Note 1339 — Chapter VI · (continued 3)

It is claimed that Maldonado presented his memoir in 1609 to the Council of the Indies, and asked for a reward for the discovery; and there are two manuscripts purporting to be the original memoir. One, of which trace is found in 1672, 1738, 1775, 1781 (copied by Muñoz), and printed in 1788, was still existing, it is claimed, in 1789, and was reviewed in 1790 by the French geographer Buache, who endeavored to establish its authenticity; and it is translated, with maps, in Barrow’s Chronological History of Voyages, etc. Another manuscript was found in the Ambrosian library in 1811, and was published at Milan as Viaggio dal mare Atlantico al Pacifico, translated from a Spanish manuscript (Stevens, Bibliotheca geographica, no. 1,746), and again in French at Plaisance in 1812. The editor was Charles Amoretti, who added a discourse, expressing his belief in it, together with a circumpolar map marking Maldonado’s track. (Harvard College Library, no. 4331.2.) This book was reviewed by Barrow in the Quarterly Review, October, 1816. Cf. Burney’s Voyages, vol. v. p.167. A memoir by the Chevalier Lapie, with another map of the “Mer polaire,” is printed in the Nouvelles Annales des Voyages, vol. xi. (1821). Bancroft (Northwest Coast, i. 98) reproduces Lapie’s map. Navarrete searched the Spanish Archives for confirmation of this memoir,—a search not in vain, inasmuch as it led to the discovery of the documents with which he illustrated the history of Columbus; and he also gave his view of the question in vol. xv. of his Coleccion de documentos inéditos in the volume specially called Examen historico-critico de los Viages y Descubrimientos apócrifos del capitan Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado, de Juan de Fuca y del almirante Bartolomé de Fonte: memoria comenzada por D. M. F. de Navarrete, y arreglada y concluida por D. Eustaquio Fernandez de Navarrete. Bancroft calls it an elaboration of the voyage of the Sutil y Méxicana. (Cf. Arcana, Bibliographia de obras anonimas, 1882, no. 408.) Goldson in his Memoir on the Straits of Anian places confidence in the Maldonado memoir. Cf. Bancroft (Northwest Coast, vol. i. p. 92), who recapitulates the story and cites the examiners of it, pro and con, and gives (p. 96) Maldonado’s map of the strait.