8

TRESOR TROUVEE

IT WAS THE ordinary stone picked up by Robert Garrard—and deemed insignificant by Frobisher—that caused a sensation that March of 1577. About the size of a small loaf of bread, and black in color, it turned out to be something much more than a curio, a worthless souvenir from an icy, barren land. This fragment of the New World seemed to contain the most precious metal known to man: gold.

Garrard had not made it back to England the previous October—he was one of the five mariners taken by the Inuits. But Frobisher kept the friable stone, which could easily be broken into chunks, and gave a piece to Michael Lok as a gesture of respect for his support and recognition of his investment.¹ After all, there was not much else to give him—no gold or silver, no spices or silks, no exotic goods, and no letter of greeting from the Great Khan of Cathay, along the lines of the letter that Richard Chancellor had brought back from Ivan Vasilivich, Tsar of Muscovy. Yes, there was the astonishing news that Frobisher had discovered the entrance to the Northwest Passage, but this would not immediately provide a financial return on Lok’s considerable personal investment of £738—nearly half the total venture cost of around £1,600.

Then, according to George Best’s possibly fabricated account, a certain gentlewoman—“one of the adventurers wives”—threw a piece of the stone into a fire. It burned for some time and then, after it was “taken forth and quenched in a little vinegar,” it “glistered with a bright Marquesset of gold.” Lok now began to fixate on the possibility that the stone contained gold and that Frobisher might have stumbled upon an unexpected source of wealth. So, even as he worked with his fellow investors to prepare for and promote a second voyage in search of the Northwest Passage, he secretly pursued his own assay of the lump of ore.

An assay—from the Old French for “a trial”—is a complex process that combines art and science and was still being developed in the sixteenth century. Precious metals—including gold and silver—are typically embedded in rock and earth. They are rarely found in a pure state. The purpose of the assay, therefore, is to separate the precious metals and render them into a pure condition, with the goal of determining the percentage of gold or silver in the ore. The most common approach was to burn the ore in a furnace, often in combination with other materials, until the precious metal melted out. There was no standard procedure, and results could vary widely depending on many factors, including heat, duration, additives, and the skill of the assayer.

Lok sent some of his ore to William Williams, one of the assay masters at the Tower of London and one of England’s leading metallurgists.² The assay came back negative. The stone, Williams said, was an iron compound of some kind—a pyrite, otherwise known as fool’s gold. Lok, reluctant to accept Williams’s findings, took samples to two other experts. They both confirmed Williams’s view that the rock was worthless. Lok refused to accept these tests as conclusive, either. So, like a hypochondriac seeking a doctor who will confirm his imagined ailment, he looked for an assayer who would give him the analysis he wanted.³

He soon found one: Giovanni Baptista Agnello, a Venetian goldsmith living in London, who was considered an expert in alchemy and metallurgy.⁴ He examined Lok’s sample and, after three days of tests, reported that he had managed to extract “a very little powder of gold” from the ore. But Lok, finally hearing what he wanted to hear, now seemed unable to accept it. Why was it that Agnello had found gold when three other skilled assayers had found none? Agnello replied, in his native Italian, easily understood by the well-traveled Lok, “Bisogna sapere adulare la natura” (You have to know how to flatter nature).⁵ Was Agnello dissembling? And, if so, to what end?

Lok met with Agnello several more times, and during these conversations the Venetian surprised Lok by pestering him for information on where the ore came from. He even suggested that the two of them might form some kind of enterprise to mine the ore and benefit from the proceeds for their “own use.” Lok finally divulged that the ore came from “the new land discovered by Mr. Frobisher” and that the Cathay Company held the commercial rights to the place. In other words, there could be no private dealing—which was always a concern in such joint-stock ventures. Lok told Agnello about the law of, as they spelled it, tresor trouvee—found treasure—which meant that such riches that belonged to the realm could not be taken without permission and license from the queen.

Even so, as he rejected Agnello’s proposals, Lok was not yet ready to reveal his secret assaying activities. In late January 1577, he dined with Frobisher, who said he was “desirous to know what was found in the stone.” Lok prevaricated. He said that he had given samples to three or four assayers, and that one of them had found a bit of tin and a trace of silver, which pleased Frobisher. Lok did not mention Agnello or the grains of gold.⁶

Over time, this dissembling seems to have weighed on Lok’s mind. Although he was the principal organizer of the venture, he was now acting on his own, contrary to the joint-stock principle. Also, by contravening the rule of secrecy surrounding the venture, he was taking a potentially fatal risk. As Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, later reported to Philip, the Frobisher venture was so hush-hush that if anyone “should divulge anything about it, he should be punished with death.”⁷

