The Project Gutenberg eBook, Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage,
by Richard Hakluyt, Edited by Henry Morley

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Title: Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage

Author: Richard Hakluyt

Editor: Henry Morley

Release Date: December 27, 2007 [eBook #3482]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VOYAGES IN SEARCH OF THE
NORTH-WEST PASSAGE***

Transcribed from the 1892 Cassell & Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org

CASSELL'S NATIONAL LIBRARY.

VOYAGES
IN SEARCH OF THE
NORTH-WEST PASSAGE.

_From the Collection of_
RICHARD HAKLUYT.

CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:
_LONDON_, _PARIS & MELBOURNE_.
1892.

INTRODUCTION.

Thirty-five years ago I made a voyage to the Arctic Seas in what Chaucer
calls

A little bote
No bigger than a manne's thought;

it was a Phantom Ship that made some voyages to different parts of the
world which were recorded in early numbers of Charles Dickens's
"Household Words." As preface to Richard Hakluyt's records of the first
endeavour of our bold Elizabethan mariners to find North-West Passage to
the East, let me repeat here that old voyage of mine from No. 55 of
"Household Words," dated the 12th of April, 1851: The _Phantom_ is fitted
out for Arctic exploration, with instructions to find her way, by the
north-west, to Behring Straits, and take the South Pole on her passage
home. Just now we steer due north, and yonder is the coast of Norway.
From that coast parted Hugh Willoughby, three hundred years ago; the
first of our countrymen who wrought an ice-bound highway to Cathay. Two
years afterwards his ships were found, in the haven of Arzina, in
Lapland, by some Russian fishermen; near and about them Willoughby and
his companions--seventy dead men. The ships were freighted with their
frozen crews, and sailed for England; but, "being unstaunch, as it is
supposed, by their two years' wintering in Lapland, sunk, by the way,
with their dead, and them