way for the most part over the Atlantic, making ever for the West. In June, 1576, Martin Frobisher sailed from Blackwall to the north-west 'for the search of the straight or passage to China.'⁴³ He sighted Greenland; and, sailing west, came to the inlet in the American coast, north of the Hudson Straits, which, after him, was called Frobisher Bay. This arm of the sea he took to be a passage between the two continents, the right-hand coast, as he went west, seeming to be Asia, the left-hand coast America. He came back to Harwich in October, bringing with him a sample of black stone supposed to contain gold; and thus, to the vain hope of a short passage to the Indies, he added the more dangerous attraction of possible mineral wealth in the Arctic regions. Men's hopes were raised; a company of Cathay was formed, with Michael Lok for governor; and, as their Captain-General, Frobisher sailed again in May, 1577, 'for the further discovering of the passage to Cathay.'⁴⁴ Again he sighted Greenland. Again he reached the bay which had been the turning-point of his former voyage. He took possession of the barren northern land in his Queen's name; and, when he came back in September, 'Her Majesty named it very properly Meta Incognita, as a mark and bound utterly hitherto unknown.'⁴⁵ The voyage was fruitless, but the stones brought home were still thought to promise gold, and so, in the following May, Frobisher started once more on a third voyage to the north. Fifteen ships went with him from Harwich, bearing 'a strong fort or house of timber'⁴⁶ to be set up on arrival in the Arctic regions, and intended to shelter one hundred men through the coming winter. The hundred men included miners, goldfiners, gentlemen, artisans, 'and all necessary persons'⁴⁶—as though this desolate region were to become the scene of a thriving colony. They set sail, reached the coast of Greenland, and claimed it in the Queen's name. They fell in with the Esquimaux; they crossed the channel now known as Davis Strait to the Meta Incognita; and they came back in the autumn with no result beyond the report of a new imaginary island. This was the end of Frobisher's enterprise, but in the next forty years other English sailors followed where he had gone before, and opened up to geographical knowledge fresh stretches of icebound coast and wintry sea. Davis, Hudson, Baffin, and others, gave their names to straits and bays, but it is impossible here to trace the record of their courage and endurance. No quest has ever been so fruitful of daring, patient seamanship, none has ever been so barren of practical results, as that for the North-West Passage. What Frobisher went to find in the sixteenth century, Franklin still sought in the nineteenth: and through all the ages of British exploration has run the ever receding hope of finding a short way through ice and snow to the sunny lands of the East.

⁴³ Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 52.

⁴⁴ Ibid. p. 56.

⁴⁵ Ibid. p. 104.

⁴⁶ Ibid. p. 105.