Three days after his dinner with Frobisher, Lok sent a letter to Elizabeth, briefing her on his activities.⁸ He did not provide sufficient detail to satisfy Sir Francis Walsingham, the queen’s principal secretary and member of the Privy Council, who read the letter first. Walsingham was one of the advocates of—and investors in—the Frobisher voyage and he immediately sensed something was not quite right about Lok’s written account. This is not surprising, given Walsingham’s background, expertise, and interests. Born around 1530, he was the son of a prominent lawyer and, like William Cecil, his mentor, he was educated at Cambridge and Gray’s Inn. He and his family were zealous Protestants and, soon after Mary’s accession, he had, like Lok, fled abroad. He had lived in the Swiss city of Basel, one of the great centers of Protestantism, and studied at the university. Later, he enrolled at the university in Padua, one of the oldest in Europe, where he studied civil law. After returning to England following Elizabeth’s accession, he became a Member of Parliament and entered service at court, working for Cecil and, for a time, alongside Sir Thomas Smith as one of the two ambassadors to France.⁹

Walsingham’s reputation as a rising star was solidified in 1573, when he became Secretary of State, once again working with Sir Thomas Smith. In this role, he became, in effect, the queen’s “spymaster” and chief of her “secret service,” assembling an extensive network of agents who were positioned in foreign courts and who gathered and relayed intelligence back to London.¹⁰ So when Lok came to discuss the matter with Walsingham, he found himself dealing with a man accustomed to investigation and interrogation and on the lookout for duplicity or scheming. Walsingham accused Lok of not revealing the entire story of the ore in his note to Elizabeth. Realizing he was on weak ground, Lok quickly confessed, admitting everything about Agnello and the assay. Walsingham was unimpressed by what Lok had to say and dismissed it all as an “alchemist matter”—in other words, worthless. Even so, he crumbled the ore sample into three or four pieces, explaining that he would distribute them among “diverse men to make proofs.”¹¹

There followed a protracted series of investigations, conversations, and negotiations among the investors, courtiers, and assayers. It all came to a head on March 28, when the commission appointed by the Privy Council met at the house of Sir William Winter, surveyor of the navy. After the meeting, Winter took Lok aside and asked to meet privately with him the next day. Described by Cecil as a “man to be cherished,” Winter was a figure to be reckoned with.¹² A founding member of the Muscovy Company, his long experience in a wide range of commercial ventures—from Africa’s Gold Coast to Ireland—made him a highly competent head of the Privy Council’s commission.

When they met the following morning, Winter revealed to Lok that he knew all about Agnello, the ore, and the gold. It seems that Agnello had violated his own pledge of secrecy and disclosed his work—almost certainly to Cecil, who held secret meetings with the Venetian, and unquestionably to Sir John Berkeley, an enthusiastic investor in overseas enterprises who had been among Sir Thomas Smith’s staunchest supporters in the Irish colonial venture.¹³ Eventually, word reached Winter, who, with Berkeley, resolved to engage yet another assayer. They chose Jonas—also known as Christopher—Schütz, who was in England on temporary leave from his master, the Duke of Saxony. Described as “a Saxon metallurgist”—that is, among the most knowledgeable in the world—he also had experience with England’s fledgling mining industry.¹⁴

Winter explained to Lok that Schütz had duly conducted his tests and had done more than just confirm Agnello’s assay results. He pointed to a golden lump glittering on his windowsill and told him that, according to Schütz, the ore was much richer than they had imagined—a “far greater treasure than was known.”¹⁵ Schütz estimated there were four ounces of gold in every hundred pounds of ore. In financial terms, that meant each ton was worth some £240. And, with ore this rich on the surface of the earth, there was possibly much more gold that could be mined underground. It also meant that, as Winter explained, this venture was far too great for them to pursue solely as a company. It was now a matter of national importance. The queen had to be informed and involved.

ONCE THE NEWS broke, the Frobisher venture was swiftly transformed from a quest for the Northwest Passage into a hunt for gold, with the hope that the mineral wealth of England’s new Arctic region could be exploited for the enrichment of the voyage’s investors and the good of the realm. Lok’s financial worries swiftly evaporated, as London was gripped by gold fever and new investors pledged money. In the six weeks between the news of gold and Frobisher’s departure, nearly £2,000 was pledged, taking the total to £5,150—more than enough to cover the costs of the second voyage.¹⁶ Courtiers were the biggest enthusiasts, contributing two-thirds of the new capital, compared with one-third in the first voyage. Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, tripled his investment—from fifty pounds to one hundred and fifty. Even more striking was the about-face of Walsingham. He set aside his skepticism and quadrupled his investment, pledging two hundred pounds.¹⁷

Among the merchants, who were usually more cautious than courtiers with their money, Lionel Duckett and Thomas Gresham remained enthusiastic, even as the priorities of the venture shifted away from the search for Cathay. That may be partly because they, along with Winter and several of the courtiers, were already knowledgeable and significant supporters of England’s nascent gold and silver mining industry. For them, it was another extraction project. It did not seem like a shot in the dark.

