After Hawkridge's abortive voyage of 1619, Foxe became the successor of Robert Bylot and William Baffin (1615) in Arctic exploration. In the meantime voyages had been made by Sir Thomas Button in 1612, by Henry Hudson in 1606, after George Waymouth in 1585-7 1605. Foxe's first patron was Henry Briggs, who with Sir John Brooke, directed royal attention to Foxe's voyage. The project first took shape in 1629, in a "Petition of Luke Fox to the king for a small supply of money towards the discovery of a passage by the north-west to the South Sea, Hudson and Sir Thomas Button having discovered a great way, and given great hopes of opening the rest". A pinnace of the Royal Navy of seventy tons was placed at the disposal of the adventurers, but the setting forth was deferred until the following year. In the interval Briggs died; half the adventurers having dropped out, the voyage might have been abandoned, but for news that Bristol merchants had projected a similar voyage from their port (under Thomas James, leaving left Bristol 3 May 1631). London merchants, with Sir Thomas Roe and Sir John Wolstenholme, supported Foxe in the "Charles" pinnace with a crew of twenty men and two boys victualled for eighteen months.