216 BAFFIN BAY 



Mainly at the expense of Ambrose Dudley, Earl of 

 Warwick, and under the business management of that 

 old seafarer, Michael Lock, of the Muscovy Company, 

 he left Blackwall on the 7th of June, 1576, in the 

 Gabriel of twenty-five tons, accompanied by the 

 Michael of twenty tons which deserted and returned 

 as soon as difficulties arose and a ten-ton pinnace, 

 which ended by foundering off Greenland. All told, 

 the expedition numbered thirty-five, of whom the 

 Gabriel carried eighteen ; and with these the voyage 

 through the Arctic Ocean was to be made to China. 



Leaving the Shetlands at her top speed of a league 

 and a half an hour which her master, good Christopher 

 Hall, proudly recorded the Gabriel sighted Cape Fare- 

 well on the llth of July. Two days afterwards she 

 was thrown on her beam-ends in a storm, and was 

 rapidly filling with water flowing in at her waist when 

 she was relieved by the loss of her fore-yard and the 

 cutting away of her mizen-mast. Rounding the cape, 

 steering westward when he could among the floating 

 ice, Frobisher reached a high headland at the south- 

 east end of what is now Frobisher Bay, which he 

 named Queen Elizabeth Foreland. A few days after- 

 wards Hall, out in a boat seeking a way through the 

 ice for the ship, landed on what they called Hall's 

 Island, and, noticing a fog coming on, left hurriedly, 

 snatching up, as specimens of the plants, a few grasses 

 and flowers, and, as a rock specimen, a heavy black 

 stone picked up haphazard on the beach. The grass 

 faded, the flowers perished, and the fateful stone 

 remained. 



For fifty leagues Frobisher sailed north-westward 



