In the early decades of the seventeenth century, looking towards the west and across the Atlantic Ocean, the British attempted to set up permanent colonies in North America that could be used as stopovers on the way to ‘Cathay’, as Marco Polo had called China. For European merchants and nations, locating a direct waterway to the fabulous wealth of Asia would have been a tremendous commercial advantage, as finding this shortcut would also have implied avoiding the dangers of travelling across the Ottoman Empire. The sailors and explorers of Europe's most powerful maritime power, England, therefore made a point of proving to the rest of the world that their reputation was well deserved and that they could locate the Passage. Robert Bylot and William Baffin were among those explorers commissioned by the Northwest Company of London to find the elusive passage to the South Seas. The two men united their fates on board the Discovery in 1615 and 1616. In 1615 Bylot was appointed master of the ship, and Baffin served as his ‘mate and assotiate’, then as his pilot in 1616. The chronicles Baffin wrote of these two expeditions up Hudson Strait and then Davis Strait were published in various, sometimes differing accounts and greeted with mixed, very often sceptical reactions, until Daines Barrington, an eighteenth-century lawyer and antiquarian, wrote across the map he wished to include in The Possibility of Approaching the North Pole: ‘Baffin's Bay according to the relation of W.’