So much for their Meta Incognita, where the old mariners dug worthless ore, and fished, and killed whale, and made poor trading with the wretched natives; and never breaking through to Cathaia, they were swept up and down, among “strange rocks and overfalls and shoals.” Caught by winter, they bivouacked somehow in the snows, and in June nosed their way out to free water, or, undiscouraged, beat ahead for their Northwest Passage. The “Island of God’s Mercy” and “Hold with Hope” tell of some cockle-shell sailor’s escape from “many points and headlongs” and “broken ground and shoals, worse than can be expected.” Captain Bayley, Captain Zacchary Gillam, in his “Nonsuch Ketch,” Henry Southwood, and William Taverner cruised here, and their findings are printed in the “Pilot.” And as to Newfoundland and the fishing-banks, if we go astray, it is by our own obstinacy: for the reporter here is a peppery old party who “informs those that are bound for that coast that they may not be deceived, as I myself had been like to have been in going to Saint John’s on the 29th day of June, 1715, at 8 o’clock in the morning, ... having been just a month that very day from Plymouth Sound,” by reason of “a very great error in those charts which have hitherto been published.” And he sets us right as to computing “the true Distance between the Lizard and Cape Spear,” where other navigators “would still continue the old erroneous Way; because, they say, when I argu’d with them, _it is the custom_; they might as well have persuaded me, that old custom could oversway Reason.”