Other English ventures in America also ended in failure. Beginning in 1585 Captain John Davis, an expert navigator, went out three times in quest of a northwest passage to Cathay. He penetrated farther north than anyone before him to discover the straits that bear his name, never fully realizing that beyond lay only pack ice. Captain George Weymouth followed Davis’ track in 1593, meeting eventual defeat. Weymouth tried again for a northern passage in 1602; so did Captain John Knight in 1606 while exploring for gold and silver mines. Ice and mutiny stopped Weymouth. Knight simply disappeared ashore one day. Not long after the turn of the century Captain Charles Leigh led a daring expedition to South America in an attempt to establish a base of operations in what is now French Guiana. Only a remnant survived a massacre by the natives in 1605 to straggle back to England. The coast of North America from Spanish Florida to Nova Scotia also came in for more investigation at this time. Bartholomew Gilbert, son of Sir Humphrey, was sent out by James I in 1603. He visited the Chesapeake Bay area, possibly hoping to find survivors of the Roanoke colony, only to be killed himself by Indians when he landed with a shore party. Others explored in the vicinity of Cape Cod and northward, Bartholomew Gosnold, going out to that coast in 1602, and Martin Pring in 1603. They found no mines, but they took back to England quantities of cedar, sassafras and furs. Gosnold’s cargo of pelts obtained from the Buzzard’s Bay area included beaver, marten, otter, “Wild-cat skinnes very large and deepe furre,” seal, deer, black fox, rabbit and “other beasts skinnes to us unknowen.” Pring was more interested in sassafras trees, but he later wrote that the furs of certain wild beasts in those parts “being hereafter purchased by exchange may yield no smal gaine to us. Since as we are certainly informed, the Frenchmen brought from Canada the value of thirtie thousand Crownes in the yeare 1604. Almost in Bevers and Otters skinnes only.” A great deal of sassafras was cut and stowed aboard their ships by these two captains. Sassafras brought fancy prices at the time as a cure for the French pox as well as a specific for certain other diseases. But such windfall importations glutted the London and Bristol markets, seriously depressing the price. Both Gosnold and Pring brought back the usual tales about a passage to the South Sea and the fertility of the land. So Captain George Weymouth went over in 1605, visiting the Maine coast where he explored for colonization sites. He also drove a good though hazardous trade for pelts. In one instance, “for knives, glasses, combes and other trifles to the valew of foure or five shillings, we had 40 good Beavers skins, Otters skins, Sables, and other small skins which we knewe not how to call.”