Unknown Shore

This “engrossing, well-paced” history reveals how England's first colony in the New World was forgotten—and rediscovered three centuries later (New Yorker).

England’s first attempt at colonizing the New World was not at Roanoke or Jamestown, but on a small, mostly frozen island in the Canadian Arctic. Queen Elizabeth I called that place Meta Incognita, the Unknown Shore. Backed by Elizabeth and her key advisors, the erstwhile pirate Sir Martin Frobisher crossed the North Atlantic to find—or so he thought—vast quantities of gold, the fabled Northwest Passage, and a suitable place for a year-round colony.

 But Frobisher’s dream turned into a nightmare, and his colony was lost to history for nearly three centuries. In this compelling dual narrative, historian Robert Ruby interweaves Frobisher’s saga with that of the nineteenth-century American Charles Francis Hall, whose explorations of this same landscape led him to the Inuit, who passed down stories of Frobisher and his unknown colony across generations.

Unknown Shore is the story of two men’s travels, and of what these men shared three centuries apart. Ultimately, it is a tale of men driven by greed and ambition, of the hard labor of exploration, of the Inuit and their land, and of great gambles gone wrong.