Sir martin frobisher achievements
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Northwest Passage
The vessels had been in Fair Isle two days earlier, sheltering from a gale. When things improved, they set off, only to find that the Michael had sprung a leak. They made for St Ninians (or the Bay of St Tronians, as the expedition’s leader, Martin Frobisher, called it), where they fixed the leak and took on fresh water. Then they got going again, sailing into the north Atlantic as fast as the wind would take them. At the time, most of what lay to the north-west of Shetland was vague and mysterious. Even the most up-to-date charts, which Frobisher had on board, might have warned Here Be Dragons for the area the sailors were heading into. What were the ships doing there? What were they trying to find?
This was a time of enormous colonial expansion for European states. Catholic nations like Portugal and Spain had established substantial, profitable colonies in the Americas and, not to be outdone, Protestant England wanted to get in on the action. England ha
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The Sordid and Swashbuckling Journeys of Martin Frobisher, Pirate of the Arctic
Frobisher’s 1577 expedition numbered 120 men in three larger ships. By mid-July, he was back in his eponymous bay. He collected 200 tonnes of ore at a place he called Countess of Warwick’s Island. (Ever since, Inuit have called the island Kodlunarn, meaning “white people.”) He also searched for the missing crewmen from the year before. There was no sign of them, but Frobisher did find a dead narwhal, which, after testing its magical properties by inserting spiders in the horn, he proclaimed a “sea unicorne.”
Frobisher also engaged in confusing interactions with the locals. With some Inuit, he traded. To another group, he entrusted a letter to be delivered to his missing crewmen. With others still, he clashed.
In one skirmish, five or six Inuit were apparently shot dead and Frobisher was wounded in the buttocks by an arrow. When crewmen encountered an old woman, they suspected her to be a witch, so
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xxxxxAs we have seen, it was in 1553 (E6) that three ships commanded by Sir Hugh Willoughby attempted to discover a north-east passage. Only one ship survived, captained by Richard Chancellor. He reached Archangel and then travelled overland to Moscow. It was in 1576that the English navigator Martin Frobisher tried to find a north-west route via the Canadian Arctic. He reached Baffin Island, but the attempt failed, as did further expeditions in 1577 and 1578. In 1585 he went with Francis Drake to the West Indies to attack the Spanish, and three years later took a prominent part in defeating the Spanish Armada, but in 1594 he was mortally wounded while trying to relieve the fort of Crozon, near Brest.
MARTIN FROBISHER c1535 - 1594 (H8, E6, M1, L1)
Acknowledgements
Frobisher: detail, by the Dutch painter Cornelis Ketel (1548-1616), 1571 – Museums and Collections, University of Oxford. Map (Baffin Island): licensed under Creative Commons – explorersgr5.wikispaces.co