in his eagerness, paddled close to the ship, when he was grabbed and hauled aboard with his boat. So angered was the poor fellow at his capture that “he bit his tongue in twain in his mouth.” Nevertheless, he survived till the return of the voyagers to England, but shortly after he died miserably “of a cold which he had taken at sea.” With this living witness of his “farre and tedious travels towards the unknowen partes of the world” (Best’s relation), and with other “tokens” which his companions had collected in their essays ashore—some bringing “floures [flowers], some greene grasse, and one ... a piece of blacke stone much like to a sea cole [coal] in colour which by the weight seemed to be some kinde of metall or minerall”—Frobisher turned his ship’s prow homeward at the end of August. Meanwhile, he had taken formal possession of the region round about the “straits,” in the name of the queen of England, who afterward dubbed it “Meta Incognita.” The name is still seen on modern maps, confined to the point of Baffin Land between Frobisher’s Bay and Hudson Strait. The homeward voyage was without incident, beyond perils encountered in fierce storms, in one of which, as Hall relates, a sailor was “blowen into the sea,” and in his flight catching hold of the foresail was there held till the captain “plucked him again into the ship.” They arrived in late September, and anchoring first at Yarmouth came to port at Harwich, October second. Frobisher immediately repaired to London with his report and his “tokens.” There he became the hero of the hour, being “highly commended of all men for his great and notable attempt, but specially famous for the great hope he brought of the passage to Cataya.” The captured native, too—"this strange infidell," as Best wrote, “whose like was never seene, read, nor heard of before, and whose language was neither knowen nor understood of any”—must have been gazed upon with awe. But the bit of “blacke stone,” brought as a novelty only, and deemed by the captain of no account except as a souvenir, proved to be the “token” of greatest import, since, quite by accident, it became an instrument that practically transformed the Frobisher project from its original design into a fervid speculative enterprise.