It was a memorable day in the annals of discovery, 30th June 1587, when Davis reached this famous point on the coast of Greenland. "A bright blue sea extended to the horizon on the north and west, obstructed by no ice, but here and there a few majestic icebergs with peaks snowy shooting up into the sky." To the eastward were the granite mountains of Greenland, and beyond them the white line of the mightiest glacier in the world. Rising immediately above the tiny vessel was the beetling wall of Hope Sanderson, with its summit eight hundred and fifty feet above sea-level. At its base the sea was a sheet of foam and spray. It must have been a scene like fairyland, for, as Davis remarked, there was "no ice towards the north, but a great sea, free, large, very salt and blue, and of an unsearchable depth."

But again disappointment awaited him. That night a wind from the north barred further advance as a mighty bank of ice some eight feet thick came drifting down toward the Atlantic. Again and again he attempted to get on, but it was impossible, and reluctantly enough he turned the little ship southwards.

"This Davis hath been three times employed; why hath he not found the passage?" said the folk at home when he returned and reported his doings. How little they realised the difficulties of the way. The commander of the twenty-ton Ellen had done more than any man had done before him in the way of Arctic exploration. He had discovered seven hundred and thirty-two miles of coast from Cape Farewell to Sanderson's Hope; he had examined the whole coast of Labrador; he had "converted the Arctic regions from a confused myth into a defined area." "He lighted Baffin into his bay. He lighted Hudson into his strait. He lighted Hans Egede to the scene of his Greenland labour." And more than this, says his enthusiastic biographer: "His true-hearted devotion to the cause of Arctic discovery, his patient scientific research, his loyalty to his employers, his dauntless gallantry and enthusiasm form an example which will be a beacon-light to maritime explorers for all time to come."

"And Davis three times forth for the north-west made,
Still striving by that course t'enrich the English trade;
And as he well deserved, to his eternal fame,
There, by a mighty sea, immortalised his name."

CHAPTER XXXVI

BARENTS SAILS TO SPITZBERGEN

With the third failure of John Davis to find the North-West Passage the English search for Cathay came to an end for the present. But the merchants of Amsterdam took up the search, and in 1594 they fitted out an expedition under William Barents, a burgher of Amsterdam and a practical seaman of much experience. The three voyages of Barents form some of the most romantic reading in the history of geographical discovery, and the preface to the old book compiled for the Dutch after the death of Barents sums up in pathetic language the tragic story of the "three Voyages, so strange and wonderful that the like hath never been heard of before." They were "done and performed three years," says the old preface, "one after the other, by the ships of Holland, on the North sides of Norway, Muscovy, and Tartary, towards the kingdoms of Cathay and China, showing discoveries of the Country lying under 80 degrees: which is thought to be Greenland; where never any man had been before, with the cruel Bears and other Monsters of the sea and the unsupportable and extreme cold that is found to be in these places. And how that in the last Voyage the Ship was enclosed by the Ice, that it was left there, whereby the men were forced to build a house in the cold and desert country of Nova Zembla, wherein they continued ten months together and never saw nor heard of any man, in most great cold and extreme misery; and how after that, to save their lives, they were constrained to sail about one thousand miles in little open boats, along and over the main Seas in most great danger and with extreme labour, unspeakable troubles, and great hunger."