Nothing but Solitude

The expedition’s chronicler, a sailor named Thomas Ellis, described what happened next: “The storm increased, the ice enclosed us…so we could see neither land, nor Sea…the rigorousness of the tempest was such and the force of the ice so great that [the ice] raced the sides of the shippes…thus continued we all that dismall and lamentable night plunged in this perplexitie, looking for instant death.” One account of a 1580 English voyage through the Asian Arctic described one sailor’s frustration at being unable to distinguish ocean from land. One of the strangest episodes from Frobisher’s last Arctic landing in 1578 involved the construction, on Baffin Island, of a house “of lyme and stone” that sailors filled with trifles and then abandoned: “We left therein dyvers of oure countrie toyes, as belles, and knives…Also pictures of men & women in lead, men on horsebacke, lookinglasses, whistles, and pipes.”

Source: www.laphamsquarterly.org