Both Duckett and Winter had been involved in English mining ventures. Duckett served as the governor of the Company of the Mines Royal, which had been incorporated in 1568 for the discovery of precious metals, namely gold and silver, and Winter acted as his assistant governor.¹⁸ A “mine royal” was one that contained gold or silver and as such was automatically considered the possession of the crown, regardless of who owned the land. Other leading investors included Robert Dudley, William Cecil, and Thomas “Customer” Smythe—all members of the Muscovy Company.

These three—Dudley, Cecil, and Smythe—were also prominent supporters of England’s other major mining company, the Mineral and Battery Works, which was licensed by Elizabeth to mine lesser minerals, those with more practical, often industrial, uses—notably “calamine stone.”¹⁹ Better known today as zinc oxide, calamine is a necessary element for making latten—a brass-like alloy used in the manufacture of wool cards, machines with bent wire teeth for carding, or untangling, wool before it is spun and woven into cloth. Wool cards, essential to England’s most vital trade, had long been imported.²⁰ Now, it was hoped, wool producers would be able to have a local supply. England would be self-sufficient—just as Sir Thomas Smith had advocated in his A Discourse of the Commonweal.

A striking feature of these emerging English mining companies was their reliance on merchants and metallurgists from the German states of the Holy Roman Empire. In both organizations, the patents—as opposed to the shares—were held jointly by one Englishman and one German. Letters patent for the Mines Royal were granted to Thomas Thurland and Daniel Höchstetter.²¹ Letters patent for the Mineral and Battery Works were granted to William Humfrey, assay master at the Royal Mint in London, and Jonas Schütz, the metallurgist employed to carry out the assay on Lok’s ore.²²

The English had long boasted a thriving tin industry in the southwest—the desire for tin had attracted the Romans to England, the most northerly outpost of its empire, more than fifteen hundred years earlier—but they lagged the German states when it came to the mining of other metals. Ever since the mid-900s A.D., with the accidental discovery of the great silver mine of Rammelsberg in the Harz mountains of Saxony, German miners had won renown across Europe. Legend has it that the mine was discovered after a Teutonic knight tied his steed to a tree while hunting for deer. As he pursued his quarry on foot, the horse pawed the ground, struck its hooves against a rock, and exposed a shiny vein of silver.²³ The disgorging of silver that ensued produced the fortunes of, among others, the Fugger family, who rivaled the Medici in their wealth.

Over the years, Germans became master miners, leaders in the emerging science of metallurgy. In 1556, Georgius Agricola, a Saxon like Jonas Schütz and Europe’s leading expert, published De Re Metallica, one of the first great manuals on “the art of mining.”²⁴ The work is filled with advice on a range of practical matters, such as the best place to “obtain a mine” and the most effective way to recognize the natural signs of a vein beneath the surface—such as a patch of herbage on which no frost has formed. Agricola also tackled some philosophical controversies, in particular the issue of whether mineral wealth such as gold was inherently evil. He contended that it wasn’t—precious metals were essential to the creation of tools needed by physicians, architects, painters, merchants, and artists in a good civilization.²⁵

With German help, the English mining companies saw some early success. In 1565, soon after the founding of the Mineral and Battery Works, German miners established a blast furnace in Keswick, in the heart of the ancient Lake District in the north of England. The following year, as the company engaged in an accelerated program of surveying, prospecting, smelting, and assaying ores, some encouraging discoveries were made. By June 1566, calamine had been found in Somerset, a traditional tin-mining district.²⁶ A month later, a copper mine was discovered in the Newlands valley in the Lake District that was said to be “the best in England.”²⁷ The German miners dubbed it Gottesgab—God’s gift. Over time, this was corrupted into English as Goldscope mine.²⁸ While calamine was essential to the cloth industry, copper ore was valuable because, among other things, it sometimes contains small amounts of gold and silver.

But by 1577, as Frobisher prepared for his second voyage, England’s mining companies had not discovered a gold or silver mine that would transform the fortunes of the investors and the country—as the discoveries in the New World had done for Spain.

