CHAPTER IV.
ON THE PRETENDED DISCOVERIES OF THE NORTH-WEST COAST.
Memoir of Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado, in 1588.—Voyage of the Descubierta and Atrevida, in 1791.—Tale of Juan de Fuca, in 1592.—Voyages of Meares, Vancouver, and Lieutenant Wilkes.—Letter of Admiral Bartolemé Fonte or de Fuentes, in 1640.—Memoir of J. N. de l’Isle and Ph. Buache, in 1750.—California discovered to be a Peninsula in 1540; reported to be an Island in 1620; re-explored by the Jesuit Kuhn and others, in 1701-21.—Maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth Centuries.—Fonte’s Letter, a jeu-d’esprit of Petiver, the Naturalist.
The general belief in the existence of a North-west passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean in the direction of Gaspar de Cortereal’s reported Straits of Anian, led to the circulation of many false accounts of the discovery of the desired channel. The most celebrated fictions of this class seem to have originated with individuals who hoped to secure, through their pretended knowledge and experience, future employment, as well as immediate emolument. A memoir of this kind is reported to have been laid before the Council of the Indies at Seville, in 1609, by Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado, who professed to have sailed in 1588 from Lisbon to the coast of Labrador, and thence into the South Sea through a channel in 60° north latitude, corresponding to the Strait of Anian, according to ancient tradition. He petitioned, in consequence, that he might be rewarded for his services, and be entrusted with an expedition to occupy the Strait of Anian, and defend the passage against other nations. His cotemporaries, according to the author of the Introduction to the Voyage of the Sutil and Mexicana, were men of more judgment and intelligence than some of the writers of the 18th century. The former at once discovered, by personal examination of the author, the fictitious character of his narrative, and rejected his proposal. Two copies of this memoir are supposed to exist; one of these being preserved in the library of the Duke of Infantado at Madrid, the other in the Ambrosian Library at Milan. The former of these is considered by the author of the Introduction to be certainly a cotemporaneous, and perhaps the original, copy of the memoir: the Ambrosian manuscript, on the other hand, has been pronounced, in an article in the London Quarterly Review for October, 1816, to be “the clumsy and audacious forgery of some ignorant German,” from the circumstance of fifteen leagues to the degree being used in some of the computations. To the same purpose Capt. James Burney, in the fifth volume of his Voyages, published in 1817, observes, that “it must not be omitted that the reckoning in the narrative is in German leagues. It is said, ‘from the latitude of 64° you will have to sail 120 leagues to the latitude of 72°, which corresponds with the German league of 15 to a degree, and not with the Spanish league of 17½ to a degree, by which last the early Spanish navigators were accustomed to reckon.’ From this peculiarity in the narrative it may be conjectured, that the real author was a Fleming, who probably thought he could not better advance his spurious offspring, than by laying it at the door of a man who had projected to invent a compass without variation,” as Maldonado professed to do to the Council of the Indies, according to Antonio Leo in his Bibliotheca Indica.
Allusions had been occasionally made to this work by Spanish writers in the 17th century, amongst others by De Luque, the author of the “Establecimientos Ultramarinos de las Naceones Europeas.” It was not, however, till so late a period as 1790 that the attention of men of science was drawn to the Madrid manuscript by J. N. Buache, the geographer of the King of France, in a paper read before the Academy of Sciences at Paris in that year. Captain Burney states, that the manuscript had been brought to notice shortly before by M. de Mendoza, a captain in the Spanish navy, who was employed in forming a collection of voyages for the use of that service. M. Buache, who had succeeded D’Anville as Geographer Royal in 1768, followed the geographical system of Ph. Buache, his relative and predecessor, and, like him, clung fondly to questionable discoveries. He had been employed to prepare instructions for the expedition of La Perouse, and thus his attention had been especially drawn to voyages of discovery on the north-west coast of America. He declared himself in his memoir so strongly in favor of the genuineness of the manuscript, and of the good faith of Maldonado, that the Spanish government, in order that the question might be definitively set at rest, directed its archives to be searched, and the manuscript in the library of the Duke of Infantado to be carefully examined, and at the same time gave orders that the corvettes Descubierta and Atrevida, which were fitting out at Acapulco for a voyage round the world, should explore the coasts and port which Maldonado pretended to have discovered in the South Sea. The archives, however, furnished ample evidence of the correctness of the ancient opinion that Maldonado was an impostor, and the expedition of the corvettes, which sailed in 1791, confirmed this fact beyond dispute. A memoir to that effect, founded upon their observations, was published in 1797, by Don Ciriaco Cevallos, who had accompanied the expedition, to prove the utter falsity of Maldonado’s story.
It was, however, once more revived by the discovery of the Ambrosian manuscript in 1812 by Carlo Amoretti. This is said to give a more succinct account than the Madrid document, and it has been thought by some to be an abridgment of it. The article in the Quarterly Review above alluded to was occasioned by its appearance, and to the curious will furnish ample information. The Milan account of the voyage may be referred to in the fifth volume of Burney’s History of Voyages. The Madrid document will be found in Barrow’s Chronological History of Voyages in the Arctic Regions.
A much more plausible narrative was published in 1625, in the third volume of “The Pilgrims,” by Purchas, the successor of Hakluyt as the historian of maritime enterprises. It is entitled “A Note made by me, Michael Lock the elder, touching the Strait of Sea, commonly called Fretum Anian, in the South Sea, through the North-west Passage of Meta Incognita.” The writer purported to give an account of what had been communicated to him at Venice, in April, 1596, by an ancient Greek pilot, commonly called Juan de Fuca, but properly named Apostolos Valerianus, who represented himself to have been taken in a Spanish ship by Captain Candish, and to have thereby lost 60,000 ducats, and to have been at another time sent by the Viceroy of Mexico to discover and fortify the Straits of Anian. His tale was to this effect: “That shortly afterwards, having been sent again, in 1592, by the Viceroy of Mexico, with a small caravel and pinnace, armed with mariners only, he followed the coast of North America until he came to the latitude of 47°, and there finding that the land trended east and north-east, with a broad inlet of sea between 47 and 48 degrees of latitude, he entered thereinto, sailing therein more than twenty days, and found that land trending still sometimes north-west and north-east and north, and also east, and south-eastward, and very much broader sea than was at the said entrance, and that he passed by divers islands in that sailing. And that at the entrance of this said strait, there is on the north-west coast thereof a great headland or island, with an exceeding high pinnacle or spired rock, like a pillar, thereupon.
“Also, he said, he went on land in divers places, and there he saw some people on land, clad is beasts’ skins; and that the land is very fruitful, and rich of gold, silver, pearls, and other things, like new Spain.