[Footnote 3:  We now know Meta Incognita to be the southernmost peninsula of the vast Baffin Island.]

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.