after it was born, and then the old nurse, and the unhappy Marguerite was left alone with the wild beasts, especially the white Polar bears, who thronged round her hut. Nevertheless she kept them at bay with her arquebus, and managed somehow to support an existence, until after nineteen months' isolation the ascending smoke of her fire was seen by people on one of the many fishing vessels which, by this time, frequented the coasts of Newfoundland. She was taken off the island and restored to her home in France. The island to which this tradition more especially relates is now called Grand Meccatina.
CHAPTER III
Elizabethan Pioneers in North America
Except that the ships of Bristol still no doubt continued to resort to the banks of Newfoundland for fishing, and that even the captains of these ships were occasionally elected admirals of the French, Basque, Portuguese, and English fishing fleets during the summer, the English, as a nation, took no part in claiming political dominion over North America after the voyage of Captain John Rut in 1527. This was the fault of Sebastian Cabot, the son of the man who founded British America, and who had returned to England long afterwards as the Grand Pilot appointed by Edward VI to further the discovery of a northern sea passage to China. Through him the attention of adventurers for a time was diverted from America to the "discovery" of Russia (as it has been called). The efforts of Sebastion Cabot were directed towards the revelation of a north-east passage by way of Arctic Russia to the Pacific, rather than past Newfoundland and Labrador and across Arctic America.
But as soon as Elizabeth came to the throne the sea adventurers of Britain, freed from any subservience to Spanish wishes, developed maritime intercourse between England, Morocco, and West Africa on the one hand, and Tropical and North America on the other. Once more the discovery of the North-west Passage across America to China came into favour. MARTIN FROBISHER[1] offered himself as a discoverer, and the Earl of Warwick found the means which provided him with two small sailing vessels of 25 and 20 tons each, besides a pinnace of 10 tons.[2] Queen Elizabeth confined herself, in the way of encouragement, to waving her lily hand from her palace of Greenwich as these three little boats dropped down the Thames on the 8th of June, 1576. She also sent them "an honourable message", which no doubt reached them at Tilbury.
But the pinnace was soon swallowed up in the high seas; the seamen in the vessel of 20 tons lost heart and turned their ship homewards. Frobisher alone, in his 25-ton bark, sailed on and on across the stormy Atlantic, past the south end of Greenland, and over the great gulf that separates Greenland from Labrador. He missed the entrance to Hudson's Bay, but reached a great "island" which he named Meta Incognita[3]. Here he gathered up stones and, as he believed, minerals, besides capturing at least one Eskimo, and then returned.
One of his stones was declared by the refiners of London to contain gold. There was at once—as we should say in modern slang—a boom for these Arctic regions. Queen Elizabeth took part in it, and on the 27th of May, 1577, a considerable fleet, under the command of Frobisher, sailed past the Orkneys for the south end of Greenland. It did not reach as far as Meta Incognita, but it brought back large heaps of earth and pieces of rock, probably from northern Labrador, which almost certainly contained mica schist, and were therefore believed to be full of gold. The following year 1578, Frobisher started on his third American voyage with a fleet of fifteen vessels, mainly financed by Queen Elizabeth, and manned to a great extent by the sons of the aristocracy, besides a hundred persons who were going out as colonists. For this region of ice and snow which was believed to be a mass of gold-bearing rocks! But the result was one of bitter disappointment. The captains were bewildered by the immense icebergs, "so vast that, as they melted, torrents poured from them in sparkling waterfalls". One iceberg toppled over on to a ship and crushed it, though most of the sailors were picked up in the sea and saved. In the thick mists the greater part of the fleet blundered into Hudson's Straits, yet did not realize that they had found a passage into the heart of Canada. At last, disgusted with this land of bare rocks, ice, and snow, they filled up the ships with cargoes of stones supposed to contain gold, and straggled back to England. No gold was extracted, however, from these cargoes, and much discouragement ensued.
SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT, one of the brilliant figures of Elizabeth's reign—scholar, poet, courageous adventurer, and man of chivalry—stimulated by the discoveries of Frobisher, obtained a patent or charter in 1578, and, after several unsuccessful attempts, led an expedition of small sailing ships to Newfoundland, where he entered St. John's Bay, and in the presence of the Basque, Portuguese, and Breton fishermen took formal possession of the country for Queen Elizabeth, raising a pillar on which the arms of England were engraved as a token. He then proceeded to grant lands to the fishermen to reassure them, and loaded his ships with rocks brought from the interior mountains and supposed to contain minerals. But in his further explorations of the southern coast of Newfoundland one of the ships was lost and nearly a hundred men intended as colonists were drowned.
Gilbert then determined to return to England in his small frigate of 10 tons named the Squirrel. He was accompanied by a larger vessel, the Golden Hinde, but refused to leave the men on the Squirrel to their fate. Consequently, between the Azores and the north coast of Spain, when the Squirrel was overwhelmed by the heavy seas, Sir Humphrey Gilbert perished together with all on board.
In spite, however, of the disappointing results of Gilbert's attempt to found a colony in Newfoundland, the importance of the cod fishery and the ivory tusks and oil of the walruses drew ever more and more ships from Bristol and Devonshire to the coasts of that great island and to the Gulf of St. Lawrence beyond. In 1592 the English adventurers got as far west as Anticosti Island (in a ship from Bristol), and in 1597 there is the first record of English ships (from London—the Hopewell and the Chancewell) sailing up the St. Lawrence River, perhaps as far west as Quebec.
In 1602, stimulated by Sir Walter Raleigh,[4] Bartholomew Gosnold sailed direct to the coast of North America south of the Newfoundland latitudes, and anchored his bark off the coast of Massachusetts on the 26th of March, 1602. Failing to find a good harbour here, he stood out for the south and definitely discovered and named Cape Cod, not far from the modern city of Boston. From Cape Cod he made his way to the Elizabeth Islands in Buzzard's Bay, and here he built a storehouse and fort, and may be said to have laid the foundations of the future colony of New England. He brought back with him a cargo of sassafras root, which was then much esteemed as a valuable medicine and a remedy for almost all diseases.
Subsequent expeditions of English ships explored and mapped the coast of Maine, and took on board Amerindians for exhibition in England. Their adventures, together with those of the colonists farther south, led to the creation of chartered companies, and to the great British colonies of New England, New York, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, which were to become in time the United States of America—a vast field of adventure which we cannot follow farther in this book.
As regards Newfoundland, James I, in 1610, granted a patent to a Bristol merchant for the foundation there of a colony, and although this attempt, and another under Sir George Calvert (Lord Baltimore) in 1616, came almost to nothing through the attacks of the French and the dislike of the crews of the fishing vessels to permanent settlers who might interfere
