Captain William Barents, who, as well as others, run aground in his voyage, yet did not doubt but there was a passage, and that if he had gone farther from shore, he should have found an open sea free from ice. The Russian navigators, sent by the Czar to survey the north seas, relate that Nova Zembla is not an island, but belonging to the continent of Tartary, and that to the north of it is a free and open sea. A Dutch navigator asserts, that the sea throws up whales on the coasts of Corea and Japan, which have English and Dutch harpoons on their backs. Another Dutchman has pretended to have been at the pole, and asserts it is as warm there as it is at Amsterdam in the middle of the summer. An Englishman, named Golding, who made more than thirty voyages to Greenland, related to King Charles II. that two Dutch vessels with which he had sailed, having found no whales on the coast of the island of Edges, resolved to proceed farther north, and that upon their return at the expiration of fifteen days, they told him that they had been as far as 89 degrees latitude (within one degree of the pole), and that they found no ice there, but an open deep sea like that of the Bay of Biscay, and that they shewed him the journals of the two vessels, as a proof of what they affirmed. In short, it is related in the Philosophical Transactions that two navigators, who had undertaken the discovery of this passage, shaped a course 300 leagues to the east of Nova Zembla, but that the East India Company, who thought it their interest this passage should not be discovered, hindered them from returning[170:A]. But the Dutch East India Company thought, on the contrary, that it was their interest to find this passage; having attempted it in vain on the side of Europe, they sought it by that of Japan, and they would probably have succeeded, if the Emperor of Japan had not forbidden all strangers from navigating on the side of the land of Jesso. This passage, therefore, cannot be found but by sailing to the pole, beyond Spitzbergen, or by keeping the open sea between Nova Zembla and Spitzbergen under the 79th degree of latitude. We need not fear to find it frozen even under the pole itself, for reasons we have alledged; in fact, there is no example of the sea being frozen at a considerable distance from the shore; the only example of a sea being frozen entirely over, is that of the Black Sea, which is narrow, contains but little salt, and receives a number of rivers from the northern countries, and which bring ice with them: and if we may credit historians, it was frozen in the time of the Emperor Copronymus, thirty cubits deep, without reckoning twenty cubits of snow above the ice. This appears to be exaggerated, but it is certain that it freezes almost every winter; whereas the open seas, a thousand leagues nearer the pole, do not freeze at all: this can only proceed from the saltness, and the little ice