On 10 May 1553, as Edward VI’s health waned, three ships commanded by Sir Hugh Willoughby set off from Greenwich. The expedition’s pilot was Richard Chancellor, a navigator and mathematician. The aim of this daring expedition was to find a navigable route along Russia’s northern coast to China, or ‘Cathay’, as it was then called. Willoughby’s ship was lost in a great storm in the North Sea, but Chancellor ‘held on his course towards that unknown part of the world,’ aided by the latest charts and celestial readings, which were exceptionally accurate by the standards of the day.
English knowledge of navigation in the 1550s was primitive. Not a single map would be published or globe constructed in England for another two decades.1 In the minds of most England’s mariners, the world was still shaped according to principles going back to the ancient Greeks. Only one book had so far been printed in English that even mentioned America, a tract written in 1511.2 Up-to-date information on the geography of the New World or, indeed, the old one, was confined to the Continent, where it was jealously guarded and rarely released.
There was, however, one local source, a young English scholar who had spent some time studying at such centres, and who had unique access to such leading cartographers as Mercator and Gerard Frisius: John Dee.
There was, however, one local source, a young English scholar who had spent some time studying at such centres, and who had unique access to such leading cartographers as Mercator and Gerard Frisius: John Dee.
Chancellor went to see Dee in the early 1550s, taking Willoughby’s audacious plans for a ‘new and strange navigation’ of the northern seas. He also brought a set of scientific instruments of his own design, including a treasured ‘excellent, strong, and fair quadrant of five foot semidiameter’.3 The two became close friends; Dee later described Chancellor as ‘incomparable’ and ‘well-beloved’. Together, they prepared charts for the voyage, presumably based on maps Dee had copied during his stay in Louvain, using the quadrant to compile detailed tables of solar and celestial positions.
It was upon these maps and measurements that Chancellor relied as he sailed north-east, off the edge of the charted world and into a strange, alien one ‘where he found no night at all, but a continual light and brightness of the sun shining clearly upon the huge and mighty sea.’
Eventually, he came across a bay, and a small fishing boat. Its crew was so amazed by the ‘strange greatness’ of Chancellor’s ship, they tried to flee. Using ‘signs and gestures’, Chancellor reassured the fishermen that he had come in peace. Despite the lack of a common language, he established a rapport with them, and asked them to inform their leader of his arrival in their country, whichever country it might be.
He had to wait a long time for a response, during which the realm of ‘continual light and brightness’ became one of perpetual dark. Eventually he was summoned, and departed on an expedition to the interior of the country. He had to endure a journey of 1,500 miles in conditions of ‘extreme and horrible’ cold, much of it on sled. Eventually, his party reached their destination: a city ‘as great as the City of London’. It was Moscow, and the king who welcomed them was Ivan the Terrible.4
Chancellor’s encounter with Ivan, first Tsar of Russia, was to lead to the creation of new, strategically vital trade routes between England and Russia which bypassed the hostile dominions of the Catholic Holy Roman Empire. The bay where Chancellor had landed became the principal seaport, later known as St Nicholas and more recently as Archangel. The Muscovy Company was founded in London to manage these new links, and given a Royal monopoly over the business that arose from them.
Chancellor’s trip also opened the imaginations of a new generation of English adventurers, feeling that the northern latitudes might yield further treasures, that the frozen seas, though less enticing and more dangerous than the Southern, might provide England with the bounty that had so enriched the Spaniards and the Portuguese.
However, Chancellor was lost with his ship in the North Sea on another expedition and the Muscovy Company had subsequently proved reluctant to back any further ventures. Since its blanket monopoly extended to the exploration as well as the exploitation of the northern latitudes, this policy effectively brought England’s age of discovery to a premature halt.5 It was on this matter that the adventurer Martin Frobisher approached the Privy Council in 1574.
According to one government paper, Martin Frobisher had ‘such a monstrous mind, that a whole kingdom could not contain it’.6 A portrait of him seems to support this judgement. He strikes an arrogant pose, frowning, his nostrils dilated, his eyes glancing to one side, as though delivering a silent warning to whoever has dared interrupt the sitting.
