North Polar Exploration. 331 



namely, sufficiently important results, and the absence of any 

 chance of such a disaster as overwhelmed the Franklin expe- 

 dition. The great advantages that are invariably derived from 

 enterprises of this nature, independently of their more obvious 

 results, have already been pointed out. 



It has been the ambition of British explorers to reach the 

 North Pole ever since " Master Eobert Thorn exhorted King 

 Henry VIII., with very weighty and substantial reasons, to 

 set forth a discovery" for that purpose; and as knowledge 

 has accumulated, these reasons have become more weighty 

 and more substantial. Bluff King Hal did not haggle at the 

 expense, nor did he discourage the spirit of enterprise among 

 his sailors. He did the right thing, cordially acceded to the 

 proposal, and sent " two faire ships well manned and vic- 

 tualled, having in them divers cunning men to seek strange 

 regions.* Subsequent voyages to the northern seas in the 

 Tudor age, opened a profitable trade with the then scarcely 

 known duchy of Muscovy ; but the most notable expedition of 

 the sixteenth century was that which was led by gallant 

 William Barenton, and his stout crew of Dutchmen. He 

 discovered Spitzbergen in 1596, rounded the northern extreme 

 of Nova Zembla, and performed one of the most remarkable 

 Arctic voyages on record. 



In England the merchants of the Muscovy Company were 

 the great promoters of voyages towards the Pole, and as the 

 introducers of the system of keeping log-books, they ensured 

 the preservation of a record of the results of those voyages, f 

 In 1607 they sent bold Henry Hudson, in an eighty-ton 

 vessel, with ten men and a boy, to sail across the North Pole. 

 He discovered the point on the coast of Greenland which 

 still bears his name of " Hold with Hope," traced the ice 

 barrier extending right across from Greenland to Spitzbergen 

 in June ; and the name of Hakluyt Head, the extreme 

 N.W. point of Spitzbergen, was also given by Hudson. 

 Having thus satisfied himself of the impossibility of pene- 

 trating through the Polar pack to the westward of Spitz- 

 bergen, this intrepid explorer next sailed up to its northern 

 end, and examined the condition of the ice in that direction 

 during the month of July. He attained a latitude of 80° 23' ; 

 and having ascertained that the pack was as impenetrable 

 in the end of July as it was in June, he returned to 

 England. In 1608 Hudson again sailed with the intention 

 of attempting to effect a passage between Spitzbergen and 

 Nova Zembla, and thus completing the examination of 



* Hakluyt, iii., p. 129. 



t Sebastian Cabot, in his instructions to Willoughby and Chancellor, was the 

 real originator of the log-book. 



