[1365] Bancroft (Northwest Coast, i. 104) sketches a similar map which appeared in 1624 at Amsterdam in Inga’s West Indische Spieghel. Muller, Books on America, 1872, no. 805; 1877, no. 1,561.
[1366] It was repeated in later editions. Bancroft uses no earlier edition than that of 1633. The edition of 1625 did not contain the map of 1630.
[1367] In 1636 a report was made by the Spanish on the probable inter-oceanic communication by way of the Gulf of California. Cf. Documentos inéditos, xv. 215; Bancroft, Northwest Coast, i. 107.
[1368] Paris, 1637, five volumes, folio. Bancroft gives his map in his Northwest Coast, i. 107.
[1369] Arthur Dobbs reprinted it in his Countries adjoining to Hudson’s Bay, in 1744,—according to Bancroft.
[1370] He is particular to describe this ship as owned by Major Gibbons, who was on board, and as commanded by one Shapley. Major Edward Gibbons was a well-known merchant of Boston at this time, and the story seems first to have attracted the notice of the local antiquaries of that city, when Dr. Franklin brought it to the attention of Thomas Prince; and upon Prince reporting to him evidence favorable to the existence of such persons at that time, Franklin addressed a letter to Dr. Pringle, in which he considers the story “an abridgment and a translation, and bad in both respects;” and he adds, “If a fiction, it is plainly not an English one; but it has none of the features of fiction.” (Cf. Sabin’s American Bibliopolist, February, 1870, p. 65.) Dr. Snow examined it in his History of Boston (p. 89), and expressed his disbelief in it. Caleb Cushing in the North American Review (January, 1839) expressed the opinion that the account was worthy of investigation; which induced Mr. James Savage to examine it in detail, who in the same periodical (April, 1839, p. 559) set it at rest by at least negative proof, as well as by establishing an alibi for Gibbons at the date assigned. It may be remarked that among the English there was no general belief in a practicable western passage at this time, and the directors of the East India Company had given up the hope of it after Baffin’s return in 1616.
[1371] It was very easy for the credulous to identify the Archipelago of St. Lazarus with the Charlotte Islands. The map of Delisle and Buache, published in Paris in 1752 in Nouvelles Cartes des Découvertes de l’Amiral de Fonte, endeavors to reconcile the voyages of De Fuca and De Fonte. The map is reproduced in Bancroft’s Northwest Coast, i. 128. Under 45° there are two straits entering a huge inland “mer de l’ouest,” the southerly of which is supposed to be the one found by Aguilar in 1603, and the northerly that of De Fuca in 1592. Under 60° is the St. Lazarus Archipelago, and thridding the adjacent main are the bays, straits, lakes, and rivers which connect the Pacific with Hudson’s Bay. The next year (1753) Vaugondy, in some Observations critiques, opposed Delisle’s theory; and the opposing memoirs were printed in Spanish, with a refutation of Delisle by Buriel, in Venegas’ California, in 1757. Some years later the English geographer Jefferys attacked the problem in maps appended to Dragg’s Great Probability of a Northwest Passage, which was printed in London in 1768. Jefferys made the connection with Baffin’s Bay, and bounded an island—in which he revived the old Chinese legend by calling it Fusang—by De Fuca’s Straits on the south and De Fonte’s Archipelago on the north. Foster, in 1786, and Clavigero, in 1798, repudiated the story; but it appealed sufficiently to Burney to induce him to include it in his Chronological History of Voyages to the South Seas, vol. iii. (1813). William Goldson, in his Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific, in two Memoirs on the Straits of Anian and the Discoveries of De Fonte (Portsmouth, England, 1793), supposed that De Fonte got into the Great Slave Lake! Navarrete has examined the question in his Documentos inéditos, xv., as he had done at less length in his Sutil y Méxicana in 1802, expressing his disbelief; and so does Bancroft in his Northwest Coast, i. 115, who cites additionally (p. 119) La Harpe, Abrégé des Voyages (1816), vol. xvi., and Lapie, Nouvelles Annales des Voyages (1821), vol. xi., as believing the story. A “Chart for the better understanding of De Font’s letter” appeared in An Account of a Voyage for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage, by Theodore Swaine Drage (clerk of the “California”), London, 1749, vol. ii.
[1372] Recueil de Voyages au Nord, Amsterdam, 1732, vol. iv.; Coxe’s Discoveries of the Russians in the North Pacific, 1803.
[1373] Sanson adopted it, and it is laid down in Van Loon’s Zee Atlas of 1661, where, in the chart “Nova Granada en l’Eylandt California,” it is marked as the thither shore of the Straits of Anian, and called “Terra incognita,”—and Van Loon had the best reputation of the hydrographers of his day. The map published by Thevenot in 1663 also gives it.
Nicolas Sanson died in 1667, and two years later (1669), his son Guillaume reissued his father’s map, still with the island and the interjacent land, which in Blome’s map, published in his Description (1670), and professedly following Sanson, is marked “Conibas.” Later, in 1691, we have another Sanson map; but though the straits still bound easterly the “Terre de Jesso,” they are without name, and open easterly into a limitless “mer glaciale.” Hennepin at a later day put a special draught of it in the margin of his large map (1697), where it has something of continental proportions, stretching through forty degrees of longitude, north of the thirty-eighth parallel; and from Hennepin Campanius copied it (1702) in his Nya Swerige, p. 10, as shown herewith (p. 464).