Chapter XXX: Appendix: The Geographical Results (3)

The outer coast of the peninsula as far north as 28° 30' had been established in 1533. It was ten years later, in 1543, that Cabrillo, making his landfall in the neighborhood of 33°, just within the southern bounds of the present State of California, coasted up to Cape Mendocino, and perhaps to 44°, or nearly, to that spot, in the present State of Oregon. If Cabrillo, who had died January 3, 1543, did not himself go so high, the credit belongs to Ferrelo, his chief pilot.

Late in 1542 Mendoza sent an expedition under Ruy Lopez de Villalobos, across the Pacific, and if a map of Juan Freire, made in 1546, is an indication of his route, he seems to have gone higher up the coast than any previous explorer.

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[Sidenote: The Atlantic coast of North America.]

While this development of the northwest coast of North America was going on, there were other discoverers still endeavoring on the Atlantic side to connect the waters of the two oceans.

[Sidenote: 1534. Cartier.]

In April, 1534, Jacques Cartier, a jovial and roistering fellow, as Father Jouon des Longrais, his latest biographer, makes him out (_Jacques Cartier_, Paris, 1888), and who had led the roving life of a corsair in the recent wars of France, was now turning his energy to solve the great problem of this western passage. He sailed from St. Malo, and for the first time laid open, by an official examination, the inner spaces of the St. Lawrence Gulf, which might have been, indeed, and probably were, known earlier to the hardy Breton and Norman fishermen. We are deficient in a knowledge of the early frequenting of these coasts because the charts of such fishermen, and of those who visited the region for trade in peltries, have not come down to us, though Kohl thinks there is some likelihood of such records being preserved in a portolano of the British Museum.

The track of Cartier about the Gulf of St. Lawrence has caused some discussion and difference of opinion in the publications of Kohl, De Costa, Laverdière, and W. F. Ganong, the latter writer claiming, in a careful paper in the _Transactions_ of the Royal Society of Canada for 1889, that in the correct interpretation of Cartier's first voyage we find a key to the cartography of the gulf for almost a century.

The Rotz map of 1542 seems to be the earliest map which we know to show a knowledge of Cartier's first voyage. The Henri II. map of 1542 still more develops his work of exploration.

The chance of further discovery in this direction induced the French king once more to commission Cartier, October 30, 1534, and early in 1535 his little fleet sailed, and by August, after some discouragements, not lessened when he found the water freshening, he began to ascend the St. Lawrence River, reaching the site of Montreal. No map by Cartier himself is preserved, though it is known that he made such. Thenceforward the cartography of this northeastern region showed the St. Lawrence Gulf in a better development of the earlier so-called Square Gulf and of the great river of Canada. It is of record that Francis I., in commissioning Cartier, considered that he was dispatching him to ascend an Asiatic river, and the name of Lachine even to-day is preserved as evidence of the belief which Cartier entertained that he was within the bounds of China.

[Sidenote: John Rotz's map.]

John Rotz's _Boke of Idiography_--a manuscript of 1542, preserved in the British Museum--shows, in his drawing of the region about the Gulf of St. Lawrence, certain signs, as Kohl thinks, of having had access to the charts of Cartier, and Harrisse traces in them the combined influence of the Portuguese and Dieppe navigators.

The Cartier voyages seem to have made little impression outside of France, and we find for some years few traces of his discoveries in the portolanos of Italy and in the maps of the rest of Europe. It was only when the expedition of Roberval, in 1540-41, excited attention that the rest of Europe seemed to recognize these French efforts.

[Sidenote: Cartier's later voyages.]

[Sidenote: Allefonsce.]

The later voyages of Cartier, in 1541 and 1543, revealed nothing more of general geographical interest. Indeed, the hope of a western passage in this direction had been abandoned in effect after Cartier's second voyage, although the pilot Allefonsce, who accompanied a later expedition, had been detailed to explore the Labrador coast to that end, and had been turned back by ice. After this he seems to have gone south into a great bay, under 42°, the end of which he did not reach. This may have been the large expanse partly shut in by Cape Sable (Nova Scotia) and Cape Cod, now called in the coast survey charts the Gulf of Maine; or perhaps it may conform, taking into account his registered latitude, to the inner bight of it called Massachusetts Bay. At all events, Allefonsce believed himself on coasts contiguous to Tartary, through which he had hopes to find access to the more hospitable orient (occident) farther south. He apparently had something of the same notion regarding the westerly stretch of water which he found below Cape Cod, extending he knew not where, along the inclosure of the present Long Island Sound.

In the years both before and after the middle of the century, French vessels were on this coast in considerable numbers for purposes of trade or for protecting French interests, but we know nothing of any accessions to geographical knowledge which they made.

Allefonsce speaks of the Saguenay as widening, when he went up, till it seemed to be an arm of the sea, and "I think the same," he adds, "runs into the Sea of Cathay;" and so he draws it on one of his maps,--an idea made more general in the map of Homem in 1558, where the St. Lawrence really becomes a channel, locked by islands, bordering an Arctic Sea. Ramusio, in 1553, has inferred from such reports as he could get of Cartier's explorations, that his track had lain in channels bounded by islands, and a similar view had already been expressed in a portolano of 1536, preserved in the Bodleian, which Kohl associates with Homem or Agnese. The oceanic expansion of the Saguenay is preserved as late as the Molineaux map of 1600.

[Sidenote: River of Norumbega.]

