68 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
are not to be trusted for any cause nor shew of freendship
that they would make. . . .” And, in Lok’s version, the five
English mariners insisted upon rowing with him to the land,
and rowed (against express orders) out of sight of their ship,
and were never seen again.
Frobisher searched up and down the coast of the island
for three days for some sign of his men, but found none, so
he returned to the place from which they disappeared, and
found one of the Eskimos who had earlier visited the ship.
The native was suspicious by now (rightly so), and stayed
far enough away from Frobisher’s ship for safety. “Yet at the
last with the fayr offers and entisements with gifts of the
capitayn he approached agayn with his bote to the ships syde,
but stood upon garde with his ore in one hand. . . .” But
Frobisher held out a bell (a toy always greatly coveted by
the savages) to him “with a short arme, and in that reache
[he] caught holde on his wrest; and suddenly by mayn force
of strength he plucked both the man and his fight bote owt
of the sea into the ship in a tryse....”
At the collapse of his plans for a native pilot through the
Passage, and probably also because of the prevalence of ice
in the upper reaches of the Bay, Frobisher decided to re-
turn to England and prepare for another journey. He sailed
from the New World on August 25, and arrived in London
on October 9. Immediately, he began preparations for an-
other voyage the following year. This time, of course, the
objective had shifted from an almost scientific approach to
the problem of the North-West Passage to the practical
venture of hunting for gold. There was to be, nonetheless,
some diversion of the shipping to the attempt on the Pas-
sage, and there was certainly to be some encounter with the
primitive inhabitants of “Meta Incognita” (the name given