FIRST POLAR VOYAGE. 223 



exhorted Henry the Eighth, " with very weighty *-»• 

 and substantial reason, to set forth a diseouery 

 even to the North Pole.' 1 '' 



The king was pleased to accede to the proposal, 

 and sent " two faire ships well manned, and 

 victualled, having in them divers cunning men 

 to seek strange regions." * The particulars of 

 this voyage, which was the first ever undertaken 

 for the purpose of searching a passage to the 

 East Indies across the Pole, appear to have been 

 lost, as Hakluyt says, "by reason of the great 

 negligence of the writers of those times, who 

 should have used more care in preserving the 

 memoires of the worthy actes of our nation ; " 

 but it seems that one of the ships was named 

 the Dominus Vobiscum, that the expedition left 

 England in 1527, and having navigated far to 

 the north-west, at length entered a dangerous 

 gulf between Greenland and Newfoundland, 

 where one of the vessels was cast away, and that 

 the other, having visited Cape Breton, and landed 

 occasionally upon that coast, returned home in the 

 autumn of the same year. This is all that is 

 known of this voyage, from which much was 

 anticipated ; and the great disappointment which 

 the disastrous fate of the expedition occasioned 

 was in all probability the reason that no other 



* Hakluyt's Voyages, vol. iii. p. 129. 