It is to the work of Allefonsce that we probably owe another confusion of this northern cartography in the sixteenth century. What we now know as Penobscot Bay and River was called by him the River of Norumbega, and he seems to have given some ground for believing that this river connected the waters of the Atlantic with the great river of Canada, just as we find it later shown upon Gastaldi's map in Ramusio, by Ruscelli in 1561, by Martines in 1578, by Lok in 1582, and by Jacques de Vaulx in 1584.

[Sidenote: Greenland connects Europe and America.]

While this idea of the north was developing, there came in another that made the peninsular Greenland of the ante-Columbian maps grow into a link of land connecting Europe with the Americo-Asiatic main, so that one might in truth perambulate the globe dryshod. We find this conception in the maps of the Bavarian Ziegler (1532), and in the Italians Ruscelli (1544) and Gastaldi (1548),--the last two represented in the Ptolemies of those years published in Italy. But these Italian cosmographers were by no means constant in their belief, as Ruscelli showed in his Ptolemy of 1561, and Gastaldi in his Ramusio map of 1550.

[Sidenote: Asia and America joined in the higher latitudes.]

As the Pacific explorations were stretched northward from Mexico, and the peninsula of California was brought into prominence, there remained for some time a suspicion that the western ocean made a great northerly bend, so as to sever North America from Asia except along the higher latitudes. We find this northerly extension of the Pacific in a map of copper preserved in the Carter-Brown library, which seems to have been the work of a Florentine goldsmith somewhere about 1535; in the Carta Marina of Gastaldi in 1548; and it even exists in maps of a later date, like that of Paolo de Furlani (1560) and that of Myritius (1587).

[Sidenote: Entanglement of the American and Asiatic coasts.]

[Sidenote: 1728. Bering.]

This map of Myritius, which appeared in his _Opusculum Geographicum_, published at Ingolstadt in 1590, is the work of, perhaps, the last of the geographers who did not leave more or less doubt about the connection of North America with Asia. So it took about a full century for the entanglement of the coasts of Asia and America, which Columbus had imagined, to be practically eradicated from the maps. Not that there were not doubters, even very early, but the faith in a new continent grew slowly and had many set-backs; nor did the Asiatic connection fade entirely out, as among the possibilities of geography, for considerably more than a century yet to come. The uncertainties of the higher latitudes kept knowledge in suspense, and even the English settlers on the northerly coasts of the United States were not quite sure. Thomas Morton, the chronicler of a colony on the Massachusetts shores, felt it necessary, so late as 1636, to make a reservation that possibly the mainland of America bordered on the land of the Tartars. Indeed, no one could say positively, though much was conjectured, that there was not a terrestrial connection in the extreme northwest, under arctic latitudes, till Bering in 1728, two hundred and thirty-six years after Columbus offered his prayer at San Salvador, passed from the Pacific into the polar waters. This became the solution of the fabled straits of Anian, an inheritance from the very earliest days of northern exploration, which, after the middle of the sixteenth century, was revived in the maps of Martines, Zaltière, Mercator, Porcacchi, Furlani, and Wytfliet, prefiguring the channel which Bering passed. Much in the same way as the southern apex of South America was a vision in men's minds long before Magellan found his way to the Pacific.

[Sidenote: 1536. Chaves.]

[Sidenote: 1538. Mercator.]

[Sidenote: 1540. Hartmann gores.]

But we have anticipated a little. Coincident with the efforts of Cartier to discover this northern passage we mark other navigators working at the same problem. The Spaniard Alonso de Chaves made a chart of this eastern coast in 1536; but we only know of its existence from the description of it written by Oviedo in 1537. In the earliest map which we have from the hand of Gerard Mercator, and of which the only copy known was discovered some years ago by the late James Carson Brevoort, of New York, we find the northern passage well defined in 1538, and a broad channel separating the western coast of America from a parallel coast of Asia,--a kind of delineation which is followed in some globe-gores of about 1540, which Nordenskiöld thinks may have been the work of George Hartmann, of Nuremberg. This map is evidently based on Portuguese information, and that Swedish scholar finds no ground for associating it with the lost globe of Schöner, as Stevens has done. A facsimile of part of it has already been given.

[Sidenote: 1540-45. Münster.]

Sebastian Münster, in his maps in the Ptolemy of 1540-45, makes a clear seaway to the Moluccas somewhere in the latitude of the Strait of Belle Isle. Münster was in many ways antiquated in his notions. He often resorted to the old device of the Middle Ages by supplying the place of geographical details with figures of savages and monsters.

* * * * *

We come now to two significant maps in the early history of American cartography.

Columbus had been dead five and thirty years when a natural result grew out of those circumstances which conspired to name the largest part of the new discoveries after a secondary pathfinder. We have seen that there seemed at first no injustice in the name of America being applied to a region in the main external to the range of Columbus's own explorations, and how it took nearly a half century before public opinion, as expressed in the protest of Schöner in 1533, recognized the injustice of using another's name.

[Sidenote: 1541. Mercator.]

Whether that protest was prompted by a tendency, already shown, to give the name to the whole western hemisphere is not clear; but certainly within eight years such a general application was publicly made, when Mercator, in drafting in 1541 some gores for a globe, divided the name AME--RICA so that it covered both North and South America, and qualified its application by a legend which says that the continent is "called to-day by many, New India." Thus a name that in the beginning was given to a part in distinction merely and without any reference to the entire field of the new explorations, was now become, by implication, an injustice to the great first discoverer of all. The mischief, aided by accident and by a not unaccountable evolution, was not to be undone, and, in the singular mutations of fate, a people inhabiting a region of which neither Columbus nor Vespucius had any conception are now distinctively known in the world's history as Americans.

