The search for the northwest passage.
The search for the northwest passage to Asia, as it had been begun by the English under Cabot in 1497, was also the last of all the endeavors to isolate the continent. The creation of the Hudson Bay Company in 1670 was ostensibly to promote "the discovery of a new passage into the South Sea," but the world knows how for two centuries that organization obstinately neglected, or as far as they dared, the leading purpose for which they pretended to ask a charter. They gave their well-directed energies to the amassing of fortunes with as much persistency as the Spaniards did at the south, but with this difference: that the wisdom in their employment of the aborigines was as eminent as with the Southrons it was lacking. It was left for other agencies of the British government successfully to accomplish, with the aid of the votaries of geographical science, what the pecuniary speculators of Fen Church Street hardly dared to contemplate.
1779. James Cook.
The spirit of the old navigators was revived in James Cook, when in 1779 he endeavored to pass eastward by Bering's Straits; but it was not till forty years later that a series of arctic explorations was begun, in which the English races of both continents have shown so conspicuous a skill and fortitude.
Kendrick in the "Columbia."
While the English, French, and Spaniards were dodging one another in their exploring efforts along this upper coast, a Boston ship, the "Columbia," under Captain Kendrick, entered the Columbia River, then named; and to these American explorations, as well as to the contemporary ones of Vancouver, the geographical confusion finally yielded place to something like an intelligible idea.
1790-95. Vancouver.
It had also been the aim of Vancouver in 1790-95 "to ascertain the existence of any navigable communication between the North Pacific and the North Atlantic Oceans," and the correspondence of the British government leading to this expedition has only been lately printed in the Report of the Dominion archivist, Douglas Brymner, for 1889.