THE STORY OF Spanish New World wealth loomed large in the minds of English investors. Spain, after all, had no tradition of mining whatsoever. And yet, in the half century after Columbus’s first voyage, Spanish conquistadors had explored the West Indies for precious metals and found enough alluvial gold, first in Hispaniola and then in the surrounding islands, to persuade them to search the mainland. In 1518, Hernán Cortés, who first went to the West Indies in 1504, started to subjugate the Aztec empire in what is now Mexico, pillaging their stores of treasure. Francisco Pizarro pushed southward into the land of the Incas, largely with the goal of finding gold, and after garroting Atahualpa, the Incan emperor, in 1533, claimed sovereignty over that territory for Spain.²⁹

To capitalize on the rich trove of precious metals they found in Mexico and South America, the Spanish established settlements and organized their newly claimed territory into three governmental regions, each ruled by a viceroy. New Spain lay to the north, basically what is now Mexico; New Granada comprised the northern area of South America; while Peru was delineated as the vast area embracing the Andean mountain range.³⁰

By the 1540s, New World metals constituted an important source of revenue for Spain. But the Spanish spectacularly hit the jackpot in 1545 when they stumbled across the silver mountain of Potosí, which sits on a cold arid plateau in the Andes, more than 12,000 feet above sea level. There are many stories about how the Spanish became aware of the cerro rico—the rich mountain—of Potosí, in what was then called Peru, now modern-day Bolivia. One features a native, who, while trying to recapture a bolting llama, fell or tripped on a silver-gleaming outcropping of rock—four-legged creatures seem to take a starring role in these tales.³¹ Another story, perhaps more likely, tells of a man called Diego Gualpa who scaled the red-tinted peak looking for the location of a shrine in the hope of looting precious relics. Near the bracing summit, a bluster of wind thrust him to the ground. He seized at a rock and found he was gripping a lump of silver ore.³²

These eureka stories may all be apocryphal. It seems most likely that Incans had long known about the silver mountain. They had already established mining operations at a place called Porco, some twenty miles southwest of Potosí. They had even developed a smelting method that was, in effect, a small-scale, wind-driven blast furnace—the guayra, derived from the Quecha word for “wind”—which they set up on mountain ridges.³³ In 1549, Pedro de Cieza de León, who wrote a history of Peru, reported that at night there were so many of these furnaces burning “all over the countryside and hillsides that they look like decorative lights. And when the wind blows hard, much silver is extracted. When the wind falls, they can extract none. And so, just as the wind is useful for sailing on the sea, so it is here, for obtaining silver.”³⁴

It was at Porco that Spanish mine operators first heard about Potosí, however it may have been discovered. What they found was an extraordinary vein, measuring some three hundred feet long and thirteen feet wide, containing ore of 50 percent purity. As the news spread, a silver rush began.³⁵ Within months, a mining camp had formed around the base of the mountain, and before long some twenty-five hundred dwellings had been erected, housing 14,000 people.³⁶ The landscape was barren, the climate chilly, yet by 1550 Potosí was a sixteenth-century boomtown.³⁷ Fortunes were quickly accumulated, and mine owners and merchants, as well as some individual miners, became avaricious consumers of luxuries from Europe and the East, including English-made hats and woolen coats—proof that new markets could be created and become profitable.³⁸ It was the irresistible temptation of this magical city of treasure that had prompted John Dudley to ask Sebastian Cabot to prepare plans for a raid on the silver-rich viceroyalty of Peru, although nothing came of it.

Potosí became an important node in a global network of trade in precious metals, largely controlled by Spain. The most visible—and vulnerable—element of this vast commercial enterprise was Spain’s treasure fleet, which operated under the jurisdiction of La Casa de la Contratación and which maintained a relatively regular schedule of two outbound sailings of armed convoys—one to the mainland of South America, and the other to New Spain, or Mexico. As many as sixty merchant ships traveled together in a fleet, and they were accompanied by several warships and additional smaller craft, which facilitated transport and communication among the ships and patrolled the waters in search of pirates and privateers.³⁹

The main ships were sturdily built and heavily armed galleons—one hundred feet long, with three or four masts, a capacity of five hundred to six hundred tons, and as many as three dozen cannon. They were well-suited for carrying large cargoes of supplies and treasure over long distances. As a comparison, Elizabeth’s Ayde, which Frobisher was using for transporting what he thought was a hoard of gold, had a capacity of just two hundred tons.

