Page:The American encyclopedia of history, biography and travel (IA americanencyclop00blak).pdf/814

 she was seized and condemned, on a supposed infringement of the rights of the Dutch East India Company, the officers and crew being put on board other ships, to be conveyed to Europe.

On the 31st of December, during the passage home, died the president, Jacob Le Maire, a victim to the unworthy treatment he had received—a worthy man and a skillful navigator; and on the 1st of July, 1617, his companions arrived at Holland, by the way of Good Hope, having been absent two years and seventeen days.

VOYAGE OF CAPTAIN JAMES, FOR THE DISCOVERY OF A NORTH-*WEST PASSAGE.

In the year 1630, several wealthy merchants of Bristol united in fitting out a vessel for the purpose of accurately examining the whole northern coast of America. The command of this vessel, which was small, only of seventy tons burden, but one of the strongest ships of her size that had ever been built, was given to Captain James. She was provisioned for eighteen months, and manned with only twenty-two seamen, but these were all excellent sailors.

His stores having been all shipped, and the men on board, Captain James left Bristol in the month of April 1631. After passing the southern coast of Ireland, he sailed in a west-north-west-erly direction, and on the fourth of June discovered the coast of Greenland. Two days subsequently to this, his vessel was encompassed with ice, many immense pieces of which beat so violently against her that the captain was fearful she would have been staved and sunk. The boat that accompanied her was crushed to atoms. In one instance he was obliged to order the ship to be made fast to a great piece of the ice, and during a day and night to employ men incessantly in pushing off such masses of ice as floated against her; but in this labor all their poles were broken. The wind at length blew a perfect hurricane, and, though the broken ice on almost all sides rose higher than the decks, and the vessel was beaten about in a most alarming manner, she suffered no injury.

On the morning of the tenth of June, these hardy adventurers passed some masses of the ice that were as high as the topmost of their vessel, and left Cape Desolation, in Greenland, to the eastward. The weather was now so cold that at one time the sails and rigging were all frozen. On the twentieth, the ship reached the southern point of the island of Resolution, at the entrance of Hudson's Strait, but she was several times carried round by the current, and floating ice, and was in imminent danger of being crushed to pieces before she could be brought to anchor. It now began to snow heavily, and the wind blew a storm from the westward. This drove the ice from the sea into the harbor where the vessel was stationed, until it was choked up. For some time the ice seemed to be perfectly firm and immovable, but it floated out again at the ebb of the tide. The various dangers to which the vessel was exposed in this harbor, of being thrown against the rocks, crushed to pieces in the ice, and sunk, were so great that the captain almost gave up all hope of being able to save her. He describes the thundering noise of the masses of ice beating against each other, the rushing of the water, and the fury of the current, to have been tremendous. After much difficulty and the most persevering exer-*