eady filled with
ice-drift, and their vessels were brought to a standstill, after about a
hundred and fifty English miles of progress beyond the Waigats; for the
whole sea of Tartary, converted into a mass of ice-mountains and islands,
and lashed into violent agitation by a north easterly storm, seemed
driving down upon the doomed voyagers. It was obvious that the sunny
clime of Cathay was not thus to be reached, at least upon that occasion.
With difficulty they succeeded in extricating themselves from the dangers
surrounding them, and emerged at last from the Waigats.

On the 15th of August, in latitude 69 deg. 15', they met the ship of
Barendz and returned in company to Holland, reaching Amsterdam on the
16th of September. Barendz had found the seas and coasts visited by him
destitute of human inhabitants, but swarming with polar bears, with
seals, with a terrible kind of monsters, then seen for the first time, as
large as oxen, with almost human faces and with two long tusks protruding
from each grim and grotesque visage. These mighty beasts, subsequently
known as walrusses or sea-horses, were found sometimes in swarms of two
hundred at a time, basking in the arctic sun, and seemed equally at home
on land, in the sea, and on icebergs. When aware of the approach of their
human visitors, they would slide off an iceblock into the water, holding
their cubs in their arms, and ducking up and down in the sea as if in
sport. Then tossing the young ones away, they would rush upon the boats,
and endeavour to sink the strangers, whom they instinctively recognised
as their natural enemies. Many were the severe combats recorded by the
diarist of that voyage of Barendz with the walrusses and the bears.

The chief result of this first expedition was the geographical
investigation made, and, with unquestionable right; these earliest arctic
pilgrims bestowed the names of their choice upon the regions first
visited by themselves. According to the unfailing and universal impulse
on such occasions, the names dear to the fatherland were naturally
selected. The straits were called Nassau, the island at its mouth became
States or Staten Island; the northern coasts of Tartary received the
familiar appellations of New Holland, New Friesland, New Walcheren; while
the two rivers, beyond which Linschoten did not advance, were designated
Swan and Mercury respectively, after his two ships. Barendz, on his part,
had duly baptized every creek, bay,