270 ARCTIC VOYAGES. Chap. VIII. 



to 15 tons. Parry takes occasion to bestow a well- 

 deserved testimony to the valuable, persevering, 

 and extraordinary labours of these men. 



" I should be doing but imperfect justice to the memory 

 of these extraordinary men, as well as to my own sense of 

 their merits, if I permitted the present opportunity to pass 

 without offering a still more explicit and decided testimony 

 to the value of their labours. The accounts of Hudson, 

 Baffin, and Davis (and first of all Frobisher) are the pro- 

 ductions of men of no common stamp. They evidently 

 relate things just as they saw them, dwelling on such 

 nautical and hydrographical notices as, even at this day, 

 are valuable to any seaman going over the same ground, 

 and describing every appearance of nature, whether on the 

 land, the sea, or the ice, with a degree of faithfulness which 

 can alone perhaps be duly appreciated by those who succeed 

 them in the same regions, and under similar circumstances. 

 The general outline of the lands they discovered was laid 

 down by themselves with such extraordinary precision, even 

 in longitude, as scarcely to require correction in modern 

 times ; of which fact the oldest maps now extant of Baffin's 

 Bay and the Straits of Hudson and Davis, constructed from 

 the original materials, will afford sufficient proof. The 

 same accuracy is observable in their accounts of the tides, 

 soundings, and bearings, phenomena in which the lapse of 

 200 years can have wrought but little change. It is indeed 

 impossible for any one personally acquainted with the 

 phenomena of the icy seas, to peruse the plain and unpre- 

 tending narratives of these navigators, without recognising 

 in almost every event they relate, some circumstance familiar 

 to his own recollection and experience, and meeting with 

 numberless remarks which bear most unequivocally about 

 them the impress of truth. 



" While thus doing justice to the faithfulness and accu- 