These 1541 gores of Mercator were first made known to scholars a few years ago, when the Belgian government issued a facsimile edition of the only copy then known, which the Royal Library at Brussels had just acquired; but since there have been two other copies brought to light,--one at St. Nicholas in Belgium, and the other in the Imperial library at Vienna.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Henry II. map.]

[Sidenote: 1544. Cabot map.]

There are some indications on Spanish globes of about 1540, and in the Desceliers or Henry II. map of 1546, that the Spanish government had sent explorers to the region of Canada not long after Cartier's earliest explorations, and it is significant that the earliest published map to show these Cartier discoveries is the other of the two maps already referred to, namely, the Cabot mappemonde of 1544, which has been supposed a Spanish cartographical waif. Early publications of southern and middle Europe showed little recognition of the same knowledge.

The Cabot map has been an enigma to scholars ever since it was discovered in Germany, in 1843, by Von Martius. It was deposited the next year in the great library at Paris. It is a large elliptical world-map, struck from an engraved plate, and it bears sundry elucidating inscriptions, some of which must needs have come from Sebastian Cabot, others seem hardly to merit his authorship, and one acknowledges him as the maker of the map. There is, accordingly, a composite character to the production, not easily to be analyzed so as to show the credible and the incredible by clear lines of demarcation. We learn from it how it proclaimed for the first time the real agency of John Cabot in the discovery of North America, confirmed when Hakluyt, in 1582, printed the patent from Henry VII. There is an unaccountable year given for that discovery, namely, 1494, but we seem to get the true date when Michael Lok, in 1582, puts down "J. Cabot. 1497," against Cape Breton in his map of that year. As this last map appeared in Hakluyt's _Divers Voyages_, and as Hakluyt tells us of the existence of Cabot's maps and of his seeing them, we may presume that we have in this date of 1497 an authoritative statement. We learn also from this map of 1544 that the land first seen was the point of the island now called Cape Breton. Without the aid of this map, Biddle, who wrote before its discovery, had contended for Labrador as the landfall.

[Sketched from his gores.]]

[Sidenote: Scarcity of Spanish printed maps.]

We know, on the testimony of Robert Thorne in 1527, if from no other source, that it was a settled policy of the Spanish government to allow no one but proper cartographical designers to make its maps, "for that peradventure it would not sound well to them that a stranger should know or discover their secrets." This doubtless accounts for the fact that, in the two hundred maps mentioned by Ortelius in 1570 as used by him in compiling his atlas, not one was published in Spain; and every bibliographer knows that not a single edition of Ptolemy, the best known channel of communicating geographical knowledge in this age of discovery, bears a Spanish imprint. The two general maps of America during the sixteenth century, which Dr. Kohl could trace to Spanish presses, were that of Medina in 1545 and that of Gomara in 1554, and these were not of a scale to be of any service in navigating.

[Sidenote: Cabot's connection with the map of 1544.]

There seem to be insuperable objections to considering that Sebastian Cabot had direct influence in the production of the map now under consideration. It is full of a lack of knowledge which it is not possible to ascribe to him. That it is based upon some drafts of Cabot is most probably true; but they are clearly drafts, confused and in some ways perverted, and eked out by whatever could be picked up from other sources.

That the Cabot map was issued in more than one edition is inferred partly from the fact that the legends which Chytræus quotes from it differ somewhat from those now in the copy preserved in Paris; and indeed Harrisse finds reason to suppose that there may have been four different editions. That in some form or other it was better known in England than elsewhere is deduced from certain relations sustained with that country on the part of those who have mentioned the map,--Livio Sanuto, Ortelius, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Richard Willes, Hakluyt, and Purchas.

Whoever its author and whatever its minor defects, this so-called Cabot map of 1544 may reasonably be accepted as the earliest really honest, unimaginative exhibition of the American continent which had been made. There was in it no attempt to fancy a northwest passage; no confidence in the marine or terrestrial actuality of the region now known to be covered by the north Pacific; no certainty about the entire western coast line of South America, though this might have been decided upon if the maker of the map had been posted to date for that region. The maker of it further showed nothing of that presumption, which soon became prevalent, of making Tierra del Fuego merely but one of the various promontories of an immense Antarctic continent, which later stood in the planispheres of Ortelius and Wytfliet.

[Sidenote: Geographical study transferred to Italy.]

This map of Cabot was the last of the principal cartographical monuments made north of the Alps in this early half of the sixteenth century. The centre of geographical study was now transferred to Italy, where it had begun with the opening of the interest in oceanic discovery. For the next score years and more we must look mainly to Venice for the newer development.

[Sidenote: 1548, Gastaldi.]

In the Venice Ptolemy of 1548, we have for the first time a _series_ of maps of the New World by Gastaldi, which were simply enlarged by Ruscelli in the edition of 1561, except in a few instances, where new details were added, like the making of Yucatan a peninsula instead of the island which Gastaldi had drawn. They were repeated in the edition of 1562.

[Sidenote: Sea manuals.]

Meanwhile the most popular sea manuals of this period were Spanish; but they studiously avoided throwing much light on the new geography.

