Tom Symons: A Canadian Life

Chapter 15: Unexplored Frontiers: Tom Symons and the Arctic Landfall of an Elizabethan Adventurer

Unexplored Frontiers: Tom Symons and the Arctic Landfall of an Elizabethan Adventurer STEPHEN ALSFORD I f fortune is kind, one may have occasion, during the course of an education or career, to come under the tutelage of giants—or at close enough quarters to observe and learn from them. When, as a history undergraduate, I was exposed to the Symons report, To Know Ourselves, I hardly imagined that later in life I would work closely with its renowned author, over the course of more than a decade, on the Meta Incognita Project: something I look back on as one of the most rewarding and self-developing experiences of my career. The project took its name from a term approved by Queen Elizabeth I for the Arctic region (southern Baffin Island) to which the adventurer Martin Frobisher had led three entrepreneurial expeditions between 1576 and 1578. Beginning as an attempt to find a northwest passage through to fabled Cathay, it was repurposed into an ambitious mining and (abortive) colonization venture after alchemical analyses of ore deluded potential backers into the belief that it contained gold. Just how this mistake came about, and how maintained—leading to considerable investment not only in the sizable third expedition but also in the construction of extensive smelting facilities in England—was one of the mysteries on which project researchers hoped to shed light. As is often the case, years of research were not to solve the mystery definitively, but narrowed down the range of possible solutions and left much better understood the circumstances surrounding C H A P T E R 1 5 314 TOM SYMONS: A CAnAdiAn Life it—circumstances that included the preparedness of Frobisher to do whatever necessary to win fame and fortune, the similar ambition and flawed science of alchemist-assayers active in Elizabethan England, the interplay of international competitiveness for empire and of gold fever on leading members of Elizabethan society, and a desire to expand the boundaries of the civilized world as it was understood by Europeans. The Meta Incognita Project has rehabilitated that episode in history from the status of a dead-end side-street to one that prefigures key themes in the stories of European maritime exploration and of the Old World exploitation and colonization of North America, particularly Canada’s North. The project began, to be frank, with a squabble between researchers: that type of competitive scholarly energy which, if harnessed and channelled, can prove all the more fruitful. To set the scene for that, we must look back to 1861, when American explorer Charles Francis Hall, searching for traces of the Franklin expedition in the Baffin Island region, had identified an islet1 off the northeastern coast of Frobisher Bay as the base camp established by Martin Frobisher on his second expedition. Some of the “relics” brought back from Kodlunarn Island, as Hall rendered the Inuit name for the place (Qallunaan now being more politically correct),2 were deposited with the Smithsonian Institution. Interest in this strand of the history of Elizabethan maritime ventures, of initial attempts to establish colonies on future Canadian territory, and of early contact between Europeans and Native North Americans revived under the approach of the four hundredth anniversary of the Frobisher expeditions, when the Royal Ontario Museum sent historical archaeologist Walter Kenyon to survey the island (1974). Ten years earlier, the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada (HSMBC) had mooted whether investigation and/or protection of the historic remains on the island—symbolically significant, but visually unspectacular—was warranted. The board made a positive recommendation in this regard, also recommending historical research be undertaken, and declared Kodlunarn a site of national historic importance; but it stopped short of designating it the national historic site that would have entailed a specific governmental responsibility. Consequently, no concrete action followed at that time. UNEXPLORED FRONTIERS 315 In 1981, the Smithsonian showed new interest by conducting its own survey of Kodlunarn and other sites in the area suspected as having some connection with the Frobisher voyages; it also worked with Canada’s National Historic Parks and Sites (NHPS) on analysis of some of the Hall artifacts. Dr. William Fitzhugh, director of the Smithsonian’s Arctic Studies Center, followed up his initial survey with a return visit in 1990, as part of his wider search for Arctic sites of historical interest. The stimulus was not solely the Frobisher expeditions but the fainter prospect...