Frobisher was recklessly ambitious, aiming for the title of England’s Columbus. But he faced stiff competition. Two years earlier, Francis Drake had stolen a lead by embarking on a privateering voyage to America that had yielded a vast treasure of plunder and the first sight of the Pacific Ocean by an Englishman. Frobisher now proposed a mission of discovery into the uncharted seas of the northern latitudes. He had taken part in expeditions to the gold coast of West Africa in the 1550s, which had returned with rich ores and black slaves, with tales of the giant ‘oliphant’ and its strange ‘snout…that it is to him in the stead of a hand,’ and with the ships’ keels ‘marvellously overgrown with certain shells of such bigness that a man might put his thumb in the mouths of them’.7 His appetite whetted by such marvels, he was now ready to embark on a voyage of his own.
Frobisher’s proposal to the Privy Council was magnificently daring. He pointed out that Spain had established dominance of the southern seas, and reaped vast rewards as a result. But thanks to the Muscovy Company’s apathy, England had failed to do the same with the northern seas. A new mission was called for, a Protestant adventure that would rival the Catholic quest, and enrich the queen’s treasury. To launch this mission Frobisher proposed the boldest enterprise of all: to search for the sea route supposed to pass along the northern coast of America to Cathay – the fabled Northwest Passage.
In the late 1560s, Humphrey Gilbert had started work on a treatise that examined whether the Northwest Passage existed. His argument was, in the manner of the time, based not just on the still sparse current geographical information but on ancient authorities.
The most important authority on geography (as on many subjects) was Ptolemy, whose map divided the world into three continents all joined together by land: Europe, Asia and Africa. But Plato challenged this view, writing of another landmass, a huge island larger than Asia Minor and Libya combined. According to Egyptian priests, it was situated beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the ancient name for the Straits of Gibraltar) which was then seen as the gateway into the unknown. The island was called Atlantis.
According to the Egyptians, Atlantis had been swallowed by the ocean that shared its name – the Atlantic8– after a series of earthquakes. Gilbert, however, was convinced that it had survived, and was the continent the Spanish called America. This would explain such discoveries as the coins of Augustus Caesar which had been found in the mines of South America and Red Indians washed up on the Baltic coast. Importantly, this also meant that this ‘New World’ had already been discovered in antiquity, so their descendants had equal, if not better claims to it.
If it was an island, then obviously it was surrounded by water, which meant there must be a way round its northern shore: the fabled Northwest Passage. Via this route navigators would soon come upon Cathay, the home of Kublai Khan. The fabulous wealth of the Khan’s court, described by the great thirteenth-century Venetian traveller Marco Polo, was legendary throughout Europe and later inspired Coleridge’s famous lines ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree’. By the fifteenth century, upheavals in the Mongolian and Ottoman empires had made the old land route to Cathay increasingly difficult, so explorers had tried to find another way. That was why Columbus set sail in 1492 – he was hoping to reach Cathay by circumnavigating the globe.
Gilbert’s central idea, that Columbus’s new world was Adantis, was supported, perhaps even inspired by John Dee, whose name was used in the treatise’s dedicatory epistle to endorse the scheme: ‘a great learned man (even M[r]. DEE) doth seem very well to like of this Discovery, and doth much commend the author’.9 Around this time, Dee was also studying an account written by Columbus’s son of his father’s travels. As his annotations show, Dee clearly thought the work might yield some of the secrets of Columbus’s extraordinary success: he marked the passages dealing with the adventurer’s methods for keeping records, dealing with natives and exploiting the discoveries of precious ores.10
Naturally, then, when news emerged of Frobisher’s plan to test Gilbert’s and find the Northwest Passage, Dee was an obvious source for the navigational knowledge the adventurers would need.
However, Frobisher soon encountered an immovable obstacle: the Muscovy Company. The company’s directors were making healthy profits developing the trade links with Russia. They did not want to risk such bounty by embarking on a hazardous venture in the opposite direction. Even the backing of the Privy Council was insufficient to make them yield.
Showing the sort of determination that was to prove vital in his coming adventures, Frobisher refused to be put off. He returned to court, and this time got a letter of support from the Queen herself. When he presented this to the Muscovy Company, it capitulated, granting him a licence in February 1575. But in return Frobisher had to accept the appointment of one of the Company’s own men, the prosperous merchant Michael Lok, as the mission’s treasurer.
