How Shall It Be Possible For So Weak A Vessel As A
Ship Is To Hold Out Amid Whole Islands,
As it were, of ice
continually beating on each side, and at the mouth of that gulf,
issuing down furiously
From the north, safely to pass, when whole
mountains of ice and snow shall be tumbled down upon her?
Well, grant the West Indies not to continue continent unto the Pole,
grant there be a passage between these two lands, let the gulf lie
nearer us than commonly in cards we find it set, namely, between the
sixty-first and sixty-fourth degrees north, as Gemma Frisius in his
maps and globes imagineth it, and so left by our countryman
Sebastian Cabot in his table which the Earl of Bedford hath at
Theinies; let the way be void of all difficulties, yet doth it not
follow that we have free passage to Cathay. For example's sake, you
may coast all Norway, Finmarke, and Lapland, and then bow southward
to St. Nicholas, in Moscovy. You may likewise in the Mediterranean
Sea fetch Constantinople and the mouth of the Don, yet is there no
passage by sea through Moscovy into Pont Euxine, now called Mare
Maggiore. Again, in the aforesaid Mediterranean Sea we sail to
Alexandria in Egypt, the barbarians bring their pearl and spices
from the Moluccas up the Red Sea and Arabian Gulf to Suez, scarcely
three days' journey from the aforesaid haven; yet have we no way by
sea from Alexandria to the Moluccas for that isthmus or little trait
of land between the two seas.
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