock from North America, the total amount of gold that was extracted remains imbedded today in the sealing wax appended to the report that it was completely worthless. The entire gold extraction could be placed upon the head of a pin.

24. In the Shadow of Magellan

And now, my masters, let us consider what we have done. We have now set together by the ears three mighty princes, as first Her Majesty [then] the Kings of Spain and Portugal, and if this voyage should not have good success, we should not only be a scorning or a reproachful scoffing spoke unto our enemies, but also a great blot to our whole country forever…

—FRANCIS DRAKE, PORT ST. JULIAN, AUGUST
1578

F
robisher was preparing for his third voyage when Drake sailed November 15, 1577. Within days the queen’s favorite, Christopher Hatton, had been knighted for his services to the queen. Aside from his known courtly duties as the head of her guard, Hatton had also contributed the
Pelican
and the
Marigold
to Drake’s journey. The
Christopher
was named after him.

As far as hugely historic voyages go, Drake had made a rather inauspicious beginning. In the days between his initial and final sailing from Plymouth, Drake accused James Sydae, who had served with him and Thomas Doughty in Ireland, of provisioning the ships poorly for the months at sea that lay ahead. This was a famous trick of many ships’ masters, when they underspent on their budget for victuals, substituting poorer quality foodstuffs or providing less, and pocketing the surplus. Doughty muttered his unhappiness to the crew that Drake had dismissed an “essential member” of their company, and that their hotheaded captain might even dismiss him, Doughty, who had been instrumental in ensuring that the voyage happened in the first place. When Doughty found he had a ready audience, he even claimed that Drake had been ordered to consult him at all times by their investors, and that he shared Drake’s authority. None of Drake’s men told him while they were still on English soil what
Doughty had been getting up to. If they had, matters may have turned out differently.

They were past the entry to the Mediterranean before the mariners learned that Alexandria was not their intended destination. Naturally there was grumbling, like, “Mr. Drake had hired them for Alexandria,” one mariner complained, “and if he had known that
this
had been Alexandria, he would have been hanged in England rather than have come on this voyage.”
¹
But still, Drake recorded no incident in his own narrative up to this point, despite the fact that he must have been on his guard for malcontents among his men.

As they steered past the Cape Verde Islands, Drake held up the old English tradition of plundering the coast. A pinnace was sent in hot pursuit after a ship off Santiago and captured her. The
Santa Maria
, as she was then called, was filled with fresh victuals, fresh fruit, other everyday necessities, an astrolabe, and the most valuable commodity yet—a Portuguese pilot named Nuño da Silva, who was the proud owner of several nautical charts of the coasts and ocean between Europe and South America. Nuño da Silva, Drake resolved, would pilot their way to South America.

Drake rechristened the prize ship the
Mary
, after his wife, and appointed his good friend Doughty as her skipper. Soon after Doughty came aboard, there was an argument with some of the men, and two contradictory stories of that dispute survive. The first supporting Doughty’s actions has it that Drake’s brother, Thomas, was found rifling through the Portuguese booty, and Doughty threatened to report it to the commander. When Drake was told, he flew into a rage against Doughty, accusing him of undermining his authority. The second version, from the ship’s preacher, Francis Fletcher, puts an entirely different slant on the matter. Though Fletcher could be considered a “hostile witness” for Drake, he claimed that it was Doughty who was stealing some of the prize goods. Drake looked into it—since fisticuffs about booty often ended in injury or death among sailors, and always ended in discord. He found that Doughty had indeed some Portuguese gloves, a ring, and some Portuguese coins upon his person. Doughty explained this away, claiming that it was the Portuguese prisoners who had given these tokens to him for preferential treatment aboard ship. Drake considered this to be
a plausible explanation, but he thought it wiser to remove Doughty from the crew, who might readily slit his throat in his sleep. And so, Drake made Doughty captain of the
Pelican
—the admiral ship.

Only Drake knew the probable length of their voyage, and the ability of any commander to keep the peace among rough men at sea was always a risky business. No one knew better than Drake how much his sailors looked for “some little comfortable dew from heaven,” and how his mariners “rejoiced in things stark naughty, bragging in sundry piracies.”
²
Transferring Doughty seemed the most sensible and amicable course, but Drake hadn’t bargained on Doughty’s colossal ego.