Baffin further suggested that if there was a Passage it must now be sought by Davis Strait.

Accordingly another expedition was fitted out and Baffin had his instructions: "For your course, you must make all possible haste to Cape Desolation; and from hence you, William Baffin, as pilot, keep along the coast of Greenland and up Davis Strait, until you come toward the height of 80 degrees, if the land will give you leave. Then shape your course west and southerly, so far as you shall think it convenient, till you come to the latitude of 60 degrees, then direct your course to fall in with the land of Yedzo, leaving your further sailing southward to your own discretion: although our desires be if your voyage prove so prosperous that you may have the year before you that you go far south as that you may touch the north part of Japan from whence we would have you bring home one of the men of the country and so, God blessing you, with all expedition to make your return home again."

The Discovery had proved a good little ship for exploration, so she was again selected by Baffin for this new attempt in the far north. Upon 26th March 1616 she sailed from Gravesend, arriving off the coast of Greenland in the neighbourhood of Gilbert Sound about the middle of May. Working against terrible winds, they plied to the northward, the old ship making but slow progress, till at last they sighted "Sanderson his Hope," the farthest point of Master Davis. Once more English voices broke the silence of thirty years. The people who appeared on the shore were wretchedly poor. They lived on seals' flesh, which they ate raw, and clothed themselves in the skins. Still northwards they sailed, cruising along the western coast. Though the ice was beginning to disappear the weather kept bitterly cold, and on Midsummer Day the sails and ropes were frozen too hard to be handled. Stormy weather now forced them into a sound which they named Whale Sound from the number of whales they discovered here. It was declared by Baffin to be the "greatest and largest bay in these parts."

But beyond this they could not go; so they sailed across the end of what we now know as Baffin's Bay and explored the opposite coast of America, naming one of the greater openings Lancaster Sound, after Sir James Lancaster of East India Company fame.

"Here," says Baffin pitifully, "our hope of Passage began to grow less every day."

It was the old story of ice, advancing season, and hasty conclusions.

BAFFIN'S MAP OF HIS VOYAGES TO THE NORTH.
From the original MS., drawn by Baffin, in the British Museum.

"There is no hope of Passage to the north of Davis' Straits," the explorer further asserts; but he asserts wrongly, for Lancaster Sound was to prove an open channel to the West.

So he returned home. He had not found the Passage, but he had discovered the great northern sea that now bears his name. The size of it was for long plunged in obscurity, and the wildest ideas centred round the extent of this northern sea. A map of 1706 gives it an indefinite amount of space, adding vaguely: "Some will have Baffin's Bay to run as far as this faint Shadow," while a map of 1818 marks the bay, but adds that "it is not now believed."