lending the “Aid” from the royal navy and subscribing £1000 towards the expenses of the expedition. A Company of Cathay was established, with a charter from the crown, giving the company the sole right of sailing in every direction but the east; Frobisher was appointed high admiral of all lands and waters that might be discovered by him. On the 26th of May 1577 the expedition, consisting, besides the “Aid,” of the ships “Gabriel” and “Michael,” with boats, pinnaces and an aggregate complement of 120 men, including miners, refiners, &c., left Blackwall, and sailing by the north of Scotland reached Hall’s Island at the mouth of Frobisher Bay on the 17th of July. A few days later the country and the south side of the bay was solemnly taken possession of in the queen’s name. Several weeks were now spent in collecting ore, but very little was done in the way of discovery, Frobisher being specially directed by his commission to “defer the further discovery of the passage until another time.” There was much parleying and some skirmishing with the natives, and earnest but futile attempts made to recover the men captured the previous year. The return was begun on the 23rd of August, and the “Aid” reached Milford Haven on the 23rd of September; the “Gabriel” and “Michael,” having separated, arrived later at Bristol and Yarmouth.
Frobisher was received and thanked by the queen at Windsor. Great preparations were made and considerable expense incurred for the assaying of the great quantity of “ore” (about 200 tons) brought home. This took up much time, and led to considerable dispute among the various parties interested. Meantime the faith of the queen and others remained strong in the productiveness of the newly discovered territory, which she herself named Meta Incognita, and it was resolved to send out a larger expedition than ever, with all necessaries for the establishment of a colony of 100 men. Frobisher was again received by the queen at Greenwich, and her Majesty threw a fine chain of gold around his neck. On the 31st of May 1578 the expedition, consisting in all of fifteen vessels, left Harwich, and sailing by the English Channel on the 20th of June reached the south of Greenland, where Frobisher and some of his men managed to land. On the 2nd of July the foreland of Frobisher Bay was sighted, but stormy weather and dangerous ice prevented the rendezvous from being gained, and, besides causing the wreck of the barque “Dennis” of 100 tons, drove the fleet unwittingly up a new (Hudson) strait. After proceeding about 60 m. up this “mistaken strait,” Frobisher with apparent reluctance turned back, and after many bufferings and separations the fleet at last came to anchor in Frobisher Bay. Some attempt was made at founding a settlement, and a large quantity of ore was shipped; but, as might be expected, there was much dissension and not a little discontent among so heterogeneous a company, and on the last day of August the fleet set out on its return to England, which was reached in the beginning of October. Thus ended what was little better than a fiasco, though Frobisher himself cannot be held to blame for the result; the scheme was altogether chimerical, and the “ore” seems to have been not worth smelting.
In 1580 Frobisher was employed as captain of one of the queen’s ships in preventing the designs of Spain to assist the Irish insurgents, and in the same year obtained a grant of the reversionary title of clerk of the royal navy. In 1585 he commanded the “Primrose,” as vice-admiral to Sir F. Drake in his expedition to the West Indies, and when soon afterwards the country was threatened with invasion by the Spanish Armada, Frobisher’s name was one of four mentioned by the lord high admiral in a letter to the queen of “men of the greatest experience that this realm hath,” and for his signal services in the “Triumph,” in the dispersion of the Armada, he was knighted. He continued to cruise about in the Channel until 1590, when he was sent in command of a small fleet to the coast of Spain. In 1591 he visited his native Altofts, and there married his second wife, a daughter of Lord Wentworth, becoming at the same time a landed proprietor in Yorkshire and Notts. He found, however, little leisure for a country life, and the following year took charge of the fleet fitted out by Sir Walter Raleigh to the Spanish coast, returning with a rich prize. In November 1594 he was engaged with a squadron in the siege and relief of Brest, when he received a wound at Fort Crozon from which he died at Plymouth on the 22nd of November. His body was taken to London and buried at St Giles’, Cripplegate. Though he appears to have been somewhat rough in his bearing, and too strict a disciplinarian to be much loved, Frobisher was undoubtedly one of the most able seamen of his time and justly takes rank among England’s great naval heroes.
See Hakluyt’s Voyages; the Hakluyt Society’s Three Voyages of Frobisher; Rev. F. Jones’s Life of Frobisher (1878); Julian Corbett, Drake and the Tudor Navy (1898).
FROCK, originally a long, loose gown with broad sleeves, more
especially that worn by members of the religious orders. The
word is derived from the O. Fr. froc, of somewhat obscure origin;
in medieval Lat. froccus appears also as floccus, which, if it is the
original, as Du Cange suggests (literula mutata), would connect
the word with “flock” (q.v.), properly a tuft of wool. Another
suggestion refers the word to the German Rock, a coat (cf.
“rochet”), which in some rare instances is found as hrock. The
formal stripping off of the frock became part of the ceremony of
degradation or deprivation in the case of a condemned monk;
hence the expression “to unfrock” (med. Lat. defrocare, Fr.
défroquer) used of the degradation of monks and of priests from
holy orders. In the middle ages “frock” was also used of a long
loose coat worn by men and of a coat of mail, the “frock of mail.”
In something of this sense the word survived into the 19th
century for a coat with long skirts, now called the “frock coat.”
The word in now chiefly used in English for a child’s or young
girl’s dress, of body and skirt, but is frequently used of a woman’s
dress. Du Cange (Glossarium, s.v. flocus) quotes an early use
of the word for a woman’s garment (Miracula S. Udalrici, ap.
Mabillon, Acta Sanctorum Benedict, saec. v. p. 466). Here a
woman, possessed of a devil, is cured, and sends her garments
to the tomb of the saint, and a dalmatic is ordered to be made
out of the flocus or frocus. “Frock” also appears in the “smock
frock,” once the typical outer garment of the English peasant.
It consists of a loose shirt of linen or other material, worn over
the other clothes and hanging to about the knee; its characteristic
feature is the “smocking,” a puckered honeycomb stitching
round the neck and shoulders.
FROEBEL, FRIEDRICH WILHELM AUGUST (1782–1852),
German philosopher, philanthropist and educational reformer,
was born at Oberweissbach, a village of the Thuringian forest,
on the 21st of April 1782. Like Comenius, with whom he had
much in common, he was neglected in his youth, and the remembrance
of his own early sufferings made him in after life
the more eager in promoting the happiness of children. His
mother he lost in his infancy, and his father, the pastor of
Oberweissbach and the surrounding district, attended to his
parish but not to his family. Friedrich soon had a stepmother,
and neglect was succeeded by stepmotherly attention; but a
maternal uncle took pity on him, and gave him a home for some
years at Stadt-Ilm. Here he went to the village school, but like
many thoughtful boys he passed for a dunce. Throughout life
he was always seeking for hidden connexions and an underlying
unity in all things. Nothing of the kind was to be perceived
in the piecemeal studies of the school, and Froebel’s mind, busy
as it was for itself, would not work for the masters. His half-brother
was therefore thought more worthy of a university
education, and Friedrich was apprenticed for two years to a
forester (1797–1799).
Left to himself in the Thuringian forest, Froebel began to study nature, and without scientific instruction he obtained a profound insight into the uniformity and essential unity of nature’s laws. Years afterwards the celebrated Jahn (the “Father Jahn” of the German gymnasts) told a Berlin student of a queer fellow he had met, who made out all sorts of wonderful things from stones and cobwebs. This queer fellow was Froebel; and the habit of making out general truths from the observation of nature, especially from plants and trees, dated from the solitary rambles in the forest. No training could have been better suited to strengthen his inborn tendency to mysticism; and when he
