Unknown Shore: The Lost History of England's Arctic Colony - Hardcover

Ruby, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805052151 ISBN 13: 9780805052152

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 2001

Synopsis

The true story of how the first English colony in the New World was lost to history, then found again three hundred years later.

England's first attempt at colonizing the New World was not at Roanoke or Jamestown, but on a mostly frozen small island in the Canadian Arctic. Queen Elizabeth I called that place Meta Incognita -- the Unknown Shore. Backed by Elizabeth I and her key advisors, including the legary spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham and the shadowy Dr. John Dee, the erstwhile pirate Sir Martin Frobisher set out three times across the North Atlantic, in the process leading what is still the largest Arctic expedition in history. In this forbidding place, Frobisher believed he had discovered vast quantities of gold, the fabled Northwest Passage to the riches of Cathay, and a suitable place for a year-round colony. But Frobisher's dream turned into a nightmare, and his colony was lost to history for nearly three centuries.

In this brilliantly conceived dual narrative, Robert Ruby interweaves Frobisher's saga with that of the nineteenth-century American Charles Francis Hall, whose explorations of this same landscape enabled him to hear the oral history of the Inuit, passed down through generations. It was these stories that unlocked the mystery of Frobisher's lost colony.

Unknown Shore is the story of two men's travels, and of what these men shared three centuries apart. Ultimately, it is a tale of men driven by greed and ambition, of the hard labor of exploration, of the Inuit and their land, and of great gambles gone wrong.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Ruby, author of Jericho, has worked as the Baltimore Sun bureau chief in Paris and in the Middle East. He now lives in Baltimore and is an editor at the newspaper.

Reviews

During the years 1576 to 1578, Queen Elizabeth I of England sent three expeditions under Martin Frobisher to find the fabled Northwest Passage that led to China. Ruby (Jericho), an editor with the Baltimore Sun, chronicles in lively prose an incredible saga of man against nature in the failed quest to place a colony in the far north. On the first expeditions, encouraged by assayists in England who were either incompetent or dishonest, former-pirate Frobisher believed he had found gold-bearing rock. Dreaming of fabulous wealth, he hoped the third expedition would establish a colony to mine gold. They failed badly (a few men were accidentally left behind when a sudden gale forced a hurried return to England), having brought back tons of useless rock and kidnapped a few Inuits. The story, buried in documents and technical archeological data, has remained unknown to most history buffs. Ruby's excellent popularized tale of Frobisher and his men draws on the 1860s expedition of American Charles Francis Hall (recounted in Bruce B. Henderson's Fatal North; see Forecasts, Jan. 1), who recorded oral histories from Inuit people about Frobisher, as well as on more recent archeological findings. The interweaving of these threads into a single narrative makes exciting reading and fills a gap in the early colonization efforts of the New World. Illus., with maps not seen by PW.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Drawing on original documents, public records, and previous research, Ruby (editor, the Baltimore Sun; Jericho: Dreams, Ruins, Phantoms) meticulously chronicles the voyages of Martin Frobisher and the anthropological travels of Charles Francis Hall, who journeyed to the Canadian Arctic for vastly different reasons. This fascinating history seamlessly moves from Elizabeth I's court to 19th-century whaling boats to the modern descendants of the Inuit whom both Frobisher and Hall encountered. Frobisher was originally looking for a navigable route to China (1576), but later voyages (1577 and 1578) were strictly for the procurement of gold and the establishment of a British colony, "Meta Incognita." Hall was "called" north in 1860 to rescue the imagined survivors of Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 expedition. Hall was unsuccessful in reaching the deserted ships but spent three years living with the Inuit of Baffin Island, who eventually led him to the remnants of Frobisher's voyages. He returned in 1864, enduring incredible hardships only to learn of the horrific fate of Franklin's men (starvation, exposure, and cannibalism), thus eliminating the need for Hall to be anyone's "savior." Recommended for public and academic libraries. Margaret Atwater-Singer, Univ. of Evansville, IN
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805052151
• ISBN 13: 9780805052152
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320