On April 17, 1610, the sturdy little three masted bark, Discovery, weighed anchor in St. Katherine's Pool, London, and floated down the Thames toward the sea. She carried, besides her captain, a crew of twenty-one and provisions for a voyage of exploration of the Arctic waters of North America.

Seventeen months later, on September 6, 1611, an Irish fishing boat sighted the Discovery limping eastward outside Galway Bay. When she reached port, she was found to have on board only eight men, all near starvation. The captain was gone, and the mate was gone. The man who now commanded her had started the voyage as an ordinary seaman.

What disaster struck the Discovery during those seventeen months? What happened to the fourteen missing men? These questions have remained one of the great sea mysteries of all time. For hundreds of years, the evidence available consisted of (1) the captain's fragmentary journal, (2) a highly prejudiced account by one of the survivors, (3) a note found in a dead man's desk on board, and (4) several second-hand reports. All told, they offered a highly confused picture.

But since 1927, researchers digging into ancient court records and legal files have been able to find illuminating pieces of information. Not enough to do away with all doubts, but sufficient to give a fairly accurate picture of the events of the voyage.

Historians have had two reasons for persisting so long in their investigations. First, they wanted to clarify a tantalizing, bizarre enigma. Second, they believed it important to determine the fate of the captain -- a man whose name is permanently stamped on our maps, on American towns and counties, on a great American river, and on half a million square miles of Arctic seas.