Note 5 — INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION.

Before meeting with his untimely end, Willoughby, on the 14th of August, “descried land, which land (he says, in a note found written in one of the two ships) we bare with all, hoising out our boat to discover what land it might be; but the boat could not come to land, the water was so shoale, where was very much ice also, but there was no similitude of habitation; and this land lyeth from Seynam5 east and by north 160 leagues, being in latitude 72 degrees. Then we plyed to the northward”.6 As the subject of Willoughby’s voyage has been discussed by Mr. Rundall in a recent publication of the Hakluyt Society,7 it is here unnecessary to say more than that, whatever may formerly have been the notions of geographers as to the coast reached by our hapless countryman, and to which the name of “Willoughby’s Land” was given, the almost universally received opinion now is8 that it was that portion of the western coast of Novaya Zemlya, which is called by Lütke the Goose Coast (Gänseufer in Erman’s Translation9),—doubtless from the numbers of water-fowl found there,—and of which the North and South Goose Capes (Syevernuy Gusinuy Muis and Yuzhnuy Gusinuy Muis) form the two extremities. Mr. Rundall is therefore fully justified in claiming for Sir Hugh Willoughby, as he so earnestly does in his work just cited,10 “the credit of having been the first Englishman by whom the coast of Novaya Zemlya was visited”; and as, further, Willoughby was not only the first Englishman, but also the first European, who had ever been there, the rule and usual practice in regard to new discoveries fairly warrants the application of the name of “Willoughby’s Land” to this “Goose Coast”, which our countryman was thus the first to visit and make known to us.