less doubting of so great continuance of the former
continent, have opened a gulf betwixt the West Indies and the extreme
northern land; but such a one that either is not to be travelled for the
causes in the first objection alleged, or clean shut up from us in Europe
by Greenland, the south end whereof Moletius maketh firm land with
America, the north part continent with Lapland and Norway.

Thirdly, the greatest favourers of this voyage cannot deny but that, if
any such passage be, it lieth subject unto ice and snow for the most part
of the year, whereas it standeth in the edge of the frosty zone. Before
the sun hath warmed the air and dissolved the ice, each one well knoweth
that there can be no sailing; the ice once broken through the continual
abode, the sun maketh a certain season in those parts. How shall it be
possible for so weak a vessel as a ship is to hold out amid whole
islands, as it were, of ice continually beating on each side, and at the
mouth of that gulf, issuing down furiously from the north, safely to
pass, when whole mountains of ice and snow shall be tumbled down upon
her?

Well, grant the West Indies not to continue continent unto the Pole,
grant there be a passage between these two lands, let the gulf lie nearer
us than commonly in cards we find it set, namely, between the sixty-first
and sixty-fourth degrees north, as Gemma Frisius in his maps and globes
imagineth it, and so left by our countryman Sebastian Cabot in his table
which the Earl of Bedford hath at Theinies; let the way be void of all
difficulties, yet doth it not follow that we have free passage to Cathay.
For example's sake, you may coast all Norway, Finmarke, and Lapland, and
then bow southward to St. Nicholas, in Moscovy. You may likewise in the
Mediterranean Sea fetch Constantinople and the mouth of the Don, yet is
there no passage by sea through Moscovy into Pont Euxine, now called Mare
Maggiore. Again, in the aforesaid Mediterranean Sea we sail to
Alexandria in Egypt, the barbarians bring their pearl and spices from the
Moluccas up the Red Sea and Arabian Gulf to Suez, scarcely three days'
journey from the aforesaid haven; yet have we no way by sea from
Alexandria to the Moluccas for that isthmus or little trait of land
between the two seas. In like manner, although the northern passage be
free at sixty-one degrees latitude, and the west ocean beyond America,
usually called Mare del Sur, known to be open at forty degrees