Lok turned out to be an enthusiastic supporter. Twenty years earlier his trading business had taken him from Flanders to Spain and Portugal, where he had seen for himself ‘the marvellous great trade’. He had watched the ships arriving and disgorging ‘jewels, spices and other rich merchandise’ from the East and West Indies onto the Lisbon quayside.
He threw all his energies (and his own fortune) into getting Frobisher’s venture off the ground. He founded the ‘Company of Kathai’, and set about looking for backers to provide the enormous amounts of money needed. The final list of shareholders was formidable and included the most important people in the country: William Cecil, and the Earls of Sussex, Warwick and Leicester subscribed £50 each, Francis Walsingham and his future son-in-law the poet Philip Sidney £25. The total came to £875, at least a million in today’s terms.11
With so much money and dignity at stake, the risks had to be minimised, and Sir Lionel Duckett, a member of Muscovy Company, asked Dee to ‘examine and instruct’ the expedition’s leaders. As time was short, in May 1576, Dee brought his books and maps to Muscovy House, the company’s headquarters in Seething Lane, where he was to stay in the weeks leading up to the departure.12
Lok, perhaps protective of the scheme he had now adopted as his own, later claimed that Dee had originally approached him, offering to provide ‘such instructions and advice as by his learning he could give’. Whether or not this was so, Lok developed a ‘great good opinion’ of the ‘learned man’, and on 20 May he invited Dee to his house. There he was to meet Frobisher, Stephen Borough, a Muscovy Company pilot and former pupil of Dee’s, and Christopher Hall, master of the Gabriel, the diminutive 25-ton barque which was to be the mission’s flagship (Drake’s Golden Hind was four times the size. The other two ships in the fleet were even smaller: a 15-ton bark called the Michael, to be captained by Matthew Kindersley, and a 10-ton ‘pinnace’ or scouting ship.
At the meeting (just a month before the ships were due to set sail), Lok was keen to demonstrate to Dee that he was no dilettante and laid before the philosopher ‘my books, authors, my cards, and instruments, and my notes thereof made in writing, as I had made them of many years study before’. Duly impressed, Dee offered his own books and maps in return, which Lok declared he ‘did very well like’.13 Reassured that Dee was not about to take over, Lok enthusiastically embraced him as a fully-fledged member of his mission. Dee’s fortune and reputation were, like his, to rest on its result.
Dee’s role was to instruct Frobisher and Hall in the ‘rules of Geometry and Cosmography’ and the use of navigational instruments. He may well also have told Frobisher what he had learned from Columbus’s experiences, as the captain was to adopt remarkably similar methods of record-keeping, dealing with natives and exploiting deposits of promising ores.
Lok had expensively equipped the expedition with the latest maps and equipment, which included a ‘very great chart of navigation’ (cost: £5), a case containing several small iron ‘instruments for geometry’ (£10 6s 8d), an armillary sphere, a brass clock and a ‘great globe of metal’ made by Humphrey Cole, London’s leading instrument maker.14 If such assets were not to be squandered, the sailors had to be taught how to use them properly.
But time was against them. Unlike Richard Chancellor, Frobisher and Hall were mathematically ignorant and were probably distracted by practical matters they considered more pressing, such as organising crews and food.15 There was also a feeling among the saltier tars that arithmetic and geometry – essential to any scientific system of navigation – were for landlubbers. William Borough, brother of the pilot Stephen, lambasted ‘the best learned in those sciences Mathematical, without convenient practise at sea’.16 Although he does not mention Dee by name, it is possible he was thinking of him. There was certainly no love lost between the two, and they later argued angrily at Muscovy House.17
Dee did what he could, and on 7 June, his pupils left their lessons and took to their ships. After an early mishap during which the pinnace crashed into another craft at Deptford and lost its bowsprit, the tiny fleet of three vessels and its crew of just thirty-four sailed to Greenwich Palace and, to attract the Queen’s attention, let off a volley of guns. ‘Her majesty beholding the same, commended it, and bade us farewell, with shaking her hand at us out of the window,’ Christopher Hall recorded in his log. That evening, they were boarded by Secretary John Wolley, who lectured the crew to ‘be obedient, and diligent to their Captain,’ and wished them well.
