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Icebergs we soon shall take our leave of; they are only found where there is a coast on which glaciers can form; they are good for nothing but to yield fresh water to the vessels; it will be all field, pack, and saltwater ice presently. Now we are in Baffin's Bay, explored in the voyages of Bylot and Baffin, 1615-16.
Button's crew became infected with scurvy, and Port Nelson a camp for the dead. Then came Captain Gibbon in 1614; but the ice caught him at Labrador and turned him back. The merchant adventurers then fitted out Bylot, Hudson's second mate, and in 1615-16 he searched the desolate, lonely northern waters.
But it belongs rather to the romantic story of the great company whose corporate title recalls his name and memory, than to the present narrative. After Hudson came the exploits of Bylot, one of his pilots, and a survivor of the tragedy, and of William Baffin, who tried to follow Davis's lead in searching for the Western Passage in the very confines of the polar sea.
At this time, also, we observed some ice in the centre of the strait heavier than that which covered the rest of the sea, and apparently aground in shoal water, as afterward proved to be the case. On the 15th we were within a league of a remarkable headland on Southampton Island, which I named CAPE BYLOT, as being probably the westernmost land seen by that navigator in 1615.
The most important was that of Bylot and Baffin: they advanced through Davis's Straits into an extensive sea, which they called Baffin's Bay: they proceeded, according to their account, as far north as the latitude 78°. The nature and extent of this discovery was very much doubted at the time, and subsequently, till the discoveries of Captains Ross and Parry, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, proved that Baffin was substantially accurate and faithful.
Thomas Button, afterwards knighted for his effort, came out the very next year at the expense of the merchant adventurers Walstenholme, Smith, and Digges to search for Hudson. Prickett and Bylot, of Hudson's former crew, were there also with the old ship Discovery and a large frigate called Resolution, an appropriate name.
"Also Adrian Mooter was appointed Boatsons mate: and a promise by the Master, that from this day Juats wages should remain to Bylot, and the Boatsons overplus of wages should bee equally diuided betweene Wilson and one John King, to the owners good liking, one of the Quarter Masters, who had very well carryed themselves to the furtherance of the businesse.
Novelists are frequently accused of sensationalism and exaggeration, but if, as tradition seems to suggest, Hudson were still alive seven hundred miles south at the lower end of the Bay, straining vain eyes for a sail at sea, like Alexander Selkirk of a later day with a Button and a Gibbon and a Bylot and a Baffin searching for him with echoing cannon roll and useless call in the north then the life and death of the old pathfinder are more like a tale from Defoe than a story of real life.
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