That of Martin Cortes was the first to suggest a magnetic pole as distinct from the terrestrial pole. Its rival, the _Arte de Navegar_ of Pedro de Medina, published at Valladolid in 1545, never reached the same degree of popularity, nor did it deserve to, for his notions were in some respects erratic.

The English in their theories of navigation had long depended on the teachings of the Spaniards, and Eden had translated the chief Spanish manual in his _Arte of Navigation_ of 1561.

[Sidenote: Ship's log.]

A great advance was possible now, for a new principle had been devised, and an estimate of the progress of a ship was no longer dependent on visual observation. The log had made it possible to put dead reckoning on a pretty firm basis. This was the great new feature of the _Regiment of the Sea_, which the Englishman, William Bourne, published in 1573; and sixteen years later, in 1589, another Englishman, Blunderville, made popularly known the new instrument for taking meridian altitudes at sea, the cross-staff, which had very early superseded the astrolabe on shipboard.

The inclination or dip of the needle, showing by its increase an approach to a magnetic pole, was not scaled till 1576, when Robert Norman made his observations, and it is not without some service to-day in that combination of phenomena of which Columbus noted the earliest traces in his first voyage of 1492.

[Sidenote: Italian discoverers.]

[Sidenote: English discoverers.]

It is significant how large a part in the cardinal discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was taken by Italian navigators, seamen, shipwrights, mathematicians, and merchants, whether in Portugal or Spain, France or England. It is curious, too, to observe how, when the theoretical work and confirmatory explorations were finished, and the commercial spirit succeeded to that of science, England embarked with her adventurous spirit. The death of Queen Mary in 1558 was the signal for English exertion, and that exertion became ominous to all Europe in the reign of Elizabeth, accompanied by an intellectual movement, typified in Bacon and Shakespeare, similar to that which stirred the age of Columbus and the Italian renaissance.

[Sidenote: John Hawkins.]

John Hawkins and African marauders of his English kind were selling negro slaves in Española in 1562 and subsequent years, and from them we get our first English accounts of the Florida coast, which on their return voyages they skirted.

[Sidenote: New France.]

[Sidenote: Spanish settlements fail at the north.]

America had at this time been abandoned for a long while to Spain and France, and the latter power had only entered into competition with Charles V., when Francis I., as we have seen, had sent out Verrazano in 1521 to take possession of the north Atlantic coasts. Out of this grew upon the maps the designation of New France, which was attached to the main portion of the North American continent. And this French claim is recognized in the maps, painted about 1562, on the walls of the geographical gallery in the Vatican. So the French stole upon the possession of Spain in the West Indies; and the English followed in their wake, when the death of Mary rendered it easier for the English to smother their inherited antipathy to France. This done, the English in due time joined the French in efforts to gain an ascendency over Spain in the Indies, to compensate for the loss of such power in Italy. The Spaniards, though they had attempted to make settlements along the Chesapeake at different times between 1566 and 1573, never succeeded in making any impression on the history of this northern region.

* * * * *

The cartography of the north was at this period subject to two new influences; and both of them make large demands upon the credulity of scholarship in these latter days.

[Sidenote: André Thevet.]

Attempts have been made to trace some portion of the development of the coasts of the northeastern parts of the United States to the publications of a mendacious monk, André Thevet. He had been sent out to the French colony of Rio de Janeiro in 1555, where he remained prostrated with illness till he was able to reëmbark for France, January 31, 1556. In 1558 he published his _Singularitez de la France Antarctique_, a descriptive and conglomerate work, patched together from all such sources as he could pillage, professing to follow more or less his experiences on this voyage. He says nothing in it of his tracking along the east coast of the present United States. Seeking notoriety and prestige for his country, he pretends, however, in his _Cosmographie_ published in 1575, to recount the experiences of the same voyage, and now he professes to have followed this same eastern coast to the region of Norumbega. Well-equipped scholars find no occasion to believe that these later statements were other than boldly conceived falsehoods, which he had endeavored to make plausible by the commingling of what he could filch from the narratives of others.

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[Sidenote: The Zeni story.]

It was at this time also (1558) that there was published at Venice the strange and riddle-like narrative which purports to give the experiences of the brothers Zeni in the north Atlantic waters in the fourteenth century. The publication came at a time when, with the transfer of cartographical interest from over the Alps to the home of its earliest growth, the countrymen of Columbus were seeking to reinstate their credit as explorers, which during the fifteenth century and the early part of the sixteenth they had lost to the peoples of the Iberian peninsula. Anything, therefore, which could emphasize their claims was a welcome solace. This accounts both for the bringing forward at this time of the long-concealed Zeni narrative,--granting its genuineness,--and for the influence which its accompanying map had upon contemporary cartography. This map professed to be based upon the discoveries made by the Zeni brothers, and upon the knowledge acquired by them at the north in the fourteenth century. It accordingly indicated the existence of countries called Estotiland and Drogeo, lying to the west, which it was now easy to identify with the Baccalaos of the Cabots, and with the New France of the later French.

[Sidenote: The Zeni map.]

"If this remarkable map," says Nordenskiöld, "had not received extensive circulation under the sanction of Ptolemy's name," for it was copied in the edition of 1561 of that geographer, "it would probably have been soon forgotten. During nearly a whole century it had exercised an influence on the mapping of the northern countries to which there are few parallels to be found in the history of cartography." It is Nordenskiöld's further opinion that the Zeni map was drawn from an old map of the north made in the thirteenth century, from which the map found in the Warsaw Codex of Ptolemy of 1467 was also drawn. He further infers that some changes and additions were imposed to make it correspond with the text of the Zeni narrative.

