[16] These are the remarks of an English chaplain in the island, quoted by the Rev. George Patterson, who contributed a most interesting article on the vanished Beothiks of Newfoundland to the Royal Society of Canada in 1891.
CHAPTER VIII
The Hudson Bay Explorers and the British Conquest of all Canada
In a general way the discovery of the main features of the vast Canadian Dominion may be thus apportioned amongst the different European nations. First came the British, led by an Italian pilot. They discovered Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. Then came the Portuguese, who discovered the north-east of Newfoundland and the coast of Labrador, while a French expedition under an Italian captain reached to Nova Scotia and southern Newfoundland. A Spanish expedition under a Portuguese leader shortly afterwards reached the coast of New Brunswick. After that the French from Brittany, Normandy, and the west coast of France laid bare the west coast of Newfoundland, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the River St. Lawrence, and the Great Lakes.
Sir Francis Drake led the way in the exploration of the north-west coast of North America. He reached, in 1579, as far north on that side as the country of Oregon, which he christened New Albion. This action stirred up the Spaniards, who explored the coast of California, and in 1591-2 sent an Ionian Island pilot, Apostolos Valeriano (commonly called Juan de Fuca), in charge of an expedition to discover the imagined Straits of Anian. He gave strength to this idea of a continuous water route across temperate North America by entering (in 1592) the straits, since called Juan de Fuca, between Vancouver Island and the modern State of Washington, and passing thence into the Straits of Georgia, which bear a striking resemblance in their features to the Straits of Magellan.
French explorers and adventurers, as we have seen, penetrated from the basin of the St. Lawrence to the north and west until they touched the southern extension of Hudson Bay (James's Bay), discovered Lake Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan Rivers, the upper Missouri and the whole course of the Mississippi, and finally recorded the existence of the Rocky Mountains.