Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/828

 792 R F R testing of which the queen manifested a strong personal interest. This took up much time, and led to considerable dispute among the various parties interested. Meantime the faith of the queen and others remained strong in the productiveness of Meta Incognita, and it was resolved to send out a larger expedition than ever, with all neces saries for the establishment of a colony of 100 men. The queen herself contributed two ships of 400 and 200 tons, manned with 150 men, and carrying 120 pioneers. Be sides these the fleet contained other 13 vessels of various sizes, carrying other 250 men, and the most elaborate and minute instructions were drawn up for the conduct of the expedition. Frobisher was again received by the queen at Greenwich, and her Majesty threw a fine chain of gold around his neck. On May 31 the expedition left Harwich, and sailing by the English Channel, reached Greenland o-.i June 19. This time Frobisher and some of his men managed to land, &quot; being the first known Christians that we have true notice of that ever set foot upon that ground.&quot; In the first days of July Frobisher Bay was reached, but stormy weather and dangerous ice drove the fleet south wards, and unwittingly Frobisher entered what was after wards known as Hudson Strait, up which he sailed about GO miles. When he found that he was sailing away from his destination, he, with apparent reluctance, turned back, and after many bufferings part of the fleet managed to come to anchor in Frobisher Bay. Some attempt was made at founding a settlement, and immense quantities of ore were slapped. But, as might be expected, there was much dissension and not a little discontent among so hetero geneous a company, and on the last day of August the fleet set out on its return to England, which was reached in the beginning of October. Thus ended what was little better than a fiasco, though Frobisher himself cannot be held to blame for the result ; the scheme was altogether chimerical, and the &quot; ore &quot; seems to have been not worth smelting. Between 1578 and 1585 we hear little of Frobisher, though he seems to have been doing service at various places, and steadily advancing in the good opinion of those in power. In 1580 he obtained the reversion of the clerkship of the royal navy, of no immediate value, In 1585 he commanded in the &quot; Primrose &quot; in Sir F. Drake s expedition to the West Indies, in the large booty brought home from which he no doubt had a good share. For the next year or two he was employed in various responsible services against the designs of Spain, and in 1588 he did such _ excellent work in the &quot;Triumph&quot; against the Spanish Armada that he was rewarded with the honour of knighthood. He continued to cruise about in the Channel until 1589, when he was sent in command of a small fleet to the coast of Spain. In 1591 he visited his native Altofts, and there married a daughter of Lord Wontworth. He had prospered during recent years and was able to become a landed proprietor in Yorkshire and Notts. But he found little leisure for a country life, and was soon on the seas again watching and cutting off the richly laden ships of Spain. In November 1594 he took part in the siege of Crozan, near Brest, and received a wound from which he died at Plymouth on November 22. His body was taken to London and buried at St Giles s, Cripplegate. Frobisher was brave and skilful as a naval leader, and had the enthu siasm of the true explorer, but was characterized by much of the coarseness, and probably some of the unscrupulousness, of las time, and appears to have been somewhat rough in his bearing, and too strict a disciplinarian to be much loved. Ho justly takes rank among England s great naval heroes. mentioned therein. FEOEBEL, FRIEDIUCII WILHF.LM AUOUST (1782-1852), philosopher, philanthropist, and educational reformer, was born at Oberweissbach, a village of the Thuringian Forest, on the 21st April 1782. He completed his seventieth year, and died at Marienthal, near Bad-Liebenstein, on the 21st June 1 852. Like Comeuius, with whom he had much in com mon, he was neglected in his youth, and the remembrance of his own early sufferings made him in after life the more eager in promoting the happiness of children. His mother he lost in his infancy, and his father, the pastor of Ober- weissbach and the surrounding district, attended to his parish but not to his family. Friedrich soon had a step mother, and neglect was succeeded by stepmotherly atten tion; but a maternal uncle took pity on him, and gave him a home for some years at Stadt-Ilm. Here he went to the village school, but like many thoughtful boys he passed for a dunce. Throughout life he was always seeking for hidden connexions and an underlying unity in all things. Nothing of the kind was to be perceived in the piecemeal studies of the school, ond Froebel s mind, busy as it was for itself, would not work for the masters. His half-brother was therefore thought more worthy of a university education, and Fried- rich was apprenticed for two years to a forester (1797-1799). Left to himself in the Thuringian Forest, Froebel now began to study nature, and without scientific instruction he ob tained a profound insight into the uniformity and essential unity of nature s laws. Years afterwards the celebrated Jahn (the &quot; Father Jahn &quot; of the German gymnasts) told a Berlin student of a queer fellow he had met, who made out all sorts of wonderful things from stones and cobwebs. This queer fellow was Froebel ; and the habit of making out general truths from the observation of nature, especially from plants and trees, dated from the solitary rambles in I he Forest. No training could have been better suited to strengthen his inborn tendency to mysticism ; and when he left the Forest at the early age of seventeen, he seems to have been possessed by the main ideas which influenced him all his life. The conception which in him dominated all others was the unity of nature ; and he longed to study nat ural sciences that he might find in them various applications of nature s universal laws. With great difficulty he got leave to join his elder brother at the university of Jena, and there for a year he went from lecture-room to lecture-room hoping to grasp that connexion of ths sciences which had for him far more attraction than any particular science in itself. But Froebel s allowance of money was very small, and his skill in the management of money was never great, so his university career ended in an imprisonment of nine weeks for a debt of thirty shillings. He then returned home with very poor prospects, but much more intent on what he calls the course of &quot;self-completion &quot; (Vervollkommnuny meines selbst) than on &quot; getting on &quot; in a worldly point of view. He was soon sent to learn farming, but was recalled in con sequence of the failing health of his father. In 1802 the father died, and Froebel, now twenty years old, had to shift for himself. It was some time before he found his true vocation, and for the next three and a half years we find him at work now in one part of Germany now in another, sometimes land-surveying, sometimes acting as accountant, sometimes as private secretary ; b it in all this his &quot;outer life was far removed from his inner life,&quot; and in spite of his outward circumstances he became more and more conscious that a great task lay before him for the good of humanity. The nature of the task, however, was not clear to him, and it seemed determined by accident. While studying architecture in Frankfort-on-the-Main, he became acquainted with the director of a model school who had caught some of the enthusiasm of Pestalozzi. This friend saw that Froebel s true field was education, and he per suaded him to give up architecture and take a post in the