The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1916-03-14
Tercentenary of Two
 Memorable Discoveries

This year marks the tercentenary of
 two memorable discoveries in the New
 World. It was just three hundred years ago that William Corne1is Se- houten and Jacob Le Maire, hardy Dutch navigators, sailed around Cape Horn, the southernmOst point of South America. In the same year William Baffin, an Englishman, en- tered the great northern bay which bears his name, in a search for the Northwest Passage which has cost so
 many lives, and which has been so tutile once accomplished.
 William Sehouten, the first naviga- tor to double Cape Horn, was born in 1887 at Hoorn, in the Netherlands, and named the cape after his native town. He was far from being the first skipper to sail his ship in those perilous southern waters, however, as his discovery followed by. nearly a century the immortal feat of Fernan- da de ge1haens-usua11y called Magellan-the daring Portuguese skipper who passed through the peril 1ous waters of the strait of Magellan in 1920, and completed the circum- navigation of the globe.
 While Seamen have always had cause to fear those southern seas where the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific ningle, a vast multitude of ships have since made their way, by sail or steam, around Cape Horn or through the marrow and stormy strait of Magellan, Much to the surprise of Europe, this route proved commer- cial1y practicable, while the North west Passage, of which so much was confidently expected, has long since been demonstrated to be a hopeless route for the vessels of commerce.
 With the building of the Panama Canal the great trade route around the southern end of South America will fall into comparative disuse, but that does not detract from the glory of the brave Dutchrnen and the gal Iant Portuguese who sailed their ships into these unknown seas, where fre- quent tempests rage and wild seas beat on rocky shores. The Horn, rearing it's dark and precipitous heights from the last island of the Fuegian archipelago-a loomy. head land of 500 feet in height running far into the sea-is an eternal mon ument to Sehouten and his compan- ions.
 Baffin's Bay or Baffin's Sea, which was discovered three centuries ao, in 1616, by William Baffin, is properly neither bay nor sea, but a part of the long strait or inlet which sep arates Green1and's icy mountains from the barren and frigid northeaS- tern coast of America.
 Of William Baffin's early life noth- ing is known, and his fame rests en- 
 him between 1912 and 1916. Tn the former years he accompanied Captain James Hall his fourth voyage in search of the Northwest Passage. In 1915 he took service as pilot of By lots ship Discovery" and in search ing for the elusive passage to the Pa cific Baffin made a careful examina- ton of Hudson's Strait. His recorded Iatitudes and notes of the tide are in remarkable agreement with those of a later date, and bespeak a carfeu1 and able explorer. In 1916 Baffin explored the large inlet now associat- ed with his name. The extent of his discovery was much doubted by his contemporaries, some of whom seem ed to consider him a sort of Doe Cook, but later expeditions proved that Baffin was substantially correct in all his statements.
 Baffin's last voyages were to the East At the siege of Ormuz, which the English were helping the Persians to recover from the Portuguese, he was killed, his death occurring early in 1899