passage the outside course, between the northern coast of Nova Zembla and the pole.  Three ships and a fishing yacht were provided by the cities of Enkhuizen, Amsterdam, and by the province of Zeeland respectively.  Linschoten was principal commissioner on board the Enkhuizen vessel, having with him an experienced mariner, Brandt Ijsbrantz by name, as skipper.  Barendz, with the Amsterdam ship and the yacht, soon parted company with the others, and steered, according to the counsels of Plancius and his own convictions; for the open seas of the north.  And in that memorable summer, for the first time in the world’s history, the whole desolate region of Nova Zembla was visited, investigated, and thoroughly mapped out.  Barendz sailed as far as latitude 77 deg. and to the extreme north-eastern point of the island.  In a tremendous storm off a cape, which he ironically christened Consolationhook (Troost-hoek), his ship, drifting under bare poles amid ice and mist and tempest, was nearly dashed to pieces; but he reached at last the cluster of barren islets beyond the utmost verge of Nova Zembla, to which he hastened to affix the cherished appellation of Orange.  This, however, was the limit of his voyage.  His ship was ill-provisioned, and the weather had been severe beyond expectation.  He turned back on the 1st of August, resolving to repeat his experiment early in the following year.

Meantime Linschoten, with the ships Swan and Mercury, had entered the passage which they called the Straits of Nassau, but which are now known to all the world as the Waigats.  They were informed by the Samoyedes of the coast that, after penetrating the narrow channel, they would find themselves in a broad and open sea.  Subsequent discoveries showed the correctness of the statement, but it was not permitted to the adventurers on this occasion to proceed so far.  The strait was already filled with ice-drift, and their vessels were brought to a standstill, after about a hundred and fifty English miles of progress beyond the Waigats; for the whole sea of Tartary, converted into a mass of ice-mountains and islands, and lashed into violent agitation by a north easterly storm, seemed driving down upon the doomed voyagers.  It was obvious that the sunny clime of Cathay was not thus to be reached, at least upon that occasion.  With difficulty they succeeded in extricating themselves from the dangers surrounding them, and emerged at last from the Waigats.

On the 15th of August, in latitude 69 deg. 15’, they met the ship of Barendz and returned in company to Holland, reaching Amsterdam on the 16th of September.  Barendz had found the seas and coasts visited by him destitute of human inhabitants, but swarming with polar bears, with seals, with a terrible kind of monsters, then seen for the first time, as large as oxen, with almost human faces and with two long tusks protruding from each grim and grotesque visage.  These mighty beasts, subsequently known as walrusses or sea-horses,