A map of Jodocus Hondius of about this time first gave indication of the growing uncertainty which led finally to a prevailing error regarding the head of the gulf. The map was inscribed “Vera totius expeditionis nauticæ Descriptio D. Franc. Draci,” etc., and illustrated Hondius’s edition of Drake and Cavendish’s voyages, and has been reproduced in the Hakluyt Society’s edition of The World Encompassed. The gulf is made to divide about an island at its northern end, producing two arms whose prolongation is left undecided. The circumpolar map of Hondius which appeared in Pontanus’s Amsterdam in 1611, and is given in fac-simile in Asher’s Henry Hudson, shows the Straits of Anian, but nothing more. Another Hondius map in the Mercator of 1613 turns the coast easterly, where the Straits of Anian separate it from Asia. The same atlas of 1613 contains also the America of Michael Mercator, which is of the usual Gerard Mercator type, with the enclosed northern sea contracted to narrow limits and called “Mare dulce.” A similar western coast is drawn in the America of Johannes Oliva of Marseilles, preserved in the British Museum.[1361]
In Kasper van Baerle’s edition of Herrera, published at Amsterdam in 1622, we get—as far as has been observed—the earliest[1362] insularizing of the California peninsula, and this only by a narrow thread of water connecting a large gulf below and a smaller one above. And even this attempt was neutralized by a second map in the same book, in which these two gulfs were not made to mingle their waters. A bolder and less equivocal severing of the peninsula followed in the maps of two English geographers. The first of these is the map of Master Briggs.[1363] In this the island stretches from 23° to 44°, showing Cape Blanco, with Cape Mendocino and “Po. Sr. Francisco Draco” south of it, the latter in about 38°. The map bears the following legend: “California, sometymes supposed to be part of ye Westerne continent; but since by a Spanish charte taken by ye Hollanders it is found to be a goodly Ilande, the length of the west shoare beeing about 500 leagues from Cape Mendocino to the south cape thereof called Cape St. Lucas, as appeareth both by that Spanish Chart, and by the relation of Francis Gaule [Gali], whereas in the ordinarie charts it is sett downe to be 1700 leagues.”[1364] The other was that given in John Speed’s Prospect, which contains one of the maps of Abraham Goos of Amsterdam, “described and enlarged by I. S. Ano. 1626.” This carries up the outer coast of the island beyond the “Po[rto] Sir Francisco Dr[ake]” and Cape Mendocino. The coast of the main opposite the northern end of the island ceases to be defined, and is continued northerly with a dotted line, while the western shore of Hudson’s Bay is also left undetermined.[1365] De Laet, however, in 1630 still kept to the peninsula, placing “Nova Albion” above it.[1366] In 1636 W. Saltonstall’s English translation of Hondius’s Mercator presents an island, with the now somewhat common break in the main coast opposite its northern end. This gap is closed up, however, in another map in the same volume.[1367]
The map in Pierre D’Avity’s Le Monde[1368] makes California a peninsula, with the river St. Lawrence rising close to it, and flowing very near also to Hudson’s Bay in its easterly passage.
The circumstantial story of Bartolemé de Fonte, whose exploits are placed in 1640, at one time commanded a certain degree of confidence, and made strange work with the cartographical ideas of the upper part of the Pacific coast. It is now believed that the story was coined by James Petiver, one of the contributors to the Monthly Miscellany, or Memoirs for the Curious, published in London in April and June, 1708, in which first appeared what purported to be a translation of a letter of a certain Admiral De Fonte.[1369] In this a Spanish navigator—whose name was possibly suggested by a veritable De Fonta who was exploring Tierra del Fuego in 1649—was made to depart from Callao, April 3, 1640, and proceed up the coast to 53°, above which he navigated a net-work of interior waters, and encountered a ship from Boston which had entered these regions from the Atlantic side.[1370] To this archipelago, as it seemed, he gave the name of St. Lazarus; and to a river, leading from a lake with an island in it, he applied that of Velasco; and these names, curiously, appear in the fanciful maps which were made by Delisle and Buache in elucidation of the voyage in which they expressed not a little faith, though the Spanish antiquaries early declared that their archives contained no record of the voyage.[1371]
The Dutch, under De Vries, in 1643 had pushed up from Japan, and discovered, as they thought, an island, “Jesso,” separated from land on the west by a water which they called the “Detroit de Vries,” and on the American side by a channel which had an uncertain extension to the north, and might after all be the long-sought Straits of Anian.[1372] The idea of an interjacent land in the north Pacific between America and Asia is also said to have grown out of the report of a Portuguese navigator, Don João da Gama, who claimed to have seen such a land in sailing from China to New Spain. It long maintained a fleeting existence on the maps.[1373]
Two maps of Petrus Koerius, dated 1646, in Speed’s Prospect (1668), indicate what variable moods geographers could assume in the same year. In one we have an island and a determinate coast line running north to the straits; in the other we have a peninsula with two different trends of the coast north of it in half-shading. We owe to an expatriated Englishman a more precise nomenclature for the western coast than we had had previous to the appearance of his maps in 1646; and the original manuscript drawings preserved at Munich are said by Dr. Hale to be richer still in names.[1374] This is the Arcano del mare of Robert Dudley. He was born in Surrey in 1573, and whether the natural or legitimate son of the Earl of Leicester depends on the proof of the secret marriage of that nobleman with Lady Sheffield. An adventurous spirit kept him away from the enjoyment of Kenilworth, which he inherited, and he was drawn nearer to the associations of the sea by marrying a sister of Cavendish. He was among the many Englishmen who tried their daring on the Spanish main. He married a second wife, a daughter of Sir Thomas Leigh, whom he abandoned, partly to be rid of a stepmother; and out of chagrin at his failure to secure the dukedom of Northumberland, which had been in abeyance since the execution of his grandfather, Lady Jane Grey’s adherent, he sold Kenilworth to young Prince Henry, and left England in company with a daughter of Sir Robert Southwell. He now gave himself up to practical seamanship and the study of hydrography. The grand-duke of Tuscany gave him employment, and he drained a morass to enable Leghorn to become a beautiful city.
DUDLEY, 1646.