The New Spain fleet sailed from Seville in the spring, bound for Veracruz, east of what is now Mexico City on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. In the summer, another fleet sailed from Seville to Cartagena, on the northern coast of modern-day Colombia, and stopped there. The main purpose of the stopover was to send word overland to Spanish functionaries in Panama City, on the Pacific coast of the isthmus, and to begin transport of the silver from Panama City to Nombre de Dios, on the Atlantic coast, for collection.⁴⁰

Meanwhile, transport from the mines had to be organized so the silver would reach Panama City in time to coincide with the arrival of the ships at Nombre de Dios. From Potosí, silver bars would be loaded onto llama packs for the trek overland to the coast—a journey that could take six months—where they were loaded onto coastal vessels for the voyage northward to Panama City. The silver was then off-loaded and taken by mule train or riverboat across the isthmus to the port of Nombre de Dios—a distance, as the crow flies, of some forty miles—where the big ships waited after the journey from Cartagena. One such llama train, which departed Potosí in March 1549, consisted of two thousand llamas bearing 7,771 bars of silver. It was accompanied by a thousand Incans, whose role was primarily to protect the silver from attack by bandits operating from their hideouts in the surrounding hills.⁴¹

When the silver at last reached Nombre de Dios, a great fair was held, where some of the silver was traded for goods, which were transported back to the mining operations in Mexico and Peru again by mule, ship, and llama. The homeward-bound Spanish convoys stopped at Havana in Cuba, where a large shipyard had been established, and supplies were plentiful and, to the delight of the sailors, the climate was mild.⁴² They then sailed together north along the coast of Florida, riding the Gulf Stream and prevailing winds. Here, they were more exposed to natural hazards—the waters were dangerous, the weather was variable, and the storms were fierce and frequent. Also, they were vulnerable to attack from privateers, hostile ships darting out from coastal harbors.

The precious metal trade quickly expanded beyond the Atlantic trade routes into India and China, initially conducted by the Portuguese. The Chinese had an “extraordinary preference” for silver over gold.⁴³Although they had mines of their own and had developed advanced expertise in metallurgy and smelting, they regarded mining as bad for the earth and as a source of human corruption. Indeed, it was banned in 1078, and China became what has been called a “receptacle” country, preferring to let others engage in the nasty work of mining but more than willing to buy the product.⁴⁴

Eventually, the Spanish pioneered the Pacific crossing from South America to the Far East, trading much of the silver in the Philippines. Spain’s silver ships would depart from Acapulco on Mexico’s west coast and sail across the Pacific to the great bay of Manila—a distance of around nine thousand miles as the crow flies. There, they would meet merchants from China and use their American silver to buy a range of goods that Spanish consumers desired, including silks, beautifully crafted Ming porcelain, and custom-made furniture.⁴⁵

This trade became an important part of the global trading system, fueling Spain’s imperial ambitions. Its most striking symbol was the peso de ocho reales—the piece of eight. This large silver coin, about one and a half inches wide, was first minted at Potosí in the 1570s.⁴⁶ It became the first global currency, beloved of princes and pirates.

For Michael Lok and his fellow investors, including Elizabeth, Spain’s global activity in precious metals was an ever-present reminder of the power—and potential—to be had from mining a rich seam of gold or silver. They dearly wanted to find their own.

IN MAY 1577, as Martin Frobisher prepared to depart on his second voyage, he received some specific instructions, probably drafted by William Cecil. According to these, the fleet was to proceed to Hall’s Island and, after finding a good harbor, repair to “the place where the mineral ore was had which you brought hither the last year.” There he was to set the miners to work.⁴⁷ It was a sign of the changed priorities of the voyage that Frobisher commanded a crew of 120 men that included several miners and gold finers. They were under the supervision of Jonas Schütz, the assayer, who was funded by William Winter and Michael Lok and given the title “chief master of the mines.”⁴⁸

While the workers gathered ore and loaded it on to the Ayde, Frobisher was to proceed farther into the strait, search for more mines, try to locate and recover the five mariners lost on the previous trip, and continue far enough into the passage to be certain that he had reached the South Sea. Once he had attempted—and ideally achieved—these goals, he was to return to Hall’s Island to evaluate the progress of the mining operations. Also, he was to consider implementing the idea of settlement propounded by Sir Humphrey Gilbert. This would mean leaving some men behind to stay over the winter so that they might “observe the nature of the air and state of the country, and what time of the year the Strait is most free from ice.”⁴⁹

Although the goals of the voyage were ambitious, the investors were realistic about the chances of success. One instruction noted that if Frobisher failed to find the gold he was looking for, he was to send the Ayde home and “proceed toward the discovering of Cathay” with the two barks.⁵⁰