The fleet then set sail for Gravesend, where Hall, perhaps practising the techniques he had just been taught by Dee, measured his ship’s position and the variation of the compass and carefully noted the results. By 24 June, they had sailed up the east coast of Britain, and had reached Fair Isle, a tiny island to the north of Scotland, where the weather started to deteriorate. By the 26th conditions had improved: a ‘fair gale’ from the south blew them west northwest. Here Hall attempted to take another measurement of latitude, his first in open sea. This was not easy: it entailed standing on the rolling deck, holding up the unwieldy measuring instrument (a cross-staff) and trying to gauge the angle between the pitching horizon and the noonday sun. Despite these problems, he achieved a reasonably accurate result, which he once again carefully recorded in his log.
Then another minor disaster struck. One of the ships, the Michael, developed a leak, and the fleet was forced to stop in the Bay of Saint Tronians in the Shetland Isles. While repairs were being made, Frobisher wrote to ‘the worshipful and our approved good friend M. Dee’. In his letter, Frobisher dutifully reported Hall’s latitude measurement (59° 46’ – which was accurate to within a few nautical miles), and reassured Dee that ‘we do remember you, and hold ourselves bound to you as your poor disciples.’18
The following day they set off at a fast clip into the north Atlantic. They were entering a realm about which almost nothing was known. One influential geographical textbook (owned by Dee) described a region in the far north called Thule where ‘there was no longer either land properly so-called, or sea, or air, but a kind of substance concreted from all these elements, resembling sea-lungs’ Dee later wondered whether this was a description of the world of ‘mountains of ice’ Frobisher was now entering.19
Finally, land was sighted. Hall took his measurements and Frobisher declared it to be ‘Frieseland’, a landmass believed to exist in the mid-Atlantic. This identification caused confusion for future generations of navigators, whose maps would mark this island as lying to the south of Greenland. In fact Hall and Frobisher were further north than they realised, and had encountered Greenland itself.
Their first sight of land was a series of sharp peaks, like church steeples, covered in snow. These were to be the first geographical features to which they would give a name, and they called them ‘Dee’s Pinnacles’ in honour of their teacher. They launched a boat in an attempt to land, but were prevented by the thick ice.
Having failed to make landfall, they decided to keep going, heading further west. They were now off the edge of their navigation charts. A fierce storm blew up and the tiny pinnace and its crew, now reduced to three men, foundered. It was never seen again. In the storm, the Gabriel, with Frobisher and Hall aboard, also lost contact with the other ship, the Michael, which then turned back.
The Gabriel sailed on alone through the intensifying tempest. Two days later, a huge wave crashed over the ship, tipping her over. The weight of the soaked rigging and the foresail kept her down, and the Gabriel began to sink. ‘All the men in the ship had lost their Courage, and did despair of life’20 – all, that is, except Frobisher. Showing ‘valiant courage’, he clambered onto the side of the prostrate ship, and crawled to the bow, where he somehow managed to free up some of the rigging.
As the vessel started to right herself, the other crew members hacked away at the mizzen mast at the stern to lighten the ship further, and would have taken the main mast down too had not Frobisher stopped them.
Somehow they managed to recover control of the stricken Gabriel. When the storm melted away, they found themselves floating in the frozen stillness of the Arctic waters. With a mast missing and every corner of the ship soaked with freezing saltwater, they sailed on.
Two days later, they sighted land again. It was the New World, Atlantis. However, where Columbus had been greeted with soft sands and lush forests, Frobisher and his crew confronted a soaring and impenetrable wall of ice. The great white precipice ran along the shoreline for mile after mile, rising out of dark waters too deep to drop anchor. They found themselves being swept along by a powerful current, which dragged great fleets of pack ice with it that threatened to smash the ship’s fragile wooden hull.
Meta Incognita was the name Frobisher gave to this terrifying terrain – the Unknown Limit. That is still the name used on some maps for the area surrounding Baffin Island in north-eastern Canada.
They spent nearly a fortnight probing the coastline until, on 11 August, they saw a small island half a mile in circumference ‘one league from the main’.21 Hall led a group of four to investigate it. With the Gabriel having to remain a safe distance offshore, they were forced to row across ten miles of open sea to reach the island.
