The outer coast of the peninsula as far north as 28° 30' had been established in 1533. It was ten years later, in 1543, that Cabrillo, making his landfall in the neighborhood of 33°, just within the southern bounds of the present State of California, coasted up to Cape Mendocino, and perhaps to 44°, or nearly, to that spot, in the present State of Oregon. If Cabrillo, who had died January 3, 1543, did not himself go so high, the credit belongs to Ferrelo, his chief pilot.
Late in 1542 Mendoza sent an expedition under Ruy Lopez de Villalobos, across the Pacific, and if a map of Juan Freire, made in 1546, is an indication of his route, he seems to have gone higher up the coast than any previous explorer.
The Atlantic coast of North America.
While this development of the northwest coast of North America was going on, there were other discoverers still endeavoring on the Atlantic side to connect the waters of the two oceans.
1534. Cartier.
In April, 1534, Jacques Cartier, a jovial and roistering fellow, as Father Jouon des Longrais, his latest biographer, makes him out (Jacques Cartier, Paris, 1888), and who had led the roving life of a corsair in the recent wars of France, was now turning his energy to solve the great problem of this western passage. He sailed from St. Malo, and for the first time laid open, by an official examination, the inner spaces of the St. Lawrence Gulf, which might have been, indeed, and probably were, known earlier to the hardy Breton and Norman fishermen. We are deficient in a knowledge of the early frequenting of these coasts because the charts of such fishermen, and of those who visited the region for trade in peltries, have not come down to us, though Kohl thinks there is some likelihood of such records being preserved in a portolano of the British Museum.
The track of Cartier about the Gulf of St. Lawrence has caused some discussion and difference of opinion in the publications of Kohl, De Costa, Laverdière, and W. F. Ganong, the latter writer claiming, in a careful paper in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada for 1889, that in the correct interpretation of Cartier's first voyage we find a key to the cartography of the gulf for almost a century.
The Rotz map of 1542 seems to be the earliest map which we know to show a knowledge of Cartier's first voyage. The Henri II. map of 1542 still more develops his work of exploration.
The chance of further discovery in this direction induced the French king once more to commission Cartier, October 30, 1534, and early in 1535 his little fleet sailed, and by August, after some discouragements, not lessened when he found the water freshening, he began to ascend the St. Lawrence River, reaching the site of Montreal. No map by Cartier himself is preserved, though it is known that he made such. Thenceforward the cartography of this northeastern region showed the St. Lawrence Gulf in a better development of the earlier so-called Square Gulf and of the great river of Canada. It is of record that Francis I., in commissioning Cartier, considered that he was dispatching him to ascend an Asiatic river, and the name of Lachine even to-day is preserved as evidence of the belief which Cartier entertained that he was within the bounds of China.