Smith Sound

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mith Sound is an uninhabited Arctic sea passage between Greenland and Canada's northernmost island, Ellesmere Island. It links Baffin Bay with Kane Basin and forms part of the Nares Strait.

The sound was discovered in 1616 by William Baffin and originally named Sir Thomas Smith's Bay after the English diplomat Sir Thomas Smyth. By the 1750s it regularly appeared on maps as Sir Thomas Smith's Sound, though no further exploration of the area would be recorded until John Ross' 1818 expedition. By this time it had begun to be known simply as Smith Sound.

Although now called a sound rather than a bay, John Ross, like Baffin before him, believed it was an inlet leading to a mountain range he called the Crocker Hills. It was not until Edward Inglefield's first voyage to the Arctic in 1852 that it became evident that this was not the case.