Here he gathered up stones and, as he believed, minerals, besides capturing at least one Eskimo, and then returned.
[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.