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The year 1569 is marked by a stride in cartographical science, of which we have not yet outgrown the necessity.

[Sidenote: 1569. Mercator's projection.]

The plotting of courses and distances, as practiced by the early explorers, was subject to all the errors which necessarily accompany the lack of well-established principles, in representing the curved surface of the globe on a plane chart. Cumbrous and rude globes were made to do duty as best they could; but they were ill adapted to use at sea. Nordenskiöld (_Facsimile Atlas_, p. 22) has pointed out that Pirckheimer, in the Ptolemy of 1525, had seemingly anticipated the theory which Mercator now with some sort of prevision developed into a principle, which was applied in his great plane chart of 1569. The principle, however, was not definite enough in his mind for the clear exposition of formulæ, and he seems not to have attempted to do more than rough-hew the idea. The hint was a good one, and it was left for the Englishman Edward Wright to put its principles into a formulated problem in 1599, a century and more after Columbus had dared to track the ocean by following latitudinal lines in the simplest manner.

It has been supposed that Wright had the fashioning of the large map which, on this same Mercator projection, Hakluyt had included in his _Principall Navigations_ in 1599. Hondius had also adopted a like method in his _mappemonde_ of the same year.

[Sidenote: 1570. The _Theatrum_ of Ortelius.]

[Sidenote: Decline of Ptolemy.]

In 1570 the publication of the great atlas of Abraham Ortelius showed that the centre of map-making had again passed from Italy, and had found a lodgment in the Netherlands. The _Theatrum_ of Ortelius was the signal for the downfall of the Ptolemy series as the leading exemplar of geographical ideas. The editions of that old cartographer, with their newer revisions, never again attained the influence with which they had been invested since the invention of printing. This influence had been so great that Nordenskiöld finds that between 1520 and 1550 the Ptolemy maps had been five times as numerous as any other. They had now passed away; and it is curious to observe that Ortelius seems to have been ignorant of some of the typical maps anterior to his time, and which we now look to in tracing the history of American cartography, like those of Ruysch, Stobnicza, Agnese, Apianus, Vadianus, and Girava.

[Sidenote: Ortelius.]

It has already been mentioned that when Ortelius published his _Theatrum_, and gave a list of ninety-nine makers of maps whom he had consulted, not a solitary one of Spanish make was to be found among them. It shows how effectually the Council of the Indies had concealed the cartographical records of their office.

[Sidenote: 1577. English explorations.]

[Sidenote: 1548. Sebastian Cabot.]

It was eighty years since the English under John Cabot had undertaken a voyage of discovery in the New World. The interval passed not without preparation for new efforts, which had for a time, however, been extended to the northwest rather than to the northeast. In 1548 Sebastian Cabot had returned to his native land to assume the first place in her maritime world. His influence in directing, and that of Richard Eden in informing, the English mind prepared the way for the advent of Frobisher, the younger Hawkins, and Drake.

[Sidenote: 1576. Frobisher.]

[Sidenote: 1577-78. Frobisher.]

Frobisher's voyage of 1576 was the true beginning of the arctic search for a northwest passage, all earlier efforts having been in lower latitudes. He had sought, by leaving Greenland on the right, to pass north of the great American barrier, and thus reach the land of spices. He congratulated himself on having found the long-desired strait, when, naming it for himself, he returned to England. Frobisher attempted to add to these earlier discoveries by a voyage the next year, 1577, but he made exploration secondary to mining for gold, and not much was done. A third voyage in 1578 brought him into Hudson's Straits, which he entered with the hope of finding it the channel to Cathay. But in all his voyages Frobisher only crossed the threshold of the arctic north.

[Sidenote: The Zeni influence.]

It was one of the results of Frobisher's voyages that they served to implant in the minds of the cartographers of the northern waters the notions of the Zeni geography, and aided to give those notions a new lease of favor. It is conjectured that Frobisher had the Zeni map with him, or its counterpart in one of the recent Ptolemies. This map had placed the point of Greenland under 66° instead of 61°, and under the last latitude this map had shown the southern coast of its insular Frisland. Therefore, when Frobisher saw land under 61°, which was in fact Greenland, he supposed it to be Frisland, and thus the maps after him became confused. A like mischance befell Davis, a little later. When this navigator found Greenland in 61°, he supposed it an island south of Greenland, which he called "Desolation," and the fancy grew up that Frobisher's route must have gone north of this island and between it and Greenland, and so we have in later maps this other misplacement of discoveries.

[Sidenote: 1577. Francis Drake.]

While Frobisher was absent, Drake developed his great scheme of following in the southerly track of Magellan.

[Sidenote: Drake sees Cape Horn.]

Four years before (1573), being at Panama, he had seen from a treetop the great Pacific, and had resolved to be the first of the English to furrow its depths. In 1577, starting on his great voyage of circumnavigation, he soon added a new stretch of the Pacific coast to the better knowledge of the world. When he returned to England, he proved to be the first commander who had taken his ship, the "Pelican," later called the "Golden Hind" wholly round the globe, for Magellan had died on the way. Passing through Magellan's Strait and entering the Pacific, Drake's ship was separated from its companions and driven south. It was then he saw the Cape Horn of a later Dutch navigator, and proved the non-existence of that neighboring antarctic continent, which was still persistently to cling to the maps. Bereft of his other ships, which the storm had driven apart, Drake, during the early months of 1579, made havoc among the Spanish galleons which were on the South American coasts.

