I was impatient to continue my journey. I had not come to see the Americans, but something quite different from the men I knew, something more in harmony with the habitual order of my ideas; I burned to throw myself into an enterprise for which I had nothing prepared except my imagination and my courage.
At the time when I formed the project of discovering the North-West Passage, it was not known whether North America extended towards the Pole and joined Greenland, or whether it terminated in some sea adjoining Hudson's Bay and Behring's Straits. In 1772, Hearne had discovered the sea at the mouth of the Copper Mine River in latitude 71° 15' N. and longitude 119° 15' W. of Greenwich[469].
On the Pacific coast, the efforts of Captain Cook and subsequent travellers had left doubts. In 1787, a vessel was said to have entered an inland sea of North America; according to the story told by the captain of this ship, all that had been taken for uninterrupted coast to the north of California consisted merely of a closely-knit chain of islands. The British Admiralty sent Vancouver[470] to verify these reports, which proved to be false. Vancouver had not yet made his second voyage.
Arctic exploration.
In 1791, people in the United States were beginning to discuss the road taken by Mackenzie: starting from Fort Chippeway on Mountains Lake[471], 3 June 1789, he descended to the Arctic Ocean by the river to which he gave his name.
This discovery might have changed my direction and caused me to take my route due north; but I should have scrupled to alter the plans agreed upon between M. de Malesherbes and myself. I proposed, therefore, to travel westwards, so as to strike the north-west coast above the Gulf of California; from there, following the outline of the continent, and always keeping the sea in sight, I intended to explore Behring's Straits, double the northernmost cape of America, descend on the east along the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and return to the United States by way of Hudson's Bay, Labrador, and Canada.
What means had I to carry out this prodigious peregrination? None at all. Most of the French travellers have been isolated men, left entirely to their own resources; it is but rarely that the government or any company has employed or assisted them. Englishmen, Americans, Germans, Spaniards, Portuguese, thanks to the concurrence of the national volition, have accomplished the things which, with us, destitute individuals have begun in vain. Mackenzie and many others after him have, to the profit of the United States and Great Britain, made conquests upon the immensity of America, with which I had dreamed of aggrandizing my native land. In case of success, I should have had the honour of bestowing French names upon unknown regions, of endowing my country with a colony upon the Pacific Ocean, of taking away the rich fur-trade from a rival Power, and of preventing that Power from opening out a shorter road to the Indies, by placing France herself in possession of that road. I have stated these projects in the Essai historique, published in London in 1796, and these projects were taken from the manuscript of my Travels written in 1791. These dates prove that I was ahead, both in thought and work, of the latest explorers of the Arctic ice-fields.
I received no encouragement in Philadelphia. I foresaw from then that the object of this first journey would be missed, and that my expedition would be but the precursor of a second and longer journey. I wrote in this sense to M. de Malesherbes, and while looking forward to the future, I promised to poetry what should be lost to science. In fact, if I did not find in America what I had come to seek, the Arctic world, I did find there a new muse.
A stage-coach, similar to that which brought me from Baltimore, took me from Philadelphia to New York, a gay, populous, commercial town, which was nevertheless far from being what it is today, far from what it will be in a few years; for the United States grow faster than does this manuscript. I made a pilgrimage to Boston to salute the first battlefield of American liberty. I saw the plains of Lexington; I there sought, as I since sought at Sparta, the tomb of the warriors who died "in obedience to the sacred laws of their country[472]." A noteworthy instance of the concatenation of human affairs: a finance bill passed by the English Parliament in 1765 erects a new empire upon the earth in 1782, and causes one of the oldest kingdoms of Europe to disappear from the world in 1789!
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