When they eventually got there, Hall conscientiously began to measure the tidal flows, while the other crew members set off towards the island’s centre. It was little more than a barren rock and there were no signs of life. The only thing of interest was a black stone ‘as great as a halfpenny loaf’, which was spotted by Robert Garrard.22 They carried it down to the shore and showed it to Hall. There is no record of the particular quality of this rock that aroused the landing party’s interest and subsequent events prevented Garrard from leaving his own account. Perhaps it had a sparkling patina, or some coloured vein could be glimpsed in its fractured surface.
There was no time to make a detailed inspection. They were dangerously distant from the mother-ship and Hall was anxious to return before they became enveloped in the thick Arctic fog. They heaved the stone aboard and rowed it back to the ship, where Hall presented it to Frobisher. Frobisher was unimpressed, and put it to one side. He knew it could not be of much value, because according to scientific orthodoxy precious metals only formed in the sorts of sunny climes the Spanish had discovered further south.
The following day they found what they had been searching for: a wide inlet in the coastline. Frobisher was convinced that the current running up the inlet showed it to be a strait, open at the other end – and the entrance, perhaps, to the Northwest Passage.
They started sailing up the inlet, among the small islands scattered along its northern side. The temperature had dropped to the extent that at one point the entire ship was encased in a quarter-inch of ice. They were also running low on supplies. So, on 19 August, they decided to weigh anchor and investigate the surrounding territory. They rowed to one of the islands, and made contact with the native population.
At first, relations were cordial, but within days they took on a more hostile aspect. Frobisher and Hall visited their village, and one of their number came back to the Gabriel. Frobisher gave him a bell and a knife, in payment for acting as a pilot for their coming journey up the strait. However, apparently distrusting him, Frobisher sent five of his crew (among them Robert Garrard) to maroon the man on a rock rather than return him to the village.
The crew of the Gabriel waited all night for the party’s return. The following morning Frobisher took the Gabriel close to shore, where he ‘shot off a fauconet, and sounded our trumpet’ to see if his men would appear.23 There was no response.
The next day, he returned to the same place, where this time he was greeted by a fleet of kayaks. The Gabriel’s crew managed to entice one of the boats to the ship by dangling a bell over the side, whereupon its occupant was seized with a boathook and dragged aboard as a hostage. The other locals then took off ‘in great haste, howling like wolves or other beasts’.24
Frobisher waited four days to see if his men would reappear, but they did not. On 26 August, he set off for home, taking the unfortunate captive with him.
Frobisher’s battered ship finally arrived in London on 9 October 1576. The last report of its progress had come months before from the returning crew of the Michael, who had watched it disappear into the storm which had forced them to return and wrecked the pinnace. The reappearance of the Gabriel and its captain was thus ‘joyfully received with the great admiration of the people’.
Frobisher showed his trophy to the gathered crowds: the kidnapped Inuit. This ‘strange man’ caused ‘such a wonder unto the whole city and to the rest of the realm that heard of it as seemed never to have happened the like great matter to any man’s knowledge’. They gawped at his broad face, his ‘very fat and full’ body, his short legs, ‘small and out of proportion’, his little eyes and little black beard and his complexion, which seemed to those who saw him like that of a Moor or Tartar – where it was assumed his race must have originated somehow transferring to the northern shores of Atlantis. It was also noted that his countenance was ‘sullen or churlish, but sharp’.25
Interest in the uprooted Inuit was shortlived, and there is no record of what happened to him. Perhaps he ended up serving in the household of one of the adventurers, or pined to death in such alien surroundings. Excitement quickly transferred to another of Frobisher’s trophies, one he had not initially considered of any importance: the stone.
On 13 October, Michael Lok came on board the Gabriel. Frobisher dug out the stone found by Richard Garrard and handed it to him. Lok, who considered himself something of an expert on metallurgy, became very excited.
Frobisher’s stone was received like a sample of moonrock. According to George Best, later Frobisher’s captain, it was the adventurer’s wife who first hinted at the fabulous wealth it might contain. She ‘by chance’ threw it on the fire ‘so long, that at the length being taken forth, and quenched in a little vinegar, it glistered with a bright marquesset of gold’.26
Samples were rapidly sent to England’s leading metallurgists or ‘assayers’. Three, including William Williams, the assay master at the Tower of London, and a ‘gold refiner’ called Wheeler found nothing of interest, but an Italian alchemist called John Baptista Agnello ‘made three several proofs and showed Lok gold’.27 Lok presented this glistening grain to the Queen, and at once the entire court was gripped by gold fever.
