e
ice-strata at Eschscholz Bay, and many others--but as the historical
part of the sketch of the voyage of the _Vega_ has already occupied
more space than was calculated upon, I consider myself compelled
with respect to the voyages of these explorers to refer to the
numerous and for the most part accessible writings which have
already been published regarding them.[339]

Was the _Vega_ actually the first, and is she at the moment when
this is being written, the only vessel that has sailed from the
Atlantic by the north to the Pacific? As follows from the above
narrative, this question may perhaps be answered with considerable
certainty in the affirmative, as it may also with truth be
maintained that no vessel has gone the opposite way from the Pacific
to the Atlantic.[340] But the fictitious literature of geography at
all events comprehends accounts of various voyages between those
seas by the north passage, and I consider myself obliged briefly to
enumerate them.

The first is said to have been made as early as 1555 by a Portuguese,
MARTIN CHACKE, who affirmed that he had been parted from his companions
by a west wind, and had been driven forward between various islands to
the entrance of a sound which ran north of America in 59 deg. N.L.; finally
that he had come S.W. of Iceland, and thence sailed to Lisbon, arriving
there before his companions, who took the "common way," _i.e._ south of
Africa. In 1579 an English pilot certified that he had read in Lisbon in
1567 a printed account of this voyage, which however he could not
procure afterwards because all the copies had been destroyed by order of
the king, who considered that such a discovery would have an injurious
effect on the Indian trade of Portugal (_Purchas_, iii. p. 849). We now
know that there is land where Chacke's channel was said to be situated,
and it is also certain that the sound between the continent of America
and the Franklin archipelago lying much farther to the north was already
in the sixteenth century too much filled with ice for its being possible
that an account of meeting with ice could be omitted from a true sketch
of a voyage along the north coast of America.

In 1588 a still more remarkable voyage was said to have been made by
the Portuguese, LORENZO FERRER MALDONADO. He is believed to have
been a cosomographer who among other tilings concerned himself with
the still unsolved problem, of making a compass free from variation,
and with t