festly it may appear unto any
one that compareth the same with Gemma Frisius' universal map, with his
round quartered card, with his globe, with Sebastian Cabot's table, and
Ortellius' general map alone, worthily preferred in this case before all
Mercator's and Ortellius' other doings: for that Cabot was not only a
skilful seaman, but a long traveller, and such a one as entered
personally that strait, sent by King Henry VII. to make this aforesaid
discovery, as in his own discourse of navigation you may read in his card
drawn with his own hand, that the mouth of the north-western strait lieth
near the 318th meridian, between 61 and 64 degrees in the elevation,
continuing the same breadth about ten degrees west, where it openeth
southerly more and more, until it come under the tropic of Cancer; and so
runneth into Mare del Sur, at the least 18 degrees more in breadth there
than it was where it first began; otherwise I could as well imagine this
passage to be more unlikely than the voyage to Moscovy, and more
impossible than it for the far situation and continuance thereof in the
frosty clime: as now I can affirm it to be very possible and most likely
in comparison thereof, for that it neither coasteth so far north as the
Moscovian passage doth, neither is this strait so long as that, before it
bow down southerly towards the sun again.

The second argument concludeth nothing. Ptolemy knew not what was above
16 degrees south beyond the equinoctial line, he was ignorant of all
passages northward from the elevation of 63 degrees, he knew no ocean sea
beyond Asia, yet have the Portuguese trended the Cape of Good Hope at the
south point of Africa, and travelled to Japan, an island in the east
ocean, between Asia and America; our merchants in the time of King Edward
the Sixth discovered the Moscovian passage farther north than Thule, and
showed Greenland not to be continent with Lapland and Norway: the like
our north-western travellers have done, declaring by their navigation
that way the ignorance of all cosmographers that either do join Greenland
with America, or continue the West Indies with that frosty region under
the North Pole. As for Virgil, he sang according to the knowledge of men
in his time, as another poet did of the hot zone.

Quarum quae media est, non est habitabilis aestu. Imagining, as most men
then did, Zonam Torridam, the hot zone, to be altogether dishabited for
heat, though presently we know many famous