Before the sun hath warmed the air and dissolved the ice, each one well knoweth that there can be no sailing; the ice once broken through the continual abode, the sun maketh a certain season in those parts.

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.

In like manner, although the northern passage be free at sixty-one degrees latitude, and the west ocean beyond America, usually called Mare del Sur, known to be open at forty degrees elevation for the island of Japan, yea, three hundred leagues northerly of Japan, yet may there be land to hinder the through passage that way by sea, as in the examples aforesaid it falleth out, Asia and America there being joined together in one continent.