In 1614, a Captain Gibbon was dispatched to the bay. Ice caught him at Labrador. Here, he was held prisoner for the summer. Again hopes were dashed, but national greatness sometimes consists in sheer dogged persistence. The English adventurers, who had sent Button and Gibbon, now fitted out Bylot, Hudson’s former mate. With him went a young man named Baffin. These two spent two years, 1615-1616, on the bay. They found no trace of Hudson. They found no passage to the South Sea, but cruised those vast islands of ice and rock on the north to which Baffin’s name has been given. The English treasure seekers and adventurers of the high seas took a breathing space. Where England left off, the trail of discovery was taken up by little Denmark. Norse sailors had been the first to belt the seas. Before Columbus was born, Norsemen had coasted the ice fields from Iceland to Greenland and Greenland to the Vinelands and Marklands farther south, supposed to be Nova Scotia and Rhode Island. The lost colonies of eastern Greenland had become the folk-lore of Danish fireside. King Christian IV, himself, examined the charts and supervised the outfitting of two ships for discovery in America. _The Unicorn_, named after a species of whale, was a frigate with a crew of forty-eight including chaplain and surgeon. _The Lamprey_ was a little sloop with sixteen of a crew. There remained the choice of a commander and that fell without question on the fittest man in the Danish navy—Jens Munck, such a soldier of fortune as the novelist might delight to portray. [Illustration: Iberville’s Ship run aground off Nelson in a Hurricane—from La Potherie.] Munck’s father was a nobleman, who had suicided in prison, disgraced for misuse of public funds. Munck’s mother was left destitute. At twelve years of age Jens was thrown on the world. Like a true soldier of fortune, he took fate by the beard and shipped as a common sailor to seek his fortunes in the New World. When a mere boy, he chanced to be off Brazil on a Dutch merchant ship. Here, he had his first bout with fate. The Dutch vessel was attacked off Bahia by the French and totally destroyed. Of all the crew, seven only escaped by plunging into the water and swimming ashore in the dark. Of the seven survivors, the Danish boy was one. He had succeeded in reaching shore by clinging to bits of wreckage through the chopping seas. Half drowned, friendless, crawling ashore like a bedraggled water rat, here was the boy, utterly alone in a strange land among a strange people speaking a strange tongue.