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and some days elapsed before the ship could be freed from these disagreeable visiters. Schouten at length arrived in Java, where his ship was confiscated by the East India Company, and instead of receiving the honour which was due to his merit as a navigator, he was treated as an interloper and delinquent. It is to be remarked, that Schouten did not prosecute his design of examining the southern regions of the great ocean; the loss of the Horn, and the distress which he endured in his voyage by Le Maire's Straits, diverted him from his purpose, and compelled him to choose the easy navigation in the trade winds near the line, where there were not, however, any discoveries to be made. But this voyage first demonstrated that the Straits of Magellan were not the eastern door of the Pacifie; and it is not the least merit of this discovery, that it was not purely the result of chance.

The Spaniards thus learned the folly of their presumption, in attempting, four and thirty years before, to exclude other nations from the navigation of the Pacific, by fortifying the Straits of Magellan. On hearing the result of Schouten's voyage, they sent, in 1618, Bartolomeo and Gonzalo Nodal, to explore in detail the southern coasts which the Dutch had just discovered: and it is worth while to observe, that they employed Dutch pilots in this voyage; thus acknowledging themselves outstripped in maritime skill by the very people whose spirit of enterprise they had sought to crush by the extinction of their liberties. The Nodals executed their task with ability; they completely circumnavigated the Tierra del Fuego, and thus completed the survey of South America.

CHAP. XVIII.

VOYAGES IN THE PACIFIC, AND DISCOVERY OF
AUSTRALIA.

THE STRAITS OF ANIAN.DISCOVERIES ASCRIBED TO URDANETA.
-DEPOSITIONS OF LADRILLERO AND MARTIN CHACK.-FA-
BULOUS VOYAGE OF MALDONADO. — EXPEDITION OF JUAN DE
FUCA. VINDICATION OF HIS VOYAGE. VOYAGE OF DE
FONTE. HE DISCOVERS THE ARCHIPELAGO OF ST. LAZARUS.
ENTERS LAKE VELASCO. PROCEEDS TO LAKE BELLE.
DESCENDS A RIVER. ARRIVES AT THE ATLANTIC. BER-
NARDO EXPLORES THE SEA OF TATARY. VISCAYNO SURVEYS
CALIFORNIA. AGUILAR ARRIVES AT THE RIVER OF QUIVIRA.
-SECRECY OF THE SPANIARDS. FIRST DISCOVERY OF NEW
HOLLAND. VOYAGE OF HERTOGE. - EDELS, DE NUYTZ, AND
CARPENTER. NEW HOLLAND KNOWN EARLY TO THE POR-
HE DISCOVERS

TUGUESE. — EXPEDITION OF ABEL TASMAN.
VAN DIEMEN'S LAND.-ARRIVES AT NEW ZEALAND.-DRIVEN
AWAY BY THE NATIVES. HE FINDS THE FRIENDLY ISLANDS.
AMSTERDAM ISLAND. - ROTTERDAM. KINDLY RECEIVED
BY THE NATIVES. DANGEROUS SHOALS. TASMAN RETURNS
BY NEW GUINEA.

WHILE the geography of South America thus rose into clear light, the obscurity of fable and uncertainty still hung over the northern portion of that great continent. When Cortereal returned from the coast of Labrador, where he had probably entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence, he reported that he had discovered the Straits of Anian, which were supposed at that time, and for ages afterwards, to conduct into the Pacific Ocean. The origin of this name is uncertain, but the belief in the existence of the Straits of Anian gave rise to many a fiction, and communicated a tinge of the fabulous even to voyages that were actually performed. But as men are more willing to believe in the activity of their imaginations, than in their liability to become its dupes, accounts which had so large a mixture of the incredible were looked upon as mere inventions, and wholly disregarded. The celebrated voyager Andres de Urdaneta, who ac

companied Legaspi on his expedition to the Philippines, and returned to New Spain by the northern Pacific, was reported to have discovered a northern strait conducting from the great ocean into the Atlantic. The high re

putation of Urdaneta as a navigator and cosmographer, by representing him as a fit person to solve an interesting geographical problem, may have conduced, along with some speculations found among his papers at his death, to give rise to this report. In 1574, a pilot of New Spain, named Juan Fernandez de Ladrillero, publicly declared that he had discovered a strait of communication about 800 leagues to the north of Compostella, in New Spain, and that it disembogued itself into the sea where the English went to kill fish. Another formal deposition to the same effect, was made in 1579, by Martin Chack, a Portuguese mariner, who stated that in a small ship, of eighty tons burden, he had found a way from the East Indies through the Gulf of Newfoundland, which he believed to be in latitude 59° north. The discovery said to have been made by Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado, who, it was pretended, made a voyage from Lisbon to the coast of Labrador, in the year 1598, and found a strait by which the navigation from Spain to China might be performed in three months, is no doubt as apocryphal as the foregoing.

