?-1634

Welsh explorer who was one of a group of men searching for a water passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. While the Northwest Passage was not discovered until more than two centuries later, the expeditions of Button and such explorers as Henry Hudson and William Baffin provided the earliest descriptions and charts of North America's Atlantic coast. On Button's best-known journey, he led an expedition aboard the famed Arctic ship Discovery to rescue Henry Hudson in 1612-1613. He never found Hudson. He was knighted in 1616.