The Spaniards, who were before long to be spurred on to other efforts by the reports of Russian expeditions, were reviving now, through the 1728 edition of Herrera, more confidence in the peninsular character of California; though Mota Padilla in his Nueva Galicia, in 1742, still thought it an island.
The French map-maker Bellin, in his cartographical illustrations for Charlevoix in 1743, also fell into the new belief; as did Consag the Jesuit, in a map which he made in 1746.[1395]
The leading English geographer Bowen in 1747 was advocating the same view, and defining the more northerly parts as “undiscovered.” In 1748 Henry Ellis published his Voyage to Hudson’s Bay,—made in 1746-1747, and mentions a story that a high or low tide made California an island or a peninsula, and was inclined to believe in a practicable northwest passage.[1396] In 1750 Robert de Vaugondy, while preserving the peninsula, made a westerly entrance to the north of it, which he marks as the discovery of Martin d’Aguilar. The lingering suspicion of the northerly connection of the California Gulf with the ocean had now nearly vanished; and the peninsula which had been an island under Cortés, then for near a century connected with the main, and then again for more than a century in many minds an island again, was at last defined in its proper geographical relations.[1397]
The coast line long remained, however, shadowy in the higher latitudes. Buriel, in his editorial notes to Venegas’s California, in 1757, confessed that nothing was known. The French geographers, the younger Delisle and Buache,[1398] published at this time various solutions of the problem of straits and interior seas, associated with the claims of Maldonado, De Fuca, and De Fonte; and others were found to adopt, while others rejected, some of their very fanciful reconciling of conflicting and visionary evidences, in which the “Mer de l’ouest” holds a conspicuous position.[1399] The English map-maker Jefferys at the same epoch (1753) was far less complex in his supposition, and confined himself to a single “river which connects with Lake Winnepeg.” A map of 1760, “par les Srs Sanson, rectifiée par Sr Robert,” also indicates a like westerly entrance; and Jefferys again in 1762, while he grows a little more determinate in coast lines, more explicitly fixes the passage as one that Juan de Fuca had entered in 1592.[1400] The Atlas Moderne, which was published at Paris, also in 1762, in more than one map, the work of Janvier, still clung to the varieties presented by Delisle ten years before, and which Delisle himself the next year (1763) again brought forward. In 1768 Jefferys made a map[1401] to illustrate the De Fonte narrative; but after 1775 he made several studies of the coast, and among other services reproduced the map which the Russian Academy had published, and which was a somewhat cautious draught of bits of the coast line here and there, indicating different landfalls, with a dotted connection between them.[1402] One of Jefferys’s own maps (1775) carries the coast north with indications of entrances, but without attempting to connect them with any interior water-sheds. Going north from New Albion we then find on his map the passage of D’Aguilar in 1603; then that of De Fuca, “where in 1592 he pretends he went through to the North Sea;” then the “Fousang” coast, visited by the Spaniards in 1774; then Delisle’s landfall in 1741; Behring’s the same year; while the coast stops at Mount St. Elias. In his 1776 map Jefferys gives another scheme. “Alaschka” is now an island athwart the water, dividing America from Asia, with Behring’s Straits at its western end; while the American main is made up of what was seen by Spangenberg in 1728, with a general northeasterly trend higher up, laid down according to the Japanese reports. The Spaniards were also at this time pushing up among the islands beyond the Oregon coast.[1403] In 1774 Don Juan Perez went to Nootka Sound, as is supposed, and called it San Lorenzo.[1404] In 1775 another Spanish expedition discovered the Columbia River.[1405] Janvier in 1782 published a map[1406] still perpetuating the great sea of the west, which Buache and others had delineated thirty years before. The English in 1776 transferred their endeavors from Hudson’s Bay to the Pacific coast, and Captain James Cook was despatched to strike the coast in the latitude of Drake’s New Albion, and proceed north in search of a passage eastward.[1407] Carver the traveller had already, in 1766-1768, got certain notions of the coast from Indian stories, as he heard them in the interior, and embodied them with current beliefs in a map of his own, which made a part of his Travels through the interior parts of North America, published in 1778. In this he fixed the name of Oregon for the supposed great river of the west, which remained in the end attached to the region which it was believed to water.[1408] In 1786 the Frenchman La Pérouse was on the coast.[1409] In 1789 the English and Spanish meeting on the coast, the English commander was seized. This action led to a diplomatic fence, the result of which was the surrender of Nootka to the English.
Meanwhile a Boston ship, the “Columbia,” commanded by Captain Kendrick, in company with the “Washington” (Captain Gray), was on a voyage, which was the first American attempt to sail around the globe.[1410] They entered and named the Columbia River; and meeting Vancouver, the intelligence was communicated to him. When the English commander occupied Nootka, the last vestige of uncertainty regarding the salient features of the coast may be said to have disappeared under his surveys. Before they were published, George Foster issued in 1791 his map of the northwest coast, in which the Straits of Juan de Fuca were placed below 40°, by which Captain Gray is supposed to have entered, on his way to an open sea, coming out again in 55°, through what we now know as the Dixon entrance, to the north of Queen Charlotte’s Island; the American navigator having threaded, as was supposed, a great northern archipelago. Vancouver’s own map finally cleared the remaining confusion, and the migratory Straits of Juan de Fuca were at last fixed as the channel south of Vancouver’s Island which led to Puget Sound.[1411]
NOTES.
Mercator’s Projection.—It was no new thing to convert the spherical representation of the earth into a plane on the cylindrical principle, for it had been done in the fourteenth century; but no one had devised any method by which it could be used for a sea-chart, since the parallelizing of the meridians altered the direction of point from point. Mercator seems to have reasoned out a plan in this wise: A B and C D are two meridians drawing together as they approach the pole. If they are made parallel, as in E F and G H, the point 2 is moved to 3, which is in a different direction from 1, in the parallel of latitude, I J. If the line of direction from 1 to 2 is prolonged till it strikes the perpendicular meridian G H at 4, the original direction is preserved, and the parallel K L can then be moved to become M N; thus prolonging the distance from 1 to 5, and from 6 to 4, to counteract the effect on direction by perpendicularizing the meridians. To do this accurately involved a law which could be applicable to all parallels and meridians; and that law Mercator seems only to have reached approximately. But the idea once conveyed, it was seized by Edward Wright in England in 1590, who evolved the law, and published it with a map, the first engraved on the new system, in his Certain Errors of Navigation, London, 1599. Mead, in his Construction of Maps (1717), examined all previous systems of projections; but contended that Varenius in Latin, and his follower Newton in English, had not done the subject justice. There have been some national controversies over the claims of the German Mercator and the English Wright; but D’Avezac, in his “Coup d’Œil historique sur la projection des cartes de géographie,” printed in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 1863 (also separately), defends Mercator’s claims to be considered the originator of the projection; and he (pp. 283-285) gives references to writers on the subject, who are also noted in Van Raemdonck’s Mercator, p. 120.
The claim which Van Raemdonck had made in his Gérard Mercator, sa vie et ses œuvres,—that the great geographer was a Fleming,—was controverted by Dr. Breusing in his Gerhard Kremer, gen. Mercator, der Deutsche Geograph, 1869, and in an article (supposed to be his) in the Mittheilungen aus Justus Perthes’ Geographischer Anstalt, 1869, vol. xi. p. 438, where the German birth of Mercator is contended for. To this Van Raemdonck replied in his Gérard de Cremer, ou Mercator, Géographe Flamand, published at St. Nicholas in 1870. The controversy rose from the project, in 1869, to erect a monument to Mercator at Duisburg. Cf. also Bertrand in the Journal des Savants, February, 1870.