court, the king, in admonishing him to be more cautious, appeared to ascribe the loss of his crew to some mismanagement. Munk replied hotly, and the king, forgetting his own proper dignity, struck the brave navigator with a cane. The old sailor left the presence of this unkingly king, smarting under a sense of outrage which he could not forget; and we are told that he took to his bed and died of a broken heart very shortly afterwards. The story, however, is discredited by some authorities. Some thirty years later Denmark again furnished an expedition, under the command of Captain Danells, to explore East Greenland. He could rarely approach the ice-girt coast nearer than eighteen or twenty miles, and subsequent attempts have been little more successful. [Illustration: MOCK SUNS.] The establishment of the Hudson’s Bay Company, in 1669, appears to have diverted the spirit of adventure and discovery from the far north, and we hear of few voyages to the Arctic at this period, and for some time afterwards, although the discovery of a northern passage to the Pacific is really included in the objects for which the charter to that Corporation was granted. One attempt at a north-eastern passage in 1676 deserves to be mentioned, principally on account of the circumstances which brought it about. There was a considerable amount of rivalry in the East Indian, Chinese, and Japanese trade at that time, between the Dutch and ourselves, and some reports had reached England that a company of merchants in Holland was agitating the subject of a north-eastern passage to the Orient once more. Further, Mr. Joseph Moxon, a Fellow of the Royal Society, had just published his “Brief Discourse,” wherein he records the following story, from which he concluded “that there is a free and open sea under the very pole.” “Being about twenty-two years ago in Amsterdam,” says he, “I went into a drinking-house to drink a cup of beer for my thirst, and sitting by the public fire among several people, there happened a seaman to come in, who seeing a friend of his there whom he knew went in the Greenland voyage, wondered to see him, because it was not yet time for the Greenland fleet to come home, and asked him what accident brought him home so soon; his friend (who was the steer-man aforesaid in a Greenland ship that summer) told him that their ship went not out to fish that summer but only to take in the lading of the whole fleet, and bring it to an early market. But, said he, before the fleet had caught fish enough to lade us, we, by order of the Greenland Company, sailed unto the north pole, and came back again. Whereupon (his relation being novel to me) I entered into discourse with him, and seemed to question the truth of what he said; but he did ensure me it was true, and that the ship was then in Amsterdam, and many of the seamen belonging to her to justify the truth of it; and told me,