Note 1371 — Chapter VI · (continued 3)

It was very easy for the credulous to identify the Archipelago of St. Lazarus with the Charlotte Islands. The map of Delisle and Buache, published in Paris in 1752 in Nouvelles Cartes des Découvertes de l’Amiral de Fonte, endeavors to reconcile the voyages of De Fuca and De Fonte. The map is reproduced in Bancroft’s Northwest Coast, i. 128. Under 45° there are two straits entering a huge inland “mer de l’ouest,” the southerly of which is supposed to be the one found by Aguilar in 1603, and the northerly that of De Fuca in 1592. Under 60° is the St. Lazarus Archipelago, and thridding the adjacent main are the bays, straits, lakes, and rivers which connect the Pacific with Hudson’s Bay. The next year (1753) Vaugondy, in some Observations critiques, opposed Delisle’s theory; and the opposing memoirs were printed in Spanish, with a refutation of Delisle by Buriel, in Venegas’ California, in 1757. Some years later the English geographer Jefferys attacked the problem in maps appended to Dragg’s Great Probability of a Northwest Passage, which was printed in London in 1768. Jefferys made the connection with Baffin’s Bay, and bounded an island—in which he revived the old Chinese legend by calling it Fusang—by De Fuca’s Straits on the south and De Fonte’s Archipelago on the north. Foster, in 1786, and Clavigero, in 1798, repudiated the story; but it appealed sufficiently to Burney to induce him to include it in his Chronological History of Voyages to the South Seas, vol. iii. (1813). William Goldson, in his Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific, in two Memoirs on the Straits of Anian and the Discoveries of De Fonte (Portsmouth, England, 1793), supposed that De Fonte got into the Great Slave Lake! Navarrete has examined the question in his Documentos inéditos, xv., as he had done at less length in his Sutil y Méxicana in 1802, expressing his disbelief; and so does Bancroft in his Northwest Coast, i. 115, who cites additionally (p. 119) La Harpe, Abrégé des Voyages (1816), vol. xvi., and Lapie, Nouvelles Annales des Voyages (1821), vol. xi., as believing the story. A “Chart for the better understanding of De Font’s letter” appeared in An Account of a Voyage for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage, by Theodore Swaine Drage (clerk of the “California”), London, 1749, vol. ii.