[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 pa.s.sage 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 Pen.o.bscot, then of the St. Croix, and when the seventeenth century came in, it was not wholly determined that the longed-for western pa.s.sage 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 a.s.sisted in making an attempt to discover a northwest pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage, 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 b.u.t.ton developed more exactly the outline in part of this great bay, and in 1614 the _Discovery_, under Robert Bylot and William Baffin, pa.s.sed 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: LUKE FOX, 1635.]
[Sidenote: 1631. Luke Fox.]
[Sidenote: Thomas James.]
The voyage of Luke Fox in 1631 developed some portions of the western sh.o.r.es of Hudson"s Bay, and he returned confident, from his observation of the tides farther north, that they indicated a western pa.s.sage; 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage yet to be found in this region.
[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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sages both from America and from Asia; and for half a century or more the supposition, connected more or less with a land seen by Joo 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 lat.i.tudinal 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 a.s.sumed 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: JESSO.
[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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: DOMINA FARRER"S MAP, 1651.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: DOMINA FARRER"S MAP, 1651.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: BUACHE"S THEORY, 1752.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: BERING"S STRAITS.]
[Sidenote: 1732.]
[Sidenote: 1741. Bering.]
By the middle of August he had pa.s.sed 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 sh.o.r.es. 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 a.s.sociate, 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 lat.i.tudes,--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 pa.s.sage.]
The search for the northwest pa.s.sage to Asia, as it had been begun by the English under Cabot in 1497, was also the last of all the endeavors to isolate the continent. The creation of the Hudson Bay Company in 1670 was ostensibly to promote "the discovery of a new pa.s.sage into the South Sea," but the world knows how for two centuries that organization obstinately neglected, or as far as they dared, the leading purpose for which they pretended to ask a charter. They gave their well-directed energies to the ama.s.sing of fortunes with as much persistency as the Spaniards did at the south, but with this difference: that the wisdom in their employment of the aborigines was as eminent as with the Southrons it was lacking. It was left for other agencies of the British government successfully to accomplish, with the aid of the votaries of geographical science, what the pecuniary speculators of Fen Church Street hardly dared to contemplate.