Chancellor, however, pushed on into the White Sea, reached a monastery on the coast, and thence made his way to Moscow, where he was well received, and thus opened a trade route of incalculable advantage to both England and Russia. It led at once to the organization of the Muscovy Company, and began a commerce now regularly carried on in steam vessels to Archangel, which in 1897 was connected with Moscow by railroad. By 1580 several other commanders had tried to improve on this performance, but none got past the Kara Sea, and the next important effort was headed toward that “Northwest Passage,” which for more than three centuries was the lodestone of Arctic students and voyagers. It was in charge of Martin Frobisher, later one of England’s most conspicuous admirals, who afterward made a larger expedition in which he learned many facts about the Labrador coast and Hudson Strait. Another English seaman, and a more scientific one, John Davis, made three remarkable voyages, between 1585 and 1589, and increased the map by a careful delineation of both coasts of the strait still called after him. Shortly afterward Dutch merchants had sent three expeditions northward under command of William Barentz to search for a _northeast_ passage, the third and most important of which sailed in 1596 and found it impossible to penetrate the ice east of Nova Zembla (which had been seen first by Burrough in 1556, who had been shown the way by Russian fishermen), but discovered Bear Island and Spitzbergen. The crew of Barentz’s vessel spent the winter of 1596-97 at Ice Haven, Nova Zembla—the first successfully to face a winter in the Arctic zone. When the next spring came they made their way to Lapland and homeward in boats, but Barentz died on the road. This voyage was highly important in opening to the Netherlands the whale and seal fisheries of that region which has ever since been known as Barentz’s Sea, but it discouraged the hopes of a “northeast passage.” In 1871 Barentz’s winter quarters at Ice Haven were found undisturbed, after a lapse of 274 years, and in 1875 part of the journal kept by this brave mariner was recovered. Almost every year about this time saw English, Dutch, and Danish ships going north, each adding some new fact to geography and the knowledge of polar waters and ice. One of them, in 1607, was commanded by Henry Hudson, who searched the North Atlantic, found Jan Mayen, and pointed the way to the Spitzbergen whale fisheries; yet he had hardly more than a sail-boat, and a crew of only eleven men.