[203] Morton here apparently refers at second hand to Aristotle’s resumé of the ancient belief of five zones, two only of which were habitable. Meteorologica, B. II. ch. v. § 11.
[204] From this passage it would appear that the Isle of Sall and the tropical waters, which Morton in this chapter refers to as having been visited by him, were in the neighborhood of the Western and Cape Verde Islands. In his time the word tornado had probably not been adopted into the English language, and in writing it Morton gives to the letter d the peculiar Western Island or Portuguese pronunciation.
[205] Morton here confounds Davis with Hudson. Davis’s three voyages were made in 1585-6-7, and it was in the first of them that he discovered the straits which bear his name. He afterwards made five voyages to the East Indies, in the last of which he was killed in a fight with some Japanese on the coast of Malacca. Hudson made four voyages between 1607 and 1610, during the last of which he passed a winter, frozen in, near the entrance to Hudson Bay. His crew mutinied, and turned him adrift in an open boat, on the 22d of July, 1610. He was never heard of again; and it is his “fate,” probably, which Morton had in mind. No other noted discoverer of the Northwest Passage was lost prior to 1634. The discovery of that passage, however, then excited as active an interest as it has since, or does now. In 1632 Edward Howes sent out to Governor Winthrop a printed “Treatise of the North-West Passage” (IV. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vi. p. 480) which is still in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
[206] The phrase in the Meteorologica (ubi supra, [117], note 1.) is, “the parts under the Bear (i.e., north) by cold are uninhabitable.”
Impiger extremos curris mercator ad Indos,
Per mare pauperiem fugiens, per saxa, per ignes.
Horace, Epist. I. ll. 45-6.
[208] “18. Yea, I hated all my labor which I had taken under the sun: because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me.
“19. And who knoweth whether he shall be a wise man or a fool?”