On May 26, 1577, the fleet departed Blackwall, another of the little shipbuilding villages on the banks of the Thames. Frobisher commanded the Ayde, while Edward Fenton, his second-in-command who had seen service in Ireland under Sir Henry Sidney, took the helm of the Gabriel. After a two-month voyage, the fleet arrived at Hall’s Island, where the rock that started it all had been picked up. But try as they might, they could not find anything “so big as a walnut.”⁵¹ So they sailed on to the neighboring island, which Frobisher named after the Countess of Warwick, the wife of his chief sponsor, Ambrose Dudley, and an investor in her own right.⁵²

There the men found a “good store of the ore,” and after washing it, gold was “plainly to be seen.”⁵³ Leading by example, Frobisher, alongside five miners, pitched into the work of digging the ore. Soon, a “few gentlemen and soldiers” joined them. It was not normal practice for gentlemen to dirty their hands with the manual tasks of such a venture, but Frobisher was no typical gentleman. Indeed, George Best, who had been hired to write an account of the voyage, gives the admiral and his fellow commanders a hearty “commendation” for their “great willingness” and “courageous stomachs” to take on such backbreaking, tedious work.

The mining went on for nearly three weeks, during which time almost two hundred tons of rock were loaded aboard ship. Finally, on August 20, with the weather turning nasty, Frobisher determined that the work was done: the ships’ holds were filled and it “was a good time to leave.” By then the men were physically exhausted. Some of them were badly injured—their “bellies broken” and their “legs made lame.” But there was a sense of achievement and, as they departed the island, Frobisher ordered the firing of a farewell volley “in honor of the right Honorable Lady Anne, Countess of Warwick.”⁵⁴

The fleet returned to England, carrying not only the ore but also three Inuits: a man, a woman, and her baby. As before, there was great anticipation as the ships sailed along the Thames. Had gold been found? Had Frobisher finally navigated through the Northwest Passage? In his diary for Tuesday, September 24, Francis Walsingham, one of the biggest investors, wrote, “Captaine Furbusher arrived at the Court, being returned from Cathay.”⁵⁵ Walsingham clearly harbored hopes that the sought-for destination had been reached at last.

Frobisher made his way to Windsor. There he was “courteously entertained and heartily welcomed of many noblemen.”⁵⁶ Elizabeth gave a great show of support, and “because that place and country, hath never heretofore been discovered, and therefore had no special name, by which it may be called and known, her Majesty named it very properly Meta Incognita, as a mark and bounds utterly hitherto unknown.”⁵⁷

The name Meta Incognita—literally, “unknown limit”—did not necessarily indicate that Elizabeth wanted to take possession of this distant land. And yet, in November, a couple of months after Frobisher’s homecoming, she received a visit from her favorite astrologer, John Dee, urging her to do just that. He came with a sheaf of documents he hoped would make her think differently about Meta Incognita as an extension of what he termed the “Brytish Impire.” As he noted in his diary, he bestowed upon her the “title to Greenland, Estotiland and Friseland,” which he contended were Arctic lands that fell within her realm.⁵⁸ Greenland was well-known, and it may have surprised Elizabeth that she could claim this territory. Friseland was supposedly an island—and Frobisher named its ice-topped mountains on what was actually the southern tip of Greenland after his navigational tutor: Dee’s Pinnacles. Estotiland, believed to lie far to the west of Friseland, was almost certainly modern-day Baffin Island.

It is not clear how Elizabeth reacted to Dee’s argument. However, the Cathay Company seems to have been inclined toward settlement. In Frobisher’s second voyage, a small group of “condemned men” were taken along on what seemed like a suicidal mission: they were to overwinter in the Arctic. In the end, they got no farther than Harwich, on England’s east coast, where they were off-loaded to cut costs.⁵⁹ This time, however, the directors of the Cathay Company took the idea more seriously, partly because they had received secret intelligence that the French might be eyeing the territory for themselves. As Frobisher learned, the French king had armed twelve ships “to pass to the same new country, to take possession of the straits and to fortify the mines there.”⁶⁰

Accordingly, the company instructed Frobisher to assemble a colonial party of one hundred men. The task fell to Edward Fenton, Frobisher’s second-in-command, who assembled a community of carpenters, bakers, tentmakers, coopers, and smiths—ordinary artisans who were given the honor of establishing England’s first colony in the New World. In a sign that this was a serious investment, Lok ordered 10,000 bricks for the construction of a permanent fort, as well as the component parts of a prefabricated building that would provide temporary lodgings for the settlers.⁶¹ Also, victuals were ordered for an eighteen-month stay, even though resupply vessels were expected to return within a year. Drawing up his provisional list, Fenton calculated that he would need 15,600 pounds of beef, 5,200 pounds of bacon, and 1,200 pounds of pork, as well as beer, bread, fish, cheese, and peas.⁶²

