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Updated: May 1, 2025
The imperfect record of this trial merely shows that Prickett and all of the other witnesses with the partial exception of Byleth told substantially the same story; and as they all equally were in danger of hanging that story most naturally was in their own favor and in much the same words.
It was at the entry of Davis' Strait, that their discoveries came to an end for this year. They returned to Plymouth on September 9th, without having lost a single man. So strong were the hopes entertained by Byleth and Baffin, that they obtained permission to put to sea again in the same vessel the following year.
Then turning to the west, and afterwards to the south-west, Byleth and Baffin discovered the Carey Islands, Jones Strait, Coburg Island, and Lancaster Strait, and afterwards they descended along the entire western shore of Baffin's Bay as far as Cumberland Land.
Despairing then of being able to carry his discoveries further, Byleth, who had several men among his crew afflicted with scurvy, found himself obliged to return to the shores of England, where he disembarked at Dover, on August 30th. If this expedition terminated again in failure, in the sense that the north-west passage was not discovered, the results obtained were nevertheless considerable.
I should be glad to believe that the mutineers even including Byleth, who was the best of them came to the hanging that the Elder Brethren of the Trinity, in their off-hand just judgment, declared that they deserved. If they did, there is no known record of their hanging.
On June 12th, Byleth and Baffin were forced by the ice to enter a bay on the coast. Some Esquimaux brought them a great quantity of horns, without doubt tusks of walruses, or horns of musk oxen; from which they named the bay Horn Sound. After remaining some days in this place, they were able to put to sea again.
Byleth and Baffin had prodigiously increased the knowledge of the seas and coasts in the quarters of Greenland. The captain and the pilot, in writing to the Director of the Company, assured him that the bay which they had visited was an excellent spot for fishing, in which thousands of whales, seals, and walruses, disported themselves.
The expeditions of Hudson were followed by those of Button and of Gibbons, to whom we owe, if not new discoveries, important observations on the tides, the variation of the weather and the temperature, and on a number of natural phenomena. In 1615, the English Company entrusted to Byleth, who had taken part in the last voyages, the command of a vessel of fifty tons.
In the more agreeable rôle of Postulator, I may add that this charge against Hudson while not disproved is not sustained. The one witness, Robert Byleth, of whom reputable record survives the only witness, indeed, of whom we have any record whatever beyond that of the case in hand did not even refer to it.
A curiously suggestive interest, however, attaches to the fact that at just about the time when the trial ended one of them, and the only conspicuous one of them, seems permanently to have disappeared. That most careful investigator the late Mr. Alexander Brown was unable to find any sure trace of Byleth after his second voyage with Baffin, which was made in March-August, 1616.
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