282 CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS 



even before the legislature had decreed the sum of money 

 which has been since held forth as an inducement to the 

 completion of the discovery. 



It must have been somewhere near Devil's Thumb that 

 the route of Bathn was continued, as related, to the 

 seventy-eighth degree ; but as the land along that quarter 

 is low and declining rapidly in descent as it approaches the 

 Pole, and also verges much to the eastward, such a course 

 could not be productive of beneficial consequences to 

 inquiry after the north-west passage. Such a way was 

 likely to be as unsuccessful as the design of sailing to 

 the North Pole. The relation of the return of those 

 navigators is equally mysterious. Whether, in their return 

 from lands in the seventy-eighth degree, they had suc- 

 ceeded in sailing to the nortliAvard of the chain of the 

 Linnaean Isles, and consequently to the northward of the 

 great accumulation of ice beyond them, is not known. 

 That thejr saw on their return some islands, which are 

 called Gary's Islands, and sounds (of course lands) on the 

 western side of Davis's Strait, or Baffin's Bay, is a cir- 

 cumstance which is also involved in obscurity. With that 

 however the present question has no immediate concern : 

 but I cannot let the term Baffin's Bay pass without remark. 

 Any water, to constitute a bay, must be embraced by land ; 

 such for instance, as is Hudson's Bay ; but if there appear 

 no land to the northward of Baffin's Bay, as I presume is 