The colonial venture was still subsidiary to the main purpose of the third voyage: the hunt for gold. Soon after Frobisher’s return from the second voyage, Walsingham and his fellow investors heard the crushing news that the fast route to Cathay lay undiscovered. But they remained excited by the mountains of ore that Frobisher had extracted from the New World, and the curious black stone was treated very differently than it had been after the first voyage. There was none of the casual passing around of souvenir rocks, no tossing them into the fire. The Ayde and the Gabriel put in at Bristol, where the rock was transferred to the castle and locked away. Four men were entrusted with keys, including Frobisher and Lok. The Michael had proceeded to London and off-loaded its ore at the residence of Sir William Winter, on St. Katherine’s Hill, just east of the Tower of London, where a furnace was being prepared for the testing of the ore.

The news generated huge excitement. Philip Sidney, son of Sir Henry and one of the main investors in the Frobisher voyages, sent off a letter to his friend Hubert Languet, a French Protestant considered to be “one of the most learned men of the day.”⁶³ He reported that Frobisher had “given it as his decided opinion that the island is so productive in metals, as to seem very far to surpass the country of Peru.”⁶⁴ In other words, better than Spain.

In his reply to Sidney, Languet eloquently warned of the dangers of the treasure hunt. England, he wrote, had “stumbled on that gift of nature, of all others the most fatal and hurtful to mankind, which nevertheless nearly all men desire with so insane a longing, that it is the most powerful of all motives to them to incur risk.” Languet reminded Sidney of the problem of land enclosure, which had been abused as a result of avarice. “And now I fear England will be tempted by the thirst for gold.”⁶⁵

England was indeed tempted, and sorely so. Now began an assaying frenzy—with the queen watching and waiting for word. Jonas Schütz, who had conducted assays on the first piece of rock and had sailed with the second voyage, began working with the furnace at Winter’s house in the first week of October. Within a month he had preliminary results, which he said were positive. But even so he argued that he would need bigger and better furnaces to make a more definitive judgment.

Several assayers were drawn into the proceedings—not only Schütz but also Agnello and another German metallurgist, Dr. Burchard Kranich (sometimes known as Dr. Burcott), who also happened to be personal physician to the queen.⁶⁶ The assayers bickered with each other and accused each other of tampering with the ore and with the results. There was, however, some agreement that a new furnace was needed for smelting the ore—a blast furnace of the kind only available in England’s mining districts, far from London.

After much searching, Lok and Frobisher identified what they considered to be a suitable existing mill to establish a larger furnace, at Dartford on the Thames estuary.⁶⁷ At the start of 1578, the Privy Council’s Commission approved construction of the new works, and Frobisher and Lok traveled to Dartford with a mason and carpenter who drew up plans for the new house, mills, and furnaces. But it soon became clear that construction could not be completed before the departure of a third voyage, planning for which was already underway. They decided, therefore, to conduct preliminary tests on ten tons of the ore, using the existing blast furnace owned and operated by the Company of Mines Royal, in Keswick, three hundred miles north of London.⁶⁸

The activity culminated in a report made by the Commission to William Cecil in March 1578. It stated that the “sundry proofs and trials made of the north-weste ore” showed that the “richness of that earth is like to fall out to a good reckoning” and that, therefore, a third voyage should be taken in hand to gather more ore and send one hundred men to inhabit those parts of the world.⁶⁹

SOON ENOUGH, A third voyage was organized, and this was the grandest of the three, with Elizabeth once again as the lead investor. The total amount pledged was £6,952—more than the amount raised for the first two voyages combined.⁷⁰ The fleet consisted of fifteen ships, with Elizabeth’s ship Ayde sailing for a second time as flagship. The mission was to proceed directly to the most promising ore site—the Countess of Warwick Island—where as much ore as possible was to be loaded and returned for smelting.

