Lesson 4.5 Martin Frobisher and The Search for the North-West Passage

1) Primary Texts:
KBCE: pp. 22-23, 14-15

Canadian History for Dummies: pp. 47-49, "The Quest for a North-West Passage," and "Fool's Gold: The Voyages of Martin Frobisher."

2) Map(s): possibly this one or, just look up Baffin Island and Frobisher Bay (and Iqaluit).

3) Activities: Look at a rock with some mica in it.

Colouring page: p. 20, Dover

Logic stage kids:

Define Longitude and latitude. What was the difficulty with measuring longitude?

Find out about three important navigational tools which sailors would have used about this time. Find pictures of them and complete the following notebooking page (to be uploaded to a reliable file hosting site). Be sure to answer the following questions:

1) What is the name of the instrument?

2) What does it do?

3) When was it invented/or where is it from?

Discuss: Do you think these tools made it easier to sail a long way away from shore? In other words, would sailors have sailed over to explore the New World without them?

Quadrant: The Humboldt State Univesity has a project detailing how to make one out of wood here.

Mariner's Astrolabe: How to construct one from http://astrolabes.org/mariner.htm

Traverse Board Instructions here.

Video of three navigational tools from The Mariner's Museum.

4) Time-line Figure or image: one here at this excellent site.
placement: 1576

5) Supplemental readings:
brief biography at Enchanted Learning. Contains a map.

A sample of the rock Frobisher brought back resides in the Lapworth collection at the University of Birmingham in the UK.

Frobisher Searches for the North West Passage from The Book of Discovery by M. B. Synge

CBYR: Martin Frobisher