Possibly working on the court’s behalf, Sir William Winter, Sir John Berkley and others secretly gathered at a house in Lambeth to check Agnello’s results, and apparently confirmed them. They immediately called for a new mission to be organised back to Meta Incognita, but in the utmost secrecy, ‘least foreign princes set foot therein’.
Enthusiasm swept the City. ‘Frobisher…has 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, at least as it now is. There are also six other islands near to this, which seem very little inferior,’ Philip Sidney wrote to Hubert Languet.28 A new mission was set up, much more ambitious than the last. The list of investors included the Queen herself, and were desperate to be involved, pressing Lok to accept their credit (though very rarely their cash).
Dee was among them, promising £25 towards the venture. It is unclear whether his main interest was in the prospect of gold or the Northwest Passage. He would probably have suspicions about the ore’s yield, as he too subscribed to the alchemical notion that gold was bound to be sparse in such cold climes.
The Gabriel and Michael were now to be joined by a new and more substantial flagship, the 180-ton Aid, from the Queen’s own fleet.29 It was a measure of the national prestige and hopes now attached to the venture that the Queen had made such a vessel available.
Crewing and equipping the expedition proved enormously expensive. The indefatigable Lok needed to find £4,400, only half of which he had managed to raise by the time the fleet was ready to set sail.
The ships left Blackwall on 26 May 1577, with a crew of one hundred and forty, including ninety sailors, gunners and carpenters, thirty miners and metallurgists (the latter expressly commanded ‘not to discover the secret of the riches’ they unearthed until it was returned home), and a handful of convicts plucked from the London gaols, including ‘John Robertes, alias Beggar’, a highway robber.30 At least some of these ‘condemned persons’ were apparently to be left in Frieseland with weapons, victuals and instructions on ‘how they may by their good behaviour win the good will of the people of that land and Country’ – which was one of the earliest recorded examples of the policy of transportation that would later populate so many corners of the British Empire.31
The fleet spent six weeks in the Arctic seas, where ‘in the place of odoriferous and fragrant smells of sweet gums and pleasant notes of musical birds which other countries in more temperate zones do yield, we tasted Boreal blasts mixed with snow and hail’, one of the crew caustically noted.32 They finally reached ‘Frobisher’s Strait’, as it was now called, on 16 July.
It was blocked by ice. A few days later the ice dispersed and the ships sailed up the ‘strait’ before finding a natural harbour, where they moored. Frobisher called it ‘Jackman’s Sound’ ‘after our master’s mate’ and claimed the surrounding land for God and the Queen – arguably England’s first documented act of colonial conquest in America. They then ‘marched through the Country, with Ensign displayed, so far as was thought needful and now and then heaped up stones on high mountains, and other places in token of possession.’33
But they could not find any more of the black stone. They searched for some days, during which the only notable find was a ‘dead fish floating, which had in his nose a horn…of length two yards lacking two inches, being broken in the top’. It was a narwhal, which they identified as a ‘sea Unicorn’.
Soon after, a rich seam of the ore was discovered on the original island, and the miners immediately set about their business. Tons of the black rock were laboriously transported to the ships, and stored as ballast, partly to disguise its value in case they were intercepted by pirates.
The remainder of the expedition was spent in a series of skirmishes with the locals, who this time proved more aggressive. The fleet, dispersed by storms, finally made its way back to England. The Aid reached Milford Haven on the western extremity of Wales on 17 September 1577.
Frobisher immediately rode to the court, where he ‘affirmed with great oaths’ that he had found ‘rich ore…precious stones, diamonds, and rubies’. He also presented the unicorn’s horn to the Queen as a personal gift, much to the irritation of Lok, who considered it the property of the Cathay Company.
The ore – over one hundred and forty tons of it – was locked up in Bristol Castle and a sample was taken to the Tower of London to be tested. It was secured there with four locks: the Tower’s warden, the ‘workmaster’ of the Royal Mint, Frobisher and Lok each being given a key.
Jonas Schutz, a German metallurgist,34 was appointed to determine the true value of the stone. Though on the expedition, he had been taken ill after his return. It was not until 25 November that, writing from the home of a friend in Smithfield, he informed Sir Francis Walsingham, the court’s representative, that he was ready to ‘finish the proof’.
