FROM WYTFLIET, 1597.
Bancroft (North Mexican States, vol. i. p. 152) sketches this map; it is also in his Northwest Coast, vol. i. p. 82.
In 1600 Metullus in his America sive novus orbis, published at Cologne, simply followed Wytfliet.[1351] From the map of Molineaux, likewise of 1600, a sketch of the California peninsula is given elsewhere.[1352] A contour of the coast more like that of the Molineaux globe figured on a preceding page belongs to the map given in the Herrera of 1601, but it also introduces views which held to a much wider separation of the shores of the north Pacific than had been maintained by the school of Mercator.[1353].
WYTFLIET, 1597.
An important voyage in both furthering and confusing the knowledge of the California coast was that of Sebastian Viscaino.[1354] This navigator, it is sometimes said, had been in a Manilla galleon which Cavendish had captured near Cape St. Lucas in 1587, when the English freebooter burned the vessel and landed her crew.[1355] He is known to have had much opportunity for acquiring familiarity with the coast; and in 1597 he had conducted an expedition to the coast of the California peninsula which had failed of success.[1356]
In 1602 (May 5) he was again despatched from Acapulco with three vessels, for the same purpose of discovering some harbor up the coast which returning vessels from the Philippines could enter for safety or repairs, and of finding the mysterious strait which led to the Atlantic. He was absent ten months.[1357] He himself went up to 42°, but one of his vessels under Martin Aguilar proceeded to 43°, where he reported that he found the entrance of a river or strait, not far from Cape Blanco;[1358] and for a long period afterwards the entrance and Aguilar’s name stood together on the maps.[1359] Buache, in his Considérations géographiques et physiques, says that it was the reports brought back from this expedition, describing an easterly trend of the coast above the 43°, which gave rise to the notion that the waters of the Gulf of California found a passage to the ocean in two ways, making an island of the peninsula. The official recorder of the expedition (Ascension) is known to have held this view. We shall see how fixed this impression later became.
Meanwhile the peninsular shape was still maintained in the map in Botero’s Relaciones Universales del mundo, published at Valladolid in 1603; in the Spanish map of 1604, made at Florence by Mathieu Neron Pecciolen (engraved for Buache in 1754); in that of Cespedes’ Regimiento de Navigacion (1606), and in that published in connection with Ferdinand de Quir’s narrative in the Detectionis Freti (1613) of Hudson’s voyage.[1360]