Unknown Shore: The Lost History of England's Arctic Colony

About this book

Here is the true story of how the first European colony in the New World was lost to history then found again three hundred years later. Englands first attempt at colonizing the New World was not at Roanoke or Jamestown but on a mostly frozen pocket-sized island in the Canadian Arctic. Queen Elizabeth I called that place Meta Incognita -- the Unknown Shore. Backed by Elizabeth I and her key advisors including the legendary spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham and the shadowy Dr. John Dee the erstwhile pirate Sir Martin Frobisher set out three times across the North Atlantic in the process leading what is still the largest Arctic expedition in history. In this brilliantly conceived dual narrative Ruby interweaves Frobishers saga with that of the nineteenth-century American Charles Francis Hall whose explorations of this same landscape enabled him to hear the oral history of the Inuit passed down through generations. It was these stories that unlocked the mystery of Frobishers lost colony.