214 
THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap. 
from the Pacific to the Atlantic.^ But the fictitious literature 
of geography at all events comprehends accounts of various 
voyages between those seas by the north passage, and I consider 
myself obliged briefiy to enumerate them. 
The first is said to have been made as early as 1555 by a 
Portuguese, Martin Chacke, who affirmed that he had been 
parted from his companions by a west wind, and had been driven 
forward between various islands to the entrance of a sound 
which ran north of America in 59° N.L.; finally that he had 
come S.W. of Iceland, and thence sailed to Lisbon, arriving 
there before his companions, who took the “ common way,” i.e. 
south of Africa. In 1579 an English pilot certified that he had 
read in Lisbon in 1567 a printed account of this voyage, which 
however he could not procure afterwards because all the copies 
had been destroyed by order of the king, who considered that 
such a discovery would have an injurious effect on the Indian 
trade of Portugal (Purdiets, iii. p. 849). We now know that 
there is land where Chacke’s channel was said to be situated, 
and it is also certain that the sound between the continent of 
America and the Franklin archipelago lying much farther to the 
north was already in the sixteenth century too much filled with 
ice for its being possible that an account of meeting with ice 
could be omitted from a true sketch of a voyage along the north 
coast of America. 
In 1588 a still more remarkable voyage was said to have been 
made by the Portuguese, Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado. He is 
believed to have been a cosmographer who among other things 
concerned himself with the still unsolved problem of making a 
^ It oiiglit to be remembered that the voyage of the distinguished Arctic 
explorer, McClure, carried out with so much gallantry and admirable per¬ 
severance, from the Pacific to the Atlantic along the north coast of 
America, took place to no inconsiderable extent hy sledge journeys over the 
ice, and that no English vessel has ever sailed by this route from the one 
sea to the other. The North-west Passage has thus never been accomplished 
by a vessel. 
