discussion of the North-West passage along right lines, and in spite of the opportunity for investigation to the west of Hudson Bay by the early servants of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which was established in 1670, the theory that the passage lay westward from that bay was still alive in 1722, when the voyage of John Scroggs, in search of two ships previously lost, was held to prove the existence of a strait leading into the Pacific; but in 1742 Christopher Middleton made further acquaintance with the inlets on the west shore of the bay, and later in the century some of the servants of the Company began to arrive at a conception of the north-westward extension of the continent. Thus about 1770 Samuel Hearne reached its arctic shore by way of the Coppermine River, and in 1789 Alexander Mackenzie came to the mouth of the great river which bears his name. The North-West passage had now ceased to be sought as a highway of commerce, though as a matter of scientific interest James Cook, on the third of his great voyages (1776), which will be dealt with in a later chapter, was instructed to find it from the Pacific, but was stopped by the ice in 70° 41´, beyond Bering Strait, having been the first English navigator to observe the western extremity of Alaska, which had, however, been known for a century or more to the Russians. The exploration for the North-East passage, though of considerably greater importance to commerce, was hardly of equal importance with that of the North-West passage from our present standpoint, for it could scarcely have been preceded by that complete ignorance which the voyages to the North-West just mentioned did so much to dispel. Some general idea of the coasts of northern Europe, based upon early Scandinavian and possibly Russian work, may be supposed to have existed even when, in 1484, the Portuguese are said to have endeavoured to find a route in this direction to the Indies, and when in the first half of the following century the feasibility of such a route came to be seriously discussed in England. From that country an expedition, in the arrangement of which Sebastian, son of John Cabot, took a leading part, started in 1553 under Sir Hugh Willoughby, with Richard Chancellor commanding one of the ships. Willoughby was lost on the Kola peninsula; Chancellor succeeded in entering the White Sea, travelled to Moscow, and made arrangements for the opening of a commercial route between England and northern Russia. The Muscovy Company of merchants was founded; and, after Chancellor had been lost on a second expedition in 1555, the Company sent out one of his companions, Stephen Borough, in 1556, with the river Ob as his goal. From this voyage information was first disseminated about the Kola region and Novaya Zemlya, though these had been known long previously to Russian fishermen and hunters. The Company also sent out Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman in 1580. They entered the Kara Sea, but only Pet returned. At this period the