In the reign of Henry VIII., Dr. Robert Thorne declared that “if he had facultie to his will, the first thing he would understande, even to attempt, would be if our seas northwarde be navigable to the Pole or no.” And it is said that the king, at his instigation, “sent two fair ships, well-manned and victualled, having in them divers cunning men, to seek strange regions; and so they set forth out of the Thames, the 20th day of May, in the nineteenth year of his reign, which was the year of our Lord 1527.” Of the details of this expedition, however, we have no record, except that one of the vessels was wrecked on the coast of Newfoundland. In 1536, a second Arctic voyage was undertaken by a London gentleman, named Hore, accompanied by thirty members of the Inns of Law, and about the same number of adventurers of a lower estate. They reached Newfoundland, which, according to some authorities, was discovered by Sebastian Cabot in 1496, and here they suffered terrible distress; in the extremity of their need being reduced to cannibalism. After the deaths of a great portion of the crew, the survivors captured by surprise a French vessel which had arrived on the coast, and navigated her in safety to England. But the true history of Arctic Discovery dates, as Mr. Markham observes, from the day when the veteran navigator, Sebastian Cabot, explained to young Edward VI. the phenomena of the variation of the needle. On the same day the aged sailor received a pension; and immediately afterwards three discovery-ships were fitted out by the Muscovy Company under his direction. Sir Hugh Willoughby was appointed to their command, with Richard Chancellor in the _Edward Bonadventure_ as his second. The latter, soon after quitting England, was separated from the squadron, and sailing in a northerly direction, gained at last a spacious harbour on the Muscovy coast. Sir Hugh’s ship, and her companion, the _Bona Confidentia_, were cast away on a desolate part of the Lapland coast, at the mouth of the river Arzina. They entered the river on September 18, 1563, and remained there for a week; and “seeing the year far spent, and also very evil weather, as frost, snow, and hail, as though it had been the deep of winter, they thought it best to winter there.” But as day followed day, and week followed week, in those grim solitudes of ice and snow, the brave adventurers perished one by one; and many months afterwards their bleached bones were discovered by some Russian fishermen.