"There you are, then," said the doctor to himself, "cape so celebrated
and so well named! Many have cleared it like us who were destined
never to see it again. Is it, then, an eternal adieu said to one's
European friends? You have all passed it. Frobisher, Knight, Barlow,
Vaughan, Scroggs, Barentz, Hudson, Blosseville, Franklin, Crozier,
Bellot, never to come back to your domestic hearth, and that cape
has been really for you the cape of adieus."

It was about the year 970 that some navigators left Iceland and
discovered Greenland. Sebastian Cabot forced his way as far as
latitude 56 degrees in 1498. Gaspard and Michel Cotreal, in 1500 and
1502, went as far north as 60 degrees; and Martin Frobisher, in 1576,
arrived as far as the bay that bears his name. To John Davis belongs
the honour of having discovered the Straits in 1585; and two years
later, in a third voyage, that bold navigator and great whaler reached
the sixty-third parallel, twenty-seven degrees from the Pole.

Barentz in 1596, Weymouth in 1602, James Hall in 1605 and 1607, Hudson,
whose name was given to that vast bay which hollows out so profoundly
the continent of America, James Poole, in 1611, advanced far into
the Strait in search of that North-West passage the discovery of which
would have considerably shortened the track of communication between
the two worlds. Baffin, in 1616, found the Straits of Lancaster in
the sea that bears his own name; he was followed, in 1619, by James
Munk, and in 1719 by Knight, Barlow, Vaughan, and Scroggs, of whom
no news has ever been heard. In 1776 Lieutenant Pickersgill, sent
out to meet Captain Cook, who tried to go up Behring's Straits, reached
the sixty-eighth degree; the following year Young, for the same
purpose, went as far north as Woman's Island.

Afterwards came Captain James Ross, who, in 1818, rounded the coasts
of Baffin's Sea, and corrected the hydrographic errors of his
predecessors. Lastly, in 1819 and 1820, the celebrated Parry passed
through Lancaster Straits, and penetrated, in spite of unnumbered
difficulties, as far as Melville Island, and won the prize of 5,000
pounds promised by Act of Parliament to the English sailors who would
reach the hundred and seventeenth meridian by a higher latitude than
the seventy-seventh parallel.

In 1826 Beechey touched Chamisso Island; James Ross wintered from
1829 to 1833 in Prince Regent Straits, and amongst other important
works discovered the magnetic pole