Note 147 — Chapter II

[It is a question how far north Drake went. Up to the middle of the last century, the writers, except Davis in his World’s Hydrographical Discovery, and perhaps Sir William Monson, had fixed his northing at 43°,—these two exceptions placing it at 48°, and this last opinion has been followed by Burney, Barrow, and the writer of the Life of Drake in the 1750 edition of the Biographia Britannica. Greenhow, Oregon and California, 2d edition, p. 74, doubts the later view. Drake’s aim was to find the westerly end of what was for a long time the conjectural Straits of Anian, or the northern passage to the Atlantic, which, ever since Cortereal, in 1500, had found what he supposed the easterly end of such a passage in Hudson’s Straits, had been a dream of navigators and geographers. An examination of the unstable views which were held regarding the shape and inlets of the western coast of North America, from the time of Cortes’ first expedition north, belongs to another volume of this work. A notion of the continuity of Asia and America, which was temporarily dispelled by Balboa’s discovery of the Pacific in 1513, was revived twenty years later by a certain school of geographers, and continued to be held by some for thirty or forty years. Before Drake’s time it had given place to views which more distinctly prefigured the Straits of Behring, not yet to be determined for a hundred and fifty years. The earlier conjectural propinquity of America and Asia at the north—as shown in the maps of Münster, Mercator, and others—was giving place to a more minute configuration, as shown in the maps of Zaltieri and Furlano, of which outlines are given in the text, indicating the kind of view which was prevailing regarding this northern part of the Pacific, which Drake was baffled in his attempt to explore. It is curious to observe, moreover, that Mercator in his map in zones, dated 1541, marks the region later to be called New Albion as having the star Caput Draconis in the zenith,—almost in strange anticipation of its being the spot where the English “dragon” was first to contest Spanish supremacy on the North American continent. Spain had as yet had no sharer of this northern new world.—Ed.]