8 
A VOYAGE TO SPITZBERGEN 
precision; and, in the struggle with other nations for 
precedence of discovery and possession, claims were 
advanced that were either without foundation, or but 
feebly supported by evidence. Purchas was in the 
habit of treating the documents that came into his 
possession with great freedom; omitting what he chose 
to consider unimportant, and introducing changes and 
additions, without always enabling his readers to distin¬ 
guish curtailed or altered or intercalated passages from 
the proper text of his authorities. 
As an example of indistinctness , may be mentioned 
his account of the important voyage of Bylot and 
Baffin in 1616, when Baffin’s Bay was first explored, 
and when most of the prominent names still attached 
to its capes, harbors, and inlets, were bestowed upon 
them. The record is ostensibly Baffin’s, who had a 
high reputation for scientific attainments and general 
accuracy of observation ; but it is obscured by the 
mutilations and other changes to which it was sub¬ 
jected. 5 
5 “ This voyage, which ought to have been, and indeed may still be, considered as 
the most interesting and important either before or since, is the most vague, indefinite, 
and unsatisfactory of all others; and the account of it most unlike the writing of 
William Baffin.” — “ So vague and indefinite, indeed, is every information left which 
could be useful, that each succeeding geographer has drawn Baffin’s Bay on his chart 
as best accorded with his fancy.” — Barrow's Chron. Hist., pp. 215, 216. 
It is probable, however, that the fault in this case rests chiefly, if not entirely, 
with Purchas, who strangely omitted Baffin’s chart and explanatory notes, on the plea 
that “ this map of the authour for this and the former voyage, with the tables of his 
journall and sayling, were somewhat troublesome and too costly to insert.” 
Baffin was, doubtless, the most scientific navigator of his time. In his voyage to 
Greenland in 1612, he laid down a method of determining the longitude at sea, which 
is said to be the first on record ( Barrow , p. 201); and he was one of the first to observe 
and calculate the influence on the sun’s apparent altitude of the remarkable refractive 
power of an arctic atmosphere. It is in his account of our voyage to Spitzbergen that 
he notices this subject particularly. Barents and his crew, who wintered at Nova 
Zembla in 1596, are reported to have seen the sun above the horizon fourteen days 
