Page:Columbus and other heroes of American discovery; (IA columbusotherher00bell).pdf/224

 his work was received with much hostile criticism, every point laid down by him has been verified by later travelers.

The important work done by Behring, Cook, Meares, and Vancouver was greatly supplemented by minor heroes of various nationalities, including Robert Gray of Boston; the Spaniards, Etevan Martinez and Gonzalo Haro, sent from Mexico to look after the interests of their Government in the North-west, who explored Prince William Sound; Joseph Billings, from England, who touched at the Aleutian Islands; and numerous French, English, and Russian captains. Their accounts of their explorations were not, however, in any sense original revelations, and we pass from them to the men who took up the work of the early French coureurs de bois and missionaries, pushing their surveys westward from Hudson's Bay, until they spanned the hitherto unknown gulf between the last inland outposts of their predecessors and the Pacific seaboard.

It was the failure of Baffin, Davis, and other early heroes of Arctic discovery to find the clew to the long-coveted secret of the vast labyrinth of straits, inlets, etc., between Greenland and the north-eastern shores of America, which first directed the attention of the thinkers of Europe to Hudson's Bay as a possible passage to the Pacific. As in Canada and elsewhere in America, however, scientific exploration, for its own sake, soon retired before the pioneers of commerce and settlement, making it next to impossible for the geographical student to trace the thin line of discovery with any certainty.

Strictly speaking, the work of the travelers who paved the way for the foundation of the great Hudson's Bay Company, destined to be so formidable a rival to the French coureurs de bois, belongs to Arctic history; but, in the early days of which we are now writing, those whose main object was the discovery of the North-west Passage, often turned aside from it either from necessity or curiosity, and in the parentheses, so to speak, of their voyages, penetrated below the 60th parallel, which we have taken as our most northerly limit. Notably was this the case with the bold mariner, Luke Fox, of London, who, in 1630, obtained from Charles I. the command of a pinnace of eighty tons, manned by twenty men, with permission to cruise about Hudson's Bay until he found a northern passage out of it.

Fox's pinnace entered Hudson's Straits early in June, 1631, and, eagerly steering his way among the numerous obstacles with which they are always encumbered, he entered the bay itself in safety, sailed across it in a north