the achievement of reaching Cathay
by some northern route. A discourse by Sir Humphrey Gilbert to prove
the existence of a passage by the north-west to Cathay and the East
Indies, in ten chapters, was much discussed, and the Elizabethan
seamen were still bent on its discovery.

"When I gave myself to the study of geography," said Sir Humphrey,
"and came to the fourth part of the world, commonly called America,
which by all descriptions I found to be an island environed round by
sea, having on the south side of it the Strait of Magellan, on the
west side the Sea of the South, which sea runneth toward the north,
separating it from the east parts of Asia, and on the north side the
sea that severeth it from Greenland, through which Northern Seas the
Passage lieth which I take now in hand to discover."

The arguments of Sir Humphrey seemed conclusive, and in 1585 they chose
John Davis, "a man well grounded in the principles of the art of
navigation," to search for the North-West Passage to China. They gave
him two little ships, the _Sunshine_ of fifty tons, with a crew of
seventeen seamen, four musicians, and a boy, and the _Moonshine_ of
thirty-five tons. It was a daring venture, but the expedition was
ill-equipped to battle with the icebound seas of the frozen north.
The ships left Dartmouth on 7th June, and by July they were well out
on the Atlantic with porpoises and whales playing round them. Then
came a time of fog and mist, "with a mighty great roaring of the sea."
On 20th July they sailed out of the fog and beheld the snow-covered
mountains of Greenland, beyond a wide stream of pack-ice--so gloomy,
so "waste, and void of any creatures," so bleak and inhospitable that
the Englishmen named it the Land of Desolation and passed on to the
north. Rounding the point, afterwards named by Davis Cape Farewell,
and sailing by the western coast of Greenland, they hoped to find the
passage to Cathay. Landing amid the fiords and the "green and pleasant
isles" about the coast, they anchored a while to refresh, and named
their bay Gilbert Sound, after Sir Humphrey and Davis' own little boy,
Gilbert, left at home.

"The people of the country," says Davis, "having espied our ships,
came down unto us in their canoes, holding up their right hand toward
the sun. We doing the like, the people came aboard our ships, men of
good stature, unbearded, small-eyed, and of tractable conditions. We
bought the clothes from their backs, which we