TRANS-POLAR PASSAGE. 45 



Leith, which succeeded in the whale-fishery iu Baf- 

 fin's Bay, at an unusual season, and in an unusual 

 latitude, was reported, on her arrival in Britain, even, 

 I believe, by the master himself, to have been as 

 high as 80° in Baffin's Bay ; but on minute inquiry 

 being made, as to the authority on which the Cap- 

 tain founded the belief of his having been to so high 

 a latitude, and so far beyond what was supposed to 

 have constituted the limits of the Bay, he could 

 only declare with full confidence, that he had been 

 to about 77°*- Now, had this circumstance passed 

 over unnoticed for fifteen or twenty years, as was 

 the case with the greater number of the instances 

 quoted by Barrington, the master of the Larkins 

 himself, though without the least design to deceive, 

 would, in all probability, have stated it as a fact, 

 and would have believed his own statement to have 

 been correct, that he had actually proceeded as far 

 as the latitude of 80°. Many other illustrations 

 might be brought forward, of the tendency to add 

 to any thing extraordinary, rather than to detract ; 

 so that persons relating the same circumstance oc- 

 casionally through a series of years, and thus pre- 

 serving the recollection of the story as they last 

 communicated it, though they might have long for- 

 gotten the original event, have, by the most trifling, 

 and at the time apparently unimportant additions, 



* Quarterly Review, No. xxxv. p. 212. 



