The river leaves Totnes in broad, sweeping curves between the hills, and rolls on past the lovely woods of Sharpham, and on its course to Dartmouth passes the early homes of two men who each played a part in English history. At Sandridge, close to the river, lived Captain John Davies, or Davis, whose name is familiar as the discoverer of Davis's Straits. Prince, who himself lived not far away, takes the fascination of Dartmouth, and the longing for the sea that Dartmouth seemed to inspire, as quite natural, and says casually that, living so near this town, 'Mr Davis had ... a kind of invitation, to put himself early to sea.' These were in the days when the Merchant Adventurers were at the height of their importance and prosperity, and it was in the hope of opening up a trade for the woollen goods of the West-country with India and China that Captain Davis set out to look for the North-West Passage. To face all the hazards of this journey, so very far away from civilization, and the perils and shocks that might await him in the frozen North, he fitted out a little fleet which consisted of the 'Barke _Sunneshine_, of London, fifty tunnes, and the _Moonshine_, of Dartmouth, thirty-five tunnes, the ship _Mermayd_, of a hundred and twenty tunnes, and a pinesse of tenne tunnes named the _North Starre_.'[5] But in spite of this name of good augury the little pinnace never came home again, and one can only admire with awe the daring that ventured to sail a boat of ten tons across the boisterous Atlantic into the unknown Arctic Seas. Traces of Davis's wanderings along the coasts of North America may still be found in the names he bestowed on different points. 'On sighting first the land, he named the bay which he entered after his friend, Gilbert Sound; we find also Exeter Sound, Totnes Roads, Mount Raleigh, and other familiar titles. A few years later John Davis found the right course to India and China, and introduced the trade from this country which exists to the present time.' [Footnote 5: 'An Elizabethan Guild of the City of Exeter,' by William Cotton.]