Pirate of the Eastern Arctic

They weren’t too different from modern-day biker gangs, those early Arctic explorers from England who set sail in boats to make money.

Along the way, they didn’t hesitate to cheat their backers and strong-arm anyone who crossed them.

When Martin Frobisher first set out for North America in 1576, he’d already racked up a long list of exploits as a pirate and seafaring wanderer.

As Robert McGhee tells in his new book, The Arctic Voyages of Martin Frobisher, the explorer’s adventures in the New World were filled with violence, sorcery, scams and dreams.

For Frobisher, who was guided only by weird and wonderful maps — based on semi-reliable information from Greek, Irish and Norse sources — “the Arctic was as distant and fantastic as another planet.”

But that didn’t deter hardy Frobisher and his crew from their desire to discover riches and perhaps a pathway to China or Cathay through the Northwest Passage.

Their knowledge of nature — they imagined a narwhal tusk to be a “sea unicorne” horn and tested it as an antidote to poison — wasn’t much better than their knowledge of geography.

Frobisher thought the bay that would someday bear his name was actually a strait with Asia on one side and North America on the other.

His grasp of metallurgy was so weak, he may have actually believed the worthless black rocks he collected near Baffin Island were full of gold.

Frobisher wasn’t a particularly nice guy, either, immediately getting into violent skirmishes with Inuit, taking hostages, shooting and killing others, pillaging tent sites and even abandoning five of his own sailors.

But he was encouraged by the supposed promise of the black rocks he found on the “Meta Incognita” or unknown land. He hooked up with assayers or metal testers who were willing to back up his claims that the rocks he found actually were rich in gold.

Based on these false analyses, Frobisher managed raise money for a “gold fleet” of 15 ships, so that he could return to the Countess of Warwick’s Island at the mouth today’s Frobisher Bay, mine ore and even start a permanent settlement for Queen Elizabeth.

On what is now known as Kodlunarn Island or “the white man’s island,” Frobisher mined tons of rock and set up a rudimentary smelter. It was “the site of the first Gold rush” in North America — as McGhee writes.

McGhee was obviously taken with the story of Frobisher’s find, comparing it to the Bre-X gold mining scandal in the 1990s that caused investors to lose millions of dollars. McGhee had also invested in what turned out to be worthless stock.

“My shares now have only curiosity value, but the financial loss was compensated for by the experience I gained by participating in Canada’s long and proud history of mining fraud,” he writes.

McGhee relies heavily on the records of those who travelled with Frobisher to recount the explorer’s adventures in the Eastern Arctic. McGhee also draws on the oral histories of Inuit — who still talked about Frobisher’s visits even hundreds of years later — to flesh out the story of the re-discovery of Frobisher’s mining camp at Kodlunarn.

Frobisher failed in his attempts to find a Northwest Passage, and he didn’t find a permanent settlement as he’d had been asked to. His mining ventures lost money for all involved, and more than 40 men and Inuit hostages died.

But Frobisher’s journeys to the Eastern Arctic did have a long-term impact on the region.

“Despite the failure of the Frobisher venture in the fields of exploration, colonization and mining, the project had one major and largely unintended historical consequence: the establishment of English sovereignty over northern North America,” McGhee writes.

McGhee’s scholarly style sometimes makes dense reading out of Frobisher’s story, but, overall, the book’s interesting illustrations, photos and maps transform the dry tale.

McGhee is curator of Arctic Archeology at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. He’s well-known to many in Canada’s North for his work in Nunavik, Nunavut, Labrador and the Mackenzie Delta.

The Arctic Voyages of Martin Frobisher: An Elizabethan Adventure by Robert McGhee. ISBN: 0-7735-2235-2. $49.95/200 pages. McGill-Queen’s University Press.