30 
A VOYAGE TO SPITZBERGEN 
and Davis made their several discoveries between the 
years 1576 and 1588. 
The Dutch were not prompt in claiming and exercis¬ 
ing their rights as discoverers in the north. In 1603, 
Bear or Cherie Island was rediscovered, as has been 
stated, and named by the English. In 1607, Henry 
Hudson, having been despatched in a course due north 
towards the Pole, rediscovered Spitzbergen; and sailed, 
with a small bark and a crew of ten men and a boy, to 
a higher latitude, it is asserted, than was afterwards 
reached by any navigator for more than two centuries. 3 
Hakluyt’s Headland, Whale Bay, and some other names 
still retained on the map, originated with him. In ran¬ 
ging homeward, he met with an island in the latitude of 
71°, which he called Hudson’s Touches. 4 A knowledge 
3 “ A latitude which no ship after was able to approach for two hundred years, or 
until 1816; when Mr. Scoresby was the first to confirm the discoveries of Hudson.” — 
Beechey's Voyage of the Dorothea and Trent, p. 204. 
Beechey, however, thinks Hudson was mistaken in his latitude, as he speaks of 
seeing land as high as 82°; whereas no part of Spitzbergen reaches even to 81°. —• 
Ibid., p. 267. 
The highest point reached by Capt. Parry over the ice north of Spitzbergen, in 
1827, was 82° 45' north, in 19£° east; when he perceived that the movement of the 
whole body of the ice towards the south was bearing him back almost as rapidly as 
he advanced. He was, at that time, a hundred and seventy-two miles from his ship; 
and, as he had travelled the greater part of the distance several times over, he esti¬ 
mated that the same labor would have carried him nearly to the Pole, if the ice had 
been stationary. — Ibid., p. 198. 
The examples collected by Daines Barrington (chiefly from the Dutch whale- 
fishers), of vessels having sailed much further towards the Pole, are not regained by 
Scoresby as sufficiently well authenticated. — Scoresby's Arctic Regions, vol. i. p. 42. 
See also Barrington’s Miscellanies, — papers read before the Royal Society in 1774 and 
1775. 
4 Edge’s account of Northern Discoveries, in Purchas, vol. iii. p. 464. As the fact 
does not appear in the journal of the voyage, as given by Purchas in the same volume, 
it may be that the statement of Edge is not correct. If Hudson really found an island 
in the latitude of 71°, it was doubtless Jan Mayen; whose discovery is attributed to 
the Dutch, as having been made four years later by the navigator whose name it bears. 
“ When the Russia (Muscovy) Company attempted to monopolize the fishery of the 
whole of the polar countries, this island was granted by the king to the corporation 
of Hull as a fishing station.” — Scoresby's Arctic Regions , vol. i. p. 154. 
