The arguments of Sir Humphrey seemed conclusive, and in 1585 they chose John Davis, "a man well grounded in the principles of the art of navigation," to search for the North-West Passage to China. They gave him two little ships, the _Sunshine_ of fifty tons, with a crew of seventeen seamen, four musicians, and a boy, and the _Moonshine_ of thirty-five tons. It was a daring venture, but the expedition was ill-equipped to battle with the icebound seas of the frozen north. The ships left Dartmouth on 7th June, and by July they were well out on the Atlantic with porpoises and whales playing round them. Then came a time of fog and mist, "with a mighty great roaring of the sea." On 20th July they sailed out of the fog and beheld the snow-covered mountains of Greenland, beyond a wide stream of pack-ice--so gloomy, so "waste, and void of any creatures," so bleak and inhospitable that the Englishmen named it the Land of Desolation and passed on to the north. Rounding the point, afterwards named by Davis Cape Farewell, and sailing by the western coast of Greenland, they hoped to find the passage to Cathay. Landing amid the fiords and the "green and pleasant isles" about the coast, they anchored a while to refresh, and named their bay Gilbert Sound, after Sir Humphrey and Davis' own little boy, Gilbert, left at home. "The people of the country," says Davis, "having espied our ships, came down unto us in their canoes, holding up their right hand toward the sun. We doing the like, the people came aboard our ships, men of good stature, unbearded, small-eyed, and of tractable conditions. We bought the clothes from their backs, which were all made of seals' skins and birds' skins, their buskins, their hose, their gloves, all being commonly sewed and well dressed." [Illustration: AN ESKIMO. From a water-colour drawing by John White, about 1585, who may have seen Eskimo either in Frobisher's or Davis's voyages.]