In March, 1579, surfeited with plunder, he started north from the coast of Mexico, to find a passage to the Atlantic in the upper latitudes.

[Sidenote: In the north Pacific.]

In June he had reached 42° north, though some have supposed that he went several degrees higher. He had met, however, a rigorous season, and his ropes crackled with the ice. The change was such a contrast to the allurements of his experiences farther to the south that he gave up his search for the strait that would carry him, as he had hoped, to the Atlantic, and, turning south, he reached a bay somewhere in the neighborhood of San Francisco, where he tarried for a while. Having placed the name of New Albion on the upper California coast, and fearing to run the hazards of the southern seas, where his plundering had made the Spaniards alert, he sailed westerly, and, rounding the Cape of Good Hope, reached England in due time, and was acknowledged to be the earliest of English circumnavigators.

It is one of the results of Drake's explorations in 1579-80 that we get in subsequent maps a more northerly trend to the California coast.

[Sidenote: Confusion in the Pacific coast cartography.]

Shortly after this, a great confusion in the maps of this Pacific region came in. From what it arose is not very apparent, except that absence of direct knowledge in geography opens a wide field for discursiveness. The Michael Lok map of 1582 indicates this uncertainty. It seemed to be the notion that the Arctic Sea was one and the same with that of Verrazano; also, that it came down to about the latitude of Puget Sound, and that the Gulf of California stretched nearly up to meet it.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Francisco Gali.]

[Sidenote: Proves the great width of the Pacific.]

Francisco Gali, a Spanish commander, returning to Acapulco from China in 1583, tried the experiment of steering northward to about 38°, when he turned west and sighted the American coast in that latitude. At this point he steered south, and showed the practicability of following this circuitous route with less time than was required to buffet the easterly trades by a direct eastern passage. His experiment established one other fact, namely, the great width of water separating the two continents in those upper latitudes; for he had found it to be 1200 leagues across instead of there being a narrow strait, as the theorizing geographers had supposed. Gali seems also to have shown that the distance south from Cape Mendocino to the point of the California peninsula was not more than half as great as the maps had made it. His voyage was a significant source of enlightenment to the cartographers.

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[Sidenote: Eastern coast of North America.]

[Sidenote: 1579. The English on the coast.]

To return to the eastern coasts, an English vessel under Simon Ferdinando spent a short season in 1579 somewhere about the Gulf of Maine, and was followed the next year by another under John Walker, and in 1593 by still a third under Richard Strong.

[Sidenote: Sir Humphrey Gilbert.]

For eighty years England might have rested her claim to North America on the discoveries of the Cabots; but Queen Elizabeth first gave prominence to these pretensions when she granted to Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1578 the right to make a settlement somewhere in these more northerly regions. Gilbert's first voyage accomplished nothing, and there was an interdict to prevent a second, since England might have use for daring seamen nearer home. "First," says Robert Hues, "Sir Humphrey Gilbert, with great courage and forces, attempted to make discovery of those parts of America which were yet unknown to the Spaniards; but the success was not answerable." The effort was not renewed till 1583, when Gilbert took possession of Newfoundland and attempted to make settlements farther south; but disaster followed him, and his ship foundered off the Azores on his return voyage.

[Sidenote: Sir Walter Ralegh.]

It was at this time that Sir Walter Ralegh came into prominence in pushing English colonization in America. He had been associated with his half-brother, Gilbert, in the earlier movements, but now he was alone. In 1584 he got his new charter, partly by reason of the urgency of Hakluyt in his _Westerne Planting_. Ralegh had his eye upon a more southern coast than Gilbert had aimed for,--upon one better fitted to develop self-dependent colonization. He knew that north of what was called Florida the Spaniards had but scantily tracked the country, and that they probably maintained no settlements. Therefore to reach a region somewhere south of the Chesapeake was the aim of the first company sent out under Ralegh's inspiration. These adventurers made their landfall where they could find no good inlet, and so sailed north, searching, until at last they reached the sounds on the North Carolina coast, and tarried awhile. Satisfied with the quality of the country, they returned to England; and their recitals so pleased Ralegh and the Queen that the country was named Virginia, and preparations were made to dispatch a colony. It went the next year, but its history is of no farther importance to our present purpose than that it marks the commencement of English colonization, disastrous though it was, on the North American continent, and the beginning of detailed English cartography of its coast, in the map, already referred to, which seems to open a passage, somewhere near Port Royal, to an interior sea.

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[Sidenote: 1585-86. John Davis.]

In 1585-86 John Davis had been buffeting among the icebergs of Greenland and the north in hopes to find a passage by the northwest; on June 30, 1587, he reached 72° 12' on the Greenland coast, and discovered the strait known by his name, and in 1595 when he published his _World's Hydrographical Description_, he maintained that he had touched the threshold of the northwest passage. He tells us that the globe of Molineaux shows how far he went.

[Sidenote: English seamanship.]

Seamanship owes more to Davis than to any other Englishman. In 1590, or thereabout, he improved the cross-staff, and giving somewhat more of complexity to it, he produced the back-staff. This instrument gave the observer the opportunity of avoiding the glare of the sun, since it was used with his back to that luminary; and when Flamsteed, the first astronomer royal at Greenwich, used a glass lens to throw reflected light, the first approach to the great principle of taking angles by reflection was made, which was later, in 1731, to be carried to a practical result in Hadley's quadrant.

