In 1566 Humphrey Gilbert—who was as near to heaven by sea as by land—petitioned Queen Elizabeth for privileges in regard to discoveries "by the North-west to Cataia" as an alternative to a petition he, in conjunction with Anthony Jenkinson, had presented the previous year for a voyage by the north-east. He received no answer; but ten years afterwards, in support of this unanswered petition, he published his _Discourse of a Discovery for a New Passage to Cataia_. This met with approval, and led, with little delay, to the expedition under the Martin Frobisher who, among other noteworthy services, commanded the _Triumph_ in the Armada fight to such good purpose that he was one of the five distinguished men knighted by Howard in mid-channel after the battle off the Isle of Wight. Frobisher was a good seaman—but no mineralogist. 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 Farewell on the 11th 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 afterwards 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. [Illustration: SIR MARTIN FROBISHER]