Yet in this disappointing third voyage Frobisher had unknowingly come very near the discovery which originally he had in view! For, in the words of the writer before quoted, "the truth was that Frobisher's foremost ships had got farther to the south than was realized, and unwittingly he had discovered what is now known as Hudson's Strait—the sea gate of that very Northwest Passage on which his waking and sleeping thoughts so long had brooded."
He had been carried some sixty leagues up the strait, but as he knew nothing as to whither it led he reaped no advantage.
Several years went by without another attempt being made to solve the problem, of the Northwest Passage, but at last, in the summer of 1585, some English merchants planned a fresh expedition.
Two ships were fitted out—one the Sunshine, of London, fifty tons; the other the Moonshine, of Dartmouth, thirty-five tons. The command was intrusted to a young Devonshire sailor, Captain John Davis, whose name is familiar to all schoolboys who have drawn maps of the northern parts of North America.
Though the records of the voyage abound with incidents relating to the various encounters that Davis' men had with spouting whales and basking seals, uncouth Eskimos, and Polar bears, the actual achievements of this expedition were not great. The ships traversed part of what is now called Davis Strait, and went some way up Cumberland Gulf, but by the end of September they were back in Dartmouth.
Davis set forth again, next summer, with three ships and a pinnace. The latter and one of the ships were dispatched up the east coast of Greenland, while the commander, with the two other vessels, sailed northwest. He got as far as Hudson Strait and farther. And in a third voyage he reached a headland not far from Upernavik. The hardihood and pluck displayed in these attempts to penetrate the ice-encumbered seas were splendid, but the results did not throw much light on the question of how to get northwest by sea to the Indies.
Soon after this the kindred question of a Northeast Passage forced itself upon the seafaring people of Holland, and the city of Amsterdam fitted out four ships, and sent them forth under William Barents, in the June of 1594. The story of this and subsequent expeditions cannot, however, be told here, though it is full of heroism and strange adventures.
It was the idea of a Northeast route which first laid hold of Henry Hudson, the intrepid Englishman whose name figures so prominently on the map of North America. Like Barents, he made his way to Nova Zembla, but, baffled by the seemingly insuperable difficulties to the eastward, he turned westward in his third voyage, and again when he set forth on his fourth and last voyage.
Some of his men were evidently less stout of heart than their commander, and when there began to be real prospects of being caught in the ice, the spirit of mutiny got the upper hand. On June 21st, 1610, with a cowardice that was happily in strange contrast to the usual behavior of English crews, it was decided to get rid of the captain. Next morning he and his little son, a loyal-hearted sailor (the ship's carpenter), and half a dozen sick and helpless members of the crew, were put over the ship's side into one of the boats, and left to their fate.
The years went by. Other expeditions were fitted out and sent northward, but the old reasons for finding out the Northwest Passage were fast disappearing. The Portuguese monopoly of the sea-borne trade with India and the supremacy of Spain on the ocean highways were things of the past. The ships of other nations had no longer to skulk past these aforetime kings of the sea.