Up to 1602 the explorations of our northern coasts seem to have been ordinarily made either by a sweep northerly from Europe, striking Newfoundland and then proceeding south, or by a southerly sweep following the Spanish tracks and coasting north from Florida. In this year, 1602, the Englishman Gosnold, without any earlier example that we know of since the time of Verrazano, stood directly to the New England coast, and in the accounts of his voyage we begin to find some particular knowledge of the contour of this coast, which opens the way to identifications of landmarks. The explorations of Pring (1603), Champlain (1604), Waymouth (1605), Popham (1607), Hudson (1609), Smith (1614), Dermer (1619), and others which followed are of no more importance in our present survey than as marking further stages of detailed geography. Even Dermer was dreaming of a western passage yet to be found in this region.
Discoveries on the Pacific coast.
We must now turn to follow the development during the seventeenth century of the discoveries on the Pacific coast.
1602. Viscaino.
Sebastian Viscaino, in his voyage up the coast from Acapulco in 1602, sought the hidden straits as high as 42°, and one of his captains reporting the coast to trend easterly at 43°, his story confused the geography of this region for many years. This supposed trend was held to indicate another passage to the Gulf of California, making the peninsula of that name an island, and so it long remained on the maps, after once getting possession, some years later (1622), of the cartographical fancy.
1643. De Vries.
Some explorations of the Dutch under De Vries, in 1643, were the source of a notion later prevailing, that there was an interjacent land in the north Pacific, which they called "Jesso," and which was supposed to be separated by passages both from America and from Asia; and for half a century or more the supposition, connected more or less with a land seen by João da Gama, was accepted in some quarters. Indeed, this notion may be said to have not wholly disappeared till the maps of Cook's voyage came out in 1777-78, when the Aleutian Islands got something like their proper delineation.
Confused geographical notions of a western sea.
In fact, so vague was the conception of what might be the easterly extension of the northern sea in the latitudinal forties that the notion of a sea something like the old one of Verrazano was even thought in 1625 by Briggs in Purchas, and again in 1651 in Farrer's map of Virginia, to bathe the western slope of the Alleghanies.