228 ATTEMPTS MADE TO DISCOVER 



those icy regions, having been for many years engaged in 

 the whale trade at Spitzbergen. 



In this voyage Bylot advanced no further north than the 

 sixty-tifth degree of latitude in Davis's Strait. 



In the following year (I616), Bylot and Baffin proceeded 

 to explore Davis's Strait, and succeeded in penetrating 

 beyond the remotest advance of Davis, and the accounts 

 say they even got up to the seventy-eighth degree, where 

 Baffin observed the variation of the compass to be 65° W. 

 which was then the greatest ever known. In this place 

 those navigators came into an extensive sound, which they 

 named Sir Thomas Smith's Sound, and which spread be- 

 yond the seventy-eighth degree. Standing over to the 

 westward, they saAv Gary's Isles, and afterwards the first 

 sound on the American side, which Captain Bylot named 

 Alderman Jones's Sound, and further south in lat. 74° N. 

 Sir James Lancaster's Sound. 



The observations made by Baffin in the course of this 

 voyage impressed him strongly with the conviction that 

 the north-west passage was still feasible ; and he commu- 

 nicated his opinion to Mr. Briggs, the fiimous mathema- 

 tician, who took much interest in the affair, and even 

 made a chart* according to Baffin's information, which, 



* No chart has hitlierto been published above the seventy-third degree of 

 north latitude in Davis's Straits ; and I indulge a presumption, that the reader 

 will receive with some gratification a chart, carefully made by myself, and 



