ARCTIC VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY. 



335 



CHAPTER XXXII. 



ARCTIC VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY, FROM THE CABOTS TO BAFFIN. 



First Scandinavian Discoverer of America. — The Cabots. — Willoughby and Chancellor (1553-1554). — 

 Stephen Burrough (1556).— Frobisher (1576-1578).— Davis (1585-1587).— Barentz, Cornelis, and 

 Brant (1594). — Wintering of the Dutch JSTavigators in Nova Zembla (1596-1597). — John Knight 

 (1606).— Murdered by the Esquimaux.— Henry Hudson (1607-1609).— Baffin (1616). 



LONG before Columbus sailed from the port of Palos (1492) on that ever- 

 memorable voyage which changed the geography of the world, the Scan- 

 dinavians had already found the way to North America. From Greenland, 

 which was known to them as early as the ninth century, and which they began 

 to colonize in the year 985, they sailed farther to the west, and gradually extend- 

 ed their discoveries from the coasts of Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Newfound- 

 land, to those of the present State of Rhode Island, which, from the wild vines 

 they there found growing in abundance, they called the " good Vinland." 



But a long series of disasters destroyed their Greenland colonies about the 

 end of the fourteenth century, and as Scandinavia itself had at that time but 

 very little intercourse with the more civilized nations of Southern Europe, it is 

 not to be wondered at that, despite the discoveries of Gunnbjorn and Eric the 

 Red, the great western continent remained unknown to the world in general. 



One of the first consequences of the achievements of Columbus was the re- 

 discovery of the northern part of America, for the English merchants longed 

 to have a share of the commerce of India; and as the Pope had assigned the 

 eastern route to the Portuguese and the western one to the Spaniards, they re- 

 solved to ascertain whether a third and shorter way to the Spice Islands, or to 

 the fabulous golden regions of the east, might not be found by steering to the 

 north-west. In pursuance of these views John and Sebastian Cabot sailed in 

 1497 from Bristol, at that time our first commercial port, and discovered the 

 whole American coast from Labrador to Virginia. They failed indeed in the 

 object of their mission, but they laid the first foundations of the future colonial 

 greatness of England. 



A second voyage, in 1498, by Sebastian Cabot alone, without the companion- 

 ship of his father, had no important results, but in a third voyage which he 

 undertook in search of a north-west passage, at Henry VIII.'s expense, in 1516 

 or 1517, it is tolerably certain that that great navigator discovered the two 

 straits which now bear the names of Davis and Hudson. 



The French expeditions of Verazzani (1523) and Jacques Cartier (1524), 

 however memorable in other respects, having been as unsuccessful as those of 

 Cortereal (1500) or Gomez (1524) in discovering the desired north-western pas- 

 sage, Sebastian Cabot, who in 1549 was created Grand Pilot of England, start- 

 ed in his old age another idea, which has become almost equally momentous in 