Among the voyages which were for a long time considered as fictitious, and the credit of which is not perfectly established at the present day, one of the first, in the order of time and of importance, is the expedition of Juan de Fuca. This pilot, whose real name was Apostolos Valerianos, was a Greek of the island of Cephalonia, and was employed in the service of Spain for upwards of forty years. Being at Lemnos, in the year 1596, on his return from his voyages, he gave an account of his last expedition to Mr. Michael Lock, an English gentleman of talent and respectability, by whom the particulars were communicated to Purchas. Fuca, according to the account that he gave, had been des patched from the harbour of Acapulco, in 1592, by the

viceroy of Mexico, with a small caravel and a pinnace, for the purpose of discovering the communication by the north of America from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. Between the parallels of 47° and 48° he found that the land trended to the north-east, and presented a large opening which might possibly be a strait; he entered it, and sailed through it for the space of twenty days. The land in some places extended toward the north-east, in others toward the north-west: the passage grew much wider as he advanced, and contained several islands. Fuca frequently went on shore, and saw a number of inhabitants clothed with skins of animals; the country appeared to him to be fertile, and to abound in gold, silver, and pearls. He continued this course till he reached the Atlantic Ocean. He had found the strait, through its entire length, to be of a width sufficient for navigation; and the mouth by which he had entered it had appeared to him to be thirty or forty leagues across. He then resolved to return by the same passage, for he was satisfied that he had accomplished the object of his mission in discovering a communication of the two seas across the continent of America. was also prevented from advancing by his dread of the savages, whom he was unable to resist if they thought proper to attack him : he therefore returned to Acapulco, where he spent two years in vainly soliciting the reward to which he thought himself entitled for the discovery that opened to Spain a new source of wealth and prosperity.

He

The voyage of Fuca was long regarded as a fiction; the discoveries of the English in Hudson's Bay clearly demonstrating that there does not exist such a communication with the western ocean as that which he pretends to have discovered: but his narrative ought to be interpreted with all the indulgence which is due to writings of that age. Modern researches have proved that there exists an inlet near the latitude mentioned by him, which conducts, not indeed into the Atlantic, but into a large basin, or interior sea, which separates a great archipelago from the high lands of the continent.

It is probable that Fuca, having proceed 150 or 160 leagues in this basin, felt convinced that it would conduct him into the Atlantic ocean; and that, under this presumption, he hastened his return, just as Cortereal had announced his discovery of the Straits of Anian, and as the Dutch voyager Cornelison had turned back from the north-eastern seas with a conviction that he had found a passage to Tatary and China. But Fuca, by confounding hypothesis with fact, has incurred the danger of being wholly disregarded.

Towards the beginning of the present century there was circulated in Europe the account of an expedition performed in 1640, by one admiral Bartolomeo de Fuente, or Fonte, which appeared for the first time in London in 1708, in a periodical work entitled Memoirs for the Curious. It long occupied the attention of English, German, and French geographers, but is now deservedly regarded as a fiction. Yet the names of De Lisle, Buache, and Fleurieu, who condescended to become its apologists and defenders, may still entitle it to a brief consideration.

The narrative relates that the king of Spain, alarmed at the progress made by Hudson, James, and other navigators, in the north-west, determined to oppose their attempts to reach the Pacific Ocean by that course, and for this purpose De Fonte received orders to sail with four armed ships. Accordingly he put to sea, from Callao, on the 3d of April, 1640. At the port of St. Helena, 200 leagues to the north of the Bay of Guayaquil, they took in a large quantity of bitumen, or mineral tar, which was deemed an excellent remedy for the scurvy. The master of De Fonte's ship informed him, that 200 leagues north from Cape St. Lucas the flood tide from the north met that flowing from the south, and that he was therefore sure that California must be

an island. On this information, don Diego Penelosa, a young nobleman of great knowledge in cosmography, undertook to discover whether California were an island or a peninsula; and, for that purpose, parted from the

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