The art of finding longitude was still in an uncertain state. Gemma Frisius, as we have noted, had as early as 1530 divined the method of carrying time by a watch; but it was not till 1726 that anything really practicable came of it, in a timekeeper constructed by Harrison. This watch was continually improved by him up to 1761, when the method of ascertaining longitude by chronometer became well established; and a few years later (1767) the first nautical almanac was published, affording a reasonably good guide in lunar distances, as a means in the computations of longitude.

[Sidenote: 1676.]

In 1676 the Greenwich observatory had been founded to attempt the rectification of lunar tables, then so erroneous that the calculations for longitude were still uncertain. In 1701 Edmund Halley had published his great variation charts. These dates will fix in the reader's mind the advance of scientific skill as applied to navigation and discovery. It will be well also to remember that in 1594 Davis published his _Seaman's Secrets_, the first manual in the English tongue, written by a practical sailor, in which the principles of great circle sailing were explained.

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[Sidenote: 1583-84. Earliest marine atlas.]

[Sidenote: 1592. Dutch West India Company.]

[Sidenote: 1598.]

The first marine atlas had been printed at Leyden in 1583-84; but the Dutch had not at that time taken any active part in the development of discovery in the New World. Their longing for a share in it, mated with a certain hostile intention towards the Spaniards, instigated the formation of the West India Company, which had first been conceived in the mind of William Usselinx in 1592, though it was not put into execution till twenty-five years later. It was claimed by the Dutch that in 1598 the ships of their Greenland Company had discovered the Hudson River, though there can be little doubt that the French, Spanish, and perhaps English had been there much earlier. It is also claimed that the straits shown in Lok's map in 1582 had instigated Heinrich Hudson to his later search. But the truth in all these questions which involve national rights is very much perplexed with claim and counter-claim, invention and perversion, in which historical data are at the beck of political objects.

[Sidenote: 1598. The Dutch on the North American coasts.]

[Sidenote: The English.]

By the end of the sixteenth century the Dutch began to appear on the coasts of the Middle and New England States, and the cartography of those regions developed rapidly under their observation; but it was through the boating explorations of Captain John Smith in 1614 that it took a shape nearer the truth. It is to him that the northerly parts owe the name of New England, which Prince Charles confirmed for it. The reports from Hudson, May, and others instigated a plan marked out in 1618, but not directly ordered by the States General till 1621, which led to the Dutch occupation of Manhattan and the neighboring regions, introducing more strongly than before a Dutch element into the maps.

[Sidenote: The English leaders in maritime discovery.]

[Sidenote: Richard Hakluyt.]

When the seventeenth century opened, the English had come well to the front in maritime explorations. A large-minded and patriotic man, Sir Thomas Smith, did much in his capacity as governor of the "merchants trading into the East Indies" to direct contemporary knowledge into better channels. Dr. Thomas Hood gave public lectures in London on the improvements in methods of navigation. Richard Hakluyt, the historiographer of the new company, had already shown that he had inherited the spirit of helpful patronage which had characterized the labors of Eden.

[Sidenote: 1600.]

[Sidenote: The search for a western passage at the north.]

[Sidenote: 1601. George Waymouth.]

We find the peninsula made by the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic insularized from the beginning of the seventeenth century, the transverse channel being now on the line of the Hudson, then of the Penobscot, then of the St. Croix, and when the seventeenth century came in, it was not wholly determined that the longed-for western passage might not yet be found somewhere in this region. On July 24, 1601, George Waymouth, a navigator, as he was called, applied to the London East India Company to be assisted in making an attempt to discover a northwest passage to India, and the company agreed to his proposition. The Muscovy Company protested in vain against such an infringement of its own rights; but it found a way to smother its grief and join with its rival in the enterprise. Through such joint action Waymouth was sent by the northwest "towards Cataya or China, or the back side of America," bearing with him a letter from Queen Elizabeth to the Emperor of "China or Kathia." The attempt failed, and Waymouth returned almost ignominiously.

[Sidenote: Hudson at the north.]

In 1602, under instructions from the East India Company, he again sailed, and now pushed a little farther into Hudson's Strait than any one had been before. In 1609 Hudson had made some explorations, defining a little more clearly the northern coasts of the present United States; and in 1610 he sailed again from England to attempt the discovery of the northwest passage, in a small craft of fifty-five tons, with twenty-three souls on board. Following the tracks of Davis and Waymouth, he went farther than they, and revealed to the world the great inland sea which is known by his name, and in which he probably perished.

[Sidenote: Hudson's Bay.]

[Sidenote: 1615. Baffin's Bay.]

In 1612-13 Sir Thomas Button developed more exactly the outline in part of this great bay, and in 1614 the _Discovery_, under Robert Bylot and William Baffin, passed along the coasts of Hudson's Strait, making most careful observation, and Baffin took for the first time at sea a lunar observation for longitude, according to a method which had been suggested as early as 1514. It was on a voyage undertaken in the next year, 1615, that Baffin, exceeding the northing of Davis, found lying before him the great expanse of Baffin's Bay, through which he proceeded till he found a northern exit in Sir Thomas Smith's Sound, under 78°. Baffin did all this with an accuracy which surprised Sir John Ross, who was the next to enter the bay, two centuries later. It was in these years of Hudson and Baffin that Napier invented logarithms and simplified the processes of nautical calculations.

[Sidenote: 1631. Luke Fox.]