He performed a series of trials at the Royal Mint’s metal-works on Tower Hill. But despite his hard work, all he had managed to extract from the ore was just a grain or two of gold. The tons of material Frobisher had brought from the opposite side of the world, as securely stored as the Crown Jewels, were apparently worthless.
Frobisher was furious. He went to Tower Hill, where he found Schutz, stripped of his clothes and bent over a furnace, sick ‘almost to death’ with the toxic fumes rising up from his crucibles. He ‘reviled him, and drew his dagger on him for not having finished his works’.
Frobisher now chose another man to test the ore, Dr Burcott. Little is known about him – not even his proper name (in the records of the Privy Council, he is identified both as Dr Burchard Kraurych and Dr Burcott). Nevertheless, within days he had a result, which Frobisher triumphantly delivered to Francis Walsingham – a sample of silver and gold as proof of the ore’s value.
On the 6 March 1578, John Dee was invited to Tower Hill, to act as an expert witness for a final, definitive trial of the ore.
Schutz worked away at two hundredweight of the stone, grinding it down, heating it up, producing great clouds of acrid smoke and, eventually, a tiny quantity of precious metal: five shillings’ worth of silver and three shillings’ worth of gold. If the rest of the ore yielded similar quantities, that would mean it was worth £28 per ton. To some this was a disappointment. ‘Frobisher’s gold is now melted and does not turn out so valuable as he at first boasted,’ Philip Sidney wrote to his friend Languet the following month.35
But Frobisher claimed that the ore could be mined and transported back to England for less than £8 a ton. And Schutz pledged that, if the samples were like the ones he had tried that day, he could probably extract the metals from them for around £10 a ton. It did not require Dee’s mathematical expertise to work out that even with the ore producing such modest yields, there were still big profits to be made.
Frobisher also claimed that the French were even now equipping twelve ships to sail to Meta Incognita and take possession. So if he did not return there fast, they might find both the ore and the country taken.
And so, on 25 May 1578, another expedition departed, this time with a fleet of fifteen ships, hastily equipped and manned by shoemakers, tailors, musicians, gardeners, anyone Frobisher could find – and, as it has recently been discovered, a highly placed Spanish spy. Through his ambassador to the English court Don Bernadino de Mendoza, King Philip had been monitoring Frobisher’s enterprise at least since the launch of the second expedition. Mendoza had even managed to smuggle a sample of the Frobisher’s ‘minerals’ back to Spain. From the detailed report later submitted to Mendoza, it is clear that the spy was one of the assayers taken on the expedition, perhaps even Frobisher’s chief assayer, Robert Denham.36
The fleet returned the following September having lost a ship and several crew members, and carried back an astonishing 1,150 tons of the black rock. As the Spanish spy noted, they had also discovered other glistening souvenirs, such as ‘a stone like white sapphire, though not as hard, and another like ruby, but with a depth of colour inferior to jacinth.’37
Despite such apparent bounty, Michael Lok was in serious financial trouble. Two months later, totting up the totals, he arrived at a provisional result of over £20,000, well over the initial budget, and roughly equivalent to ten per cent of the entire Royal Exchequer.38 Buried in the midst of that vast total was over £2,000 of his own money, including £100 he had invested on behalf of John Dee, perhaps in payment for consulting services.
Lok also found himself the target of increasingly hostile attacks by Frobisher, which were presumably launched to deflect any blame for the overspend. Lok was, Frobisher fulminated, a fraud, a cozener, ‘no venturer at all in the voyages, a bankrupt knave’. On the latter point Frobisher was not far from the truth. For Lok was soon declared bankrupt, and his Cathay Company went into receivership under Thomas Allen, a scientist whose name was closely coupled with Dee’s (often by their enemies). Lok ended up in the Fleet Prison, where he passed his time issuing desperate and disregarded petitions.
Meanwhile, efforts continued to extract gold from the mountain of ore that had been brought back, now stored at Dartford. These proved fruitless. One of the final attempts was made by William Williams, the assay master at the Tower of London who had tested Frobisher’s original sample. After weeks of hot work, he sent the results of his efforts to Walsingham. Embedded in sealing wax was a pinhead of silver.39