THE ARCTIC REGIONS. 4I 
historic times who penetrated to Arctic polar regions was Sebastian 
Cabot, who, in 1498, sought a north-west passage from Europe to 
China and the Indies. Considering the date, and the state of navi- 
gation at that period, this was perhaps the boldest attempt on 
record. 
Sebastian Cabot reached as high as Hudson’s Bay, but a mutiny 
of his sailors forced him to retrace his steps. In 1500, Gaspard de 
Cortereal discovered Labrador ; in 1553, Sir Hugh Willoughby Nova 
Zembla, and Chancellor the White Sea about the same time. 
Davis visited in 1585 the west coast of Greenland, and two years 
later he discovered the strait which bears his name. In 1596 
Barentz discovered Spitzbergen, which was again seen by Hendrich 
Hudson, who sailed up to and beyond the eighty-second parallel. 
Three years later Hudson gave his name to the great Labrador Bay, 
but he could get no farther. : His crew revolted, and he was left in 
the ship’s launch with his son, seven sailors, and the carpenter, who 
remained faithful ; one by one they died, and thus perished one of 
our greatest navigators. 
The Island of Jan Mayen was discovered in 1611; the channel 
which Baffin took for a bay, and which bears his name, was dis- 
covered in 1616. Behring discovered, in his first voyage in 1727, 
the strait which separates Siberia from America; he sailed through 
it in 1741, but his ship was stranded, and he himself died of scor- 
butic disease. 
In the year 1771 the Polar Sea was discovered by Hearne, a fur 
merchant ; it was explored long after by Mackenzie. 
From the year 1810, when Sir John Ross, Franklin, and Parry, 
turned their attention to the Arctic regions, expeditions to the Polar 
Seas rapidly succeeded each other. 
In his first voyage, made in 1818, Sir John Ross was led to think 
that Lancaster Sound was closed by a chain of mountains, which he 
called the Croker Mountains; but in the following year Captain 
Parry, in command of two ships, the Meca and Griger, discovered 
that this was an error. This celebrated navigator discovered Barrow’s 
Straits, Wellington Channel, and Prince Regent Inlet, Cornwallis, 
Sir Byam Martin, and Melville Islands, to which the name of Parry’s 
Archipelago has been given. In this short voyage he gathered more 
new results than were obtained by his successors during the next 
forty years. He was the first to traverse these seas, Upon Sir 
Byam Martin Island he discovered and described the ruins of some 
ancient habitations of the Esquimaux. He passed the winter on 
Melville Island. In order to attain his chosen anchorage in Winter's 
