1700.
Maldonado, Da Fuca, De Fonte.
Early in the eighteenth century, even the best cartographers ran wild in their delineations of the Pacific coast. A series of multifarious notions, arising from more or less faith in the alleged explorations of Maldonado, Da Fuca, and De Fonte, some of them assumed to have been made more than a century earlier, filled the maps with seas and straits, identified sometimes with the old strait of Anian, and converting the northwestern parts of North America into a network of surmises, that look strangely to our present eyes. Some of these wild configurations prevailed even after the middle of the century, but they were finally eliminated from the maps by the expedition of that James Cook who first saw the light in a Yorkshire cabin in 1728.
JESSO.
[After Hennepin.]
1724. Bering.
1728.
In 1724 Peter the Great equipped Vitus Bering's first expedition, and in December, 1724, five weeks before his death, the Czar gave the commanding officer his instruction to coast northward and find if the Asiatic and American coasts were continuous, as they were supposed to be. There were, however, among the Siberians, some reports of the dividing waters and of a great land beyond, and these rumors had been prevailing since 1711. Peter the Great died January 28, 1725 (old style), just as Bering was beginning his journey, and not till March, 1728, did that navigator reach the neighborhood of the sea. In July he spread his sails on a vessel which he had built.