Three voyages were undertaken not long afterward by the Danes, in which James Hall was the chief pilot; and one by the English, under the command of John Knight, in a pinnace of forty tons, sent out by the East India and Muscovy companies. But each of these voyages had for its chief object the discovery of gold and silver mines, and though they all seem to have followed in the track of Frobisher, they added little or nothing to the knowledge of Arctic geography, and contributed nothing toward the solution of the problem of a northwest passage. The first of these expeditions, in which both Hall and Knight were employed, consisted of two small ships and a pinnace, and sailed from Copenhagen on the 2d of May, 1605. After coasting along the western shore of Davis Strait as far north as 69°, the ships reached Elsinore on their return early in August. The next year a fleet of four ships and a pinnace was sent out, with Hall as pilot-major. They sailed from Elsinore on the 29th of May, but were prevented by the ice and stormy weather from reaching as far north as before, and after much delay they returned to Copenhagen on the 4th of October. In 1607 Hall accompanied a third expedition, consisting of two vessels, which was equally unproductive of results. When they had reached no farther than Cape Farewell, on the southern coast of Greenland, they were compelled to return, from causes which are variously stated, but which were probably complicated by a mutinous spirit in the crew.
In the same year with Hall’s second voyage, Knight sailed from Gravesend, on the 18th of April. Two months afterward he made land on the coast of Labrador; and the captain and five men went on shore to find a convenient place for repairing their vessel. Leaving two men with their boat, the captain and three men went to the highest part of the island. They did not return that day, and on the following day the state of the ice was such that it was impossible to reach them, and they were never heard from afterward. The pinnace then went to Newfoundland to repair; and after encountering many perils, reached Dartmouth on the 24th of December. Hall made a fourth voyage, in 1612, in two small vessels fitted out by some merchant-adventurers in London. In this voyage he was mortally wounded in an encounter with the Esquimaux on the coast of Labrador. His death destroyed all hope of a successful prosecution of the enterprise, and shortly afterward the vessels returned to England.
Henry Hudson had already acquired a considerable reputation as a bold and skilful navigator, and had made three noteworthy voyages of discovery when he embarked on his voyage for northwest exploration. On the 17th of April, 1610, he sailed from Gravesend in the “Discovery,” a vessel of only fifty-five tons, provisioned for six months; and on the 9th of June he arrived off Frobisher’s Strait. He then sailed southwesterly, and entering the strait which bears his name, passed through its entire length, naming numerous islands and headlands, and finally, on the 3d of August, saw before him the open waters of Hudson’s Bay. Three months were spent in examining its shores, and on the 10th of November his vessel was frozen in. She was not released until the 18th of June in the following year, and six days afterward a mutiny occurred. Hudson and his son, with six of the crew who were either sick or unfit for work, were forced into a shallop, where they were voluntarily joined by the carpenter; and then the frail boat was cut loose, and the mutineers set sail for home, leaving their late master and his companions to the mercy of the waves or death by starvation. They were never seen or heard of again; but after encountering great perils and privations, the mutineers finally made land in Galway Bay, on the coast of Ireland. Hudson’s own account of the voyage terminates with his entrance into the bay discovered by him. For the later explorations and for the tragic end of the great navigator’s brilliant career, we are forced to trust to the narrative of one of his men, Abacuk Pricket. If we may believe the story told by him, he had no part in the mutiny; but no one can read his narrative without sharing the suspicion of Fox: “Well, Pricket, I am in great doubt of thy fidelity to Master Hudson.”[198]
Two years after Hudson sailed on his last voyage, a new expedition was sent to the northwest under the command of Sir Thomas Button. It consisted of two ships, the “Resolution” and the “Discovery,” and was provisioned for eighteen months. “Concerning this voyage,” says Luke Fox, “there cannot bee much expected from me, seing that I have met with none of the Journalls thereof. It appeareth that they have been concealed, for what reasons I know not.”[199] Button sailed from England in the beginning of May, and entering Hudson’s Strait, crossed the Bay to the southern point of Southampton Island, which he named Carey’s Swan’s Nest. He then kept on toward the western side of the Bay, to which he gave the significant name “Hope’s Check,” and coasting along the shore he discovered the important river which he called Port Nelson, and which is now known as Nelson’s River. Here he wintered, “and kept three fires all the Winter, but lost many men, and yet was supplied with great store of white Partridges and other Fowle,” says Fox.[200] On the breaking up of the ice he made a thorough exploration of the bay and of Southampton Island, and finally returned to England in the autumn, having accomplished enough to give him a foremost rank among Arctic navigators.
A little less than a year and a half after Button’s return, Robert Bylot and William Baffin embarked on the first of the two voyages commonly associated with their names.
They sailed from the Scilly Islands on Good Friday, April 7, 1615, in the “Discovery,” a ship of about fifty-five tons, in which Bylot had already made three voyages to the northwest. Following a course already familiar to him, they passed through Hudson’s Strait, and ascended what is now known as Fox Channel. Here and at the western end of Hudson’s Strait they spent about three weeks, and then sailed for home, where they arrived in the early part of September.
SIR THOMAS SMITH.