The Meta Incognita Project: Contributions to Field Studies

Martin L. Nicolai an adjunct assistant professor of history at Queen’s
University.

This is a collection of field reports by geologists, archeologists, and
anthropologists who studied English and Inuit sites along the southern
coast of Baffin Island, sites associated with the Arctic voyages of
Martin Frobisher from 1576 to 1578. The book is clearly not designed for
a popular audience, but rather for specialists interested in
Frobisher’s mining enterprises and the effect of the European presence
on the culture of local Inuit bands.

Elizabeth I named the shore of Frobisher Bay “Meta Incognita” or
“Unknown Shore,” and it remained virtually unknown to outsiders
because of the dismal results of this first English attempt to colonize
and carry out mining operations in the Americas. In 1577 and again in
1578, workers laboriously hand-mined hundreds of tons of black ore,
which assayers said contained large quantities of gold and silver, but
which eventually turned out to be completely worthless. Project
researchers have identified the precise locations and functions of the
Frobisher sites; tried (without much success) to explain why the
assayers and expedition leaders believed that they were mining precious
metals; demonstrated how the Elizabethan miners worked the pits; and
studied how the Inuit who scavenged the sites used the materials they
found. While all the field reports are important, albeit often
overlapping and repetitious, some will interest the general reader more
than others. Particularly intriguing are the reports on Inuit–European
contact, especially Inuit oral history, for modern Inuit elders still
remember 400-year-old stories about the white men and their activities.

General readers interested in the European exploration of the Arctic
should probably wait until the results of the Meta Incognita Project are
incorporated into the history books. However, historians who would like
to employ this diverse, nonarchival source material in their writings,
and other specialists interested in such topics as the preservation of
historical sites and traditional mining methods, will find this
large-scale study of Canada’s Arctic well worth perusal.