8 INTRODUCTION. Chap. I. 



times ready to attend to any suggestion that had 

 for its object the improvement of science or the in- 

 terests of navigation and commerce. It was sent as 

 usual to the President and Council of the Royal 

 Society, returned with their approval, and sub- 

 mitted to Lord Liverpool, then Prime Minister, for 

 his sanction ; and this being obtained, orders were 

 forthwith issued by the Board of Admiralty for the 

 preparation of four ships to be appropriated to the 

 service in question, — two for the search of a passage 

 from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and two to proceed 

 from the sea of Spitzbergen towards the North Pole. 

 It may be observed, that none of our old navi- 

 gators were able to penetrate any part of the Polar 

 Sea; all their discoveries were confined to the 

 straits and inlets and islands on the eastern coast of 

 America, and the large strait of Davis and Baffin 

 on the western coast of Greenland. Had Baffin 

 entered Lancaster Sound from his own strait, he 

 would at once have discovered the sea which com- 

 municates with the Pacific, and then there is no 

 saying what this able old navigator and his con- 

 temporaries might not have effected. Indeed, at 

 the commencement of the late Arctic voyages, 

 nothing was known of any entrance into the Polar 

 Sea from this side of America. All that was known 

 on the first attempt, which hardly deserves the 

 name, was, that a Polar Sea did exist, that the ships 

 of Captain Cook had looked at it through Behring's 

 Strait, and that Hearne and Mackenzie, two North 