Frobisher set off at the end of May 1578, the ships churning toward what the English hoped would prove to be its own version of the fabled cerro rico of Potosí. And it was because of that perceived intention that Spain paid much closer attention this time. In April, prior to Frobisher’s departure, Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, had informed Philip II that the Englishman was commanding the expedition “on the Queen’s behalf.” She had, he revealed, “expressed herself very warmly as to the great importance of the undertaking for the welfare of her realm.” He also noted that “the number of men for colonization has been increased” and that “a quantity of easily erected wooden houses and other necessaries are being taken.” Mendoza had tried, without success, to get a copy of the chart that the Frobisher crew would employ—but he did manage to get his hands on a piece of ore, which he sent to the king.⁷¹

The route was a familiar one for Frobisher, and in mid-June he reached a familiar location: Friseland, or what he thought was Friseland. Previously, he had struggled to step ashore. This time, however, he made a successful landing, took possession of the island, and discovered, in the process, “a goodly harbor for the ships.” Also, perhaps with Dee’s words about a “Brytish Impire” in the back of his mind, Frobisher named this territory West England.⁷² It was the first foreign land to be named after the country.

Continuing on, Frobisher endured another eventful expedition, and after five months, returned to England with news of successes and setbacks. He did not manage to navigate through the Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean. Nor did he establish a settlement—the plan had been abandoned, largely because part of the prefabricated wooden house the expedition had taken along had been lost when one of the barks carrying the structure sank after a collision with an iceberg.

Yet the new land was now scattered with English names—evidence that Elizabeth’s people were starting to summon the self-belief to imagine an empire. A map, drawn by James Beare, master of one of Frobisher’s ships, shows the scale of England’s burgeoning territory. In addition to West England, it includes, among many landmarks, Cape Walsingham, Hatton’s Headland, Lok’s Land, and Winter’s Furnace, where much of the mining took place. There is even a Charing Cross, a familiar London landmark, and a fond reminder of home. Of course, Frobisher’s Strait is marked, and it leads west, with Beare noting “the way trending to Cathai.”

With this, the investors could live in hope. But, when Frobisher docked, there was the more immediate concern of the ore—1,296 tons of it. Frobisher sent the ore to the now-completed Dartford smelting works, and the process of extracting gold was begun.⁷³ But what might have been a triumphant return gradually degenerated into a three-year squabble that resulted in bankruptcy and disillusionment. By the end of October 1578, the Commissioners requested that Lok provide a full account, in writing, of the “doings and proceedings in this voyage,” as well as the current state of the operations at Dartford. Lok calculated that an additional six thousand pounds would be needed to meet expenses, pay the miners and sailors, and cover the cost of handling the ore. In December, with permission from the queen to collect the necessary funds, he set about trying to raise more capital from the investors. But collecting money after the completion of a venture turned out to be more difficult than doing so in advance, especially when news of the assays conducted at Dartford proved disappointing. Soon enough, Lok and Frobisher were blaming each other. Lok sought funds to cover his personal outlay. Frobisher accused him of duplicity.

Lok came to realize that he had made a terrible mistake by signing an agreement on behalf of the entire company. As it turned out, the Cathay Company was never given formal legal status. “There is no such corporation or company in law,” noted William Cecil, as things started to unravel.⁷⁴ It meant that Lok was left having to take responsibility for the costs of the entire venture, and when some investors refused to pay, he was stuck with the entire obligation. He was soon suspended as treasurer of the company and found himself in serious financial difficulty. In a “humble petition” to the Privy Council’s commission for the disbursement of funds to him, he warranted that he and his wife and fifteen children had been “left in a state to beg their bread henceforth except God turn the stones at Dartford into his bread again.”⁷⁵ Eventually, he was sent to debtors’ prison, returning several times for nonpayment of obligations. Meanwhile, Frobisher railed against the Dartford assayers, certain that his ore was the genuine article.⁷⁶

As the Cathay Company disintegrated, the Spanish, continuing to keep track of Frobisher’s activities, came to the conclusion that there was nothing much to worry about. In February 1579, Mendoza sent a letter, along with more ore samples, to Philip: “They are of but little value, as the Englishmen and assayers themselves confess, and no matter what heat is employed they cannot smelt them satisfactorily, owing to their great crudity, which is a certain sign they are not rich.” The whole business, he continued, “is not thought much of now as the sailors have not been paid, and the merchants who took shares in it have failed, so that people are undeceived.”⁷⁷

Although Frobisher had come closer than anyone to discovering the Northwest Passage to Cathay, the queen and the other investors gave up on the project after further assays produced no precious metals of any significance. William Williams conducted the last assay in May 1581. It proved once and for all that the ore did not contain sufficient precious metal to make it profitable. The rock was not completely worthless, however. It was taken from Dartford and repurposed in a variety of ways—from the repairing of roads to the construction of the wall of the queen’s manor house not far from the smelting works.⁷⁸