[Sidenote: Thomas James.]

The voyage of Luke Fox in 1631 developed some portions of the western shores of Hudson's Bay, and he returned confident, from his observation of the tides farther north, that they indicated a western passage; and in the same year Thomas James searched the more southern limits of the great bay with no more success. These voyages put a stay for more than a hundred years to efforts in this direction to find the passage so long sought.

[Sidenote: 1602. Gosnold.]

Up to 1602 the explorations of our northern coasts seem to have been ordinarily made either by a sweep northerly from Europe, striking Newfoundland and then proceeding south, or by a southerly sweep following the Spanish tracks and coasting north from Florida. In this year, 1602, the Englishman Gosnold, without any earlier example that we know of since the time of Verrazano, stood directly to the New England coast, and in the accounts of his voyage we begin to find some particular knowledge of the contour of this coast, which opens the way to identifications of landmarks. The explorations of Pring (1603), Champlain (1604), Waymouth (1605), Popham (1607), Hudson (1609), Smith (1614), Dermer (1619), and others which followed are of no more importance in our present survey than as marking further stages of detailed geography. Even Dermer was dreaming of a western passage yet to be found in this region.

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[Sidenote: Discoveries on the Pacific coast.]

We must now turn to follow the development during the seventeenth century of the discoveries on the Pacific coast.

[Sidenote: 1602. Viscaino.]

Sebastian Viscaino, in his voyage up the coast from Acapulco in 1602, sought the hidden straits as high as 42°, and one of his captains reporting the coast to trend easterly at 43°, his story confused the geography of this region for many years. This supposed trend was held to indicate another passage to the Gulf of California, making the peninsula of that name an island, and so it long remained on the maps, after once getting possession, some years later (1622), of the cartographical fancy.

[Sidenote: 1643. De Vries.]

Some explorations of the Dutch under De Vries, in 1643, were the source of a notion later prevailing, that there was an interjacent land in the north Pacific, which they called "Jesso," and which was supposed to be separated by passages both from America and from Asia; and for half a century or more the supposition, connected more or less with a land seen by João da Gama, was accepted in some quarters. Indeed, this notion may be said to have not wholly disappeared till the maps of Cook's voyage came out in 1777-78, when the Aleutian Islands got something like their proper delineation.

[Sidenote: Confused geographical notions of a western sea.]

In fact, so vague was the conception of what might be the easterly extension of the northern sea in the latitudinal forties that the notion of a sea something like the old one of Verrazano was even thought in 1625 by Briggs in Purchas, and again in 1651 in Farrer's map of Virginia, to bathe the western slope of the Alleghanies.

[Sidenote: 1700.]

[Sidenote: Maldonado, Da Fuca, De Fonte.]

Early in the eighteenth century, even the best cartographers ran wild in their delineations of the Pacific coast. A series of multifarious notions, arising from more or less faith in the alleged explorations of Maldonado, Da Fuca, and De Fonte, some of them assumed to have been made more than a century earlier, filled the maps with seas and straits, identified sometimes with the old strait of Anian, and converting the northwestern parts of North America into a network of surmises, that look strangely to our present eyes. Some of these wild configurations prevailed even after the middle of the century, but they were finally eliminated from the maps by the expedition of that James Cook who first saw the light in a Yorkshire cabin in 1728.

[After Hennepin.]]

[Sidenote: 1724. Bering.]

[Sidenote: 1728.]

In 1724 Peter the Great equipped Vitus Bering's first expedition, and in December, 1724, five weeks before his death, the Czar gave the commanding officer his instruction to coast northward and find if the Asiatic and American coasts were continuous, as they were supposed to be. There were, however, among the Siberians, some reports of the dividing waters and of a great land beyond, and these rumors had been prevailing since 1711. Peter the Great died January 28, 1725 (old style), just as Bering was beginning his journey, and not till March, 1728, did that navigator reach the neighborhood of the sea. In July he spread his sails on a vessel which he had built.

[Sidenote: 1732.]

[Sidenote: 1741. Bering.]

By the middle of August he had passed beyond the easternmost point of Asia, and was standing out into the Arctic Ocean, when he turned on his track and sailed south. Neither in going nor in returning did he see land to the east, the mists being too thick. He had thus established the limits of the Russian Empire, but he had not as yet learned of the close proximity of the American shores. His discoveries did not get any cartographical record till Kiriloff made his map of Russia in 1734, using the map which Bering had made in Moscow in 1731. The following year (1732), Gvosdjeff espied the opposite coast; but it was not till 1741 that Bering sailed once more from the Asiatic side to seek the American coast. He steered southeast, and soon found that the land seen by Da Gama, and which the Delisles had so long kept on their maps, did not exist there.

[Sidenote: Aleutian Islands.]

Thence sailing northward, Bering sighted the coast in July and had Mount St. Elias before him, then named by him from that saint's day in the calendar. On his return route some vague conception of the Aleutian Islands was gained, the beginning of a better cartography, in which was also embodied the stretch of coast which Bering's associate, Chirikoff, discovered farther east and south.

[Sidenote: Northern Pacific.]

In 1757 Venegas, uninformed as to these Russian discoveries, confessed in his _California_ that nothing was really known of the coast line in the higher latitudes,--an ignorance that was the source of a great variety of conjectures, including a large inland sea of the west connecting with the Pacific, which was not wholly discarded till near the end of the century, as has already been mentioned.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The search for the northwest passage.]