James McDermott presents Martin Frobisher - Sir Martin after he successfully commanded Triumph against the Armada - as a personification of the Elizabethan Zeitgeist. He and the spirit of 16th-century England, in McDermott's opinion, were notable for opportunistic adventurousness, "treachery, cupidity and double-dealing".
McDermott is one of the new school of biographic debunkers who do not depict warts and all dispassionately; they gloat on the warts. This acerbic interpretation of history is more entertaining than traditional hero-worship and makes the 509 pages of this masterpiece of scholarly vilification a misanthropic pleasure to read.
In plain language and in elegant circumlocution, he deplores the overweeningly ambitious mariner and the men who commercially and politically exploited him: "Frobisher was not trustworthy, but his endearingly loose understanding of the bounds of legality appears to have been found useful by men whose own characters had to be seen to be above reproach." Though he was never one of the favoured gallants of Queen Elizabeth's court, she, too, found him useful and encouraged him, more and more as he demonstrated his increasing boldness as a freelance privateer - sometimes virtually a pirate - whose depredations on the high seas impoverished her enemies and enriched her.
McDermott became interested in England's haphazard emergence as an imperial seafaring power when he was doing research in the 1990s for the Canadian Museum of Civilization's re-examination of Frobisher's three voyages, in 1576, 1577 and 1578, to the country now known as Canada. On the first voyage, he was commissioned to seek the (non-existent) northwest passage from the north Atlantic to China, but failed to sail significantly beyond Meta Incognita ("the unknown limits") of Baffin Island.
He returned from that disappointing expedition with nothing to show for it but a small lump of ore bearing a trace of gold. Though uneconomically scanty, it was enough to persuade his backers to send him back as a prospector. The museum's Meta Incognita project was concerned principally with Europeans' first contacts with the indigenous Inuits on what might have become the site of England's first North American colony, almost 10 years before Raleigh's ill-fated Roanoke venture.
In the most interesting part of this bulky work, McDermott relates in detail how Frobisher's men exchanged gifts of little value with the initially friendly natives, then suffered and inflicted some casualties and abducted a few Inuits to exibit in England, where they soon died. The on-and-off hospitality and the extremely harsh climate of Baffin Island aborted the explorers' tentative plan to colonise the place. The search for gold was also a failure.
McDermott's study of Frobisher's frustrations in the north-west has been greatly extended to comprehend his whole career, with gaps only where there is a dearth of recorded information. Swashbucklers tried to keep their illicit swashbuckling secret. However, the author has been able to put together a sufficiently coherent account of Frobisher's forays ranging as far as West Africa and the West Indies, as well as his activities in waters close to home.
Frobisher's and England's outstanding achievement in this era was the defeat of the Armada, though McDermott finds some faults with their tactics. Frobisher also distinguished himself leading a victorious assault on a Spanish fort in Brittany, but that was the end of the game. A wounded thigh, surgically maltreated in the field, caused gangrene and Frobisher's death at the age of (about) 59.
James McDermott's verbal portrait of Frobisher, an ill-tempered, semi-literate Yorkshireman who cruelly neglected two wives, is written with urbanity and dry wit, and, like Cornelius Ketel's 1577 oil painting, is without charm.
The illustrations include unnecessary portraits of Queen Elizabeth, Philip II of Spain, Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Drake, Frobisher's much envied rival, and a worthwhile contemporary coloured drawing by John White of a skirmish with Inuits at "Bloody Point". There is only one map, a woefully inadequate one. Readers who wish to derive the maximum possible benefit from the book should keep atlases close by.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic