Part 71 (1/2)

He congratulated himself on having found the long-desired strait, when, naming it for himself, he returned to England. Frobisher attempted to add to these earlier discoveries by a voyage the next year, 1577, but he made exploration secondary to mining for gold, and not much was done. A third voyage in 1578 brought him into Hudson's Straits, which he entered with the hope of finding it the channel to Cathay. But in all his voyages Frobisher only crossed the threshold of the arctic north.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ORTELIUS, 1570.]

[Sidenote: The Zeni influence.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SEBASTIAN CABOT.]

It was one of the results of Frobisher's voyages that they served to implant in the minds of the cartographers of the northern waters the notions of the Zeni geography, and aided to give those notions a new lease of favor. It is conjectured that Frobisher had the Zeni map with him, or its counterpart in one of the recent Ptolemies. This map had placed the point of Greenland under 66 instead of 61, and under the last lat.i.tude this map had shown the southern coast of its insular Frisland. Therefore, when Frobisher saw land under 61, which was in fact Greenland, he supposed it to be Frisland, and thus the maps after him became confused. A like mischance befell Davis, a little later. When this navigator found Greenland in 61, he supposed it an island south of Greenland, which he called ”Desolation,” and the fancy grew up that Frobisher's route must have gone north of this island and between it and Greenland, and so we have in later maps this other misplacement of discoveries.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROBISHER.]

[Sidenote: 1577. Francis Drake.]

While Frobisher was absent, Drake developed his great scheme of following in the southerly track of Magellan.

[Sidenote: Drake sees Cape Horn.]

Four years before (1573), being at Panama, he had seen from a treetop the great Pacific, and had resolved to be the first of the English to furrow its depths. In 1577, starting on his great voyage of circ.u.mnavigation, he soon added a new stretch of the Pacific coast to the better knowledge of the world. When he returned to England, he proved to be the first commander who had taken his s.h.i.+p, the ”Pelican,”

later called the ”Golden Hind” wholly round the globe, for Magellan had died on the way. Pa.s.sing through Magellan's Strait and entering the Pacific, Drake's s.h.i.+p was separated from its companions and driven south. It was then he saw the Cape Horn of a later Dutch navigator, and proved the non-existence of that neighboring antarctic continent, which was still persistently to cling to the maps. Bereft of his other s.h.i.+ps, which the storm had driven apart, Drake, during the early months of 1579, made havoc among the Spanish galleons which were on the South American coasts.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROBISHER, 1578.]

In March, 1579, surfeited with plunder, he started north from the coast of Mexico, to find a pa.s.sage to the Atlantic in the upper lat.i.tudes.

[Sidenote: In the north Pacific.]

In June he had reached 42 north, though some have supposed that he went several degrees higher. He had met, however, a rigorous season, and his ropes crackled with the ice. The change was such a contrast to the allurements of his experiences farther to the south that he gave up his search for the strait that would carry him, as he had hoped, to the Atlantic, and, turning south, he reached a bay somewhere in the neighborhood of San Francisco, where he tarried for a while. Having placed the name of New Albion on the upper California coast, and fearing to run the hazards of the southern seas, where his plundering had made the Spaniards alert, he sailed westerly, and, rounding the Cape of Good Hope, reached England in due time, and was acknowledged to be the earliest of English circ.u.mnavigators.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FRANCIS DRAKE.]

It is one of the results of Drake's explorations in 1579-80 that we get in subsequent maps a more northerly trend to the California coast.

[Sidenote: Confusion in the Pacific coast cartography.]

Shortly after this, a great confusion in the maps of this Pacific region came in. From what it arose is not very apparent, except that absence of direct knowledge in geography opens a wide field for discursiveness. The Michael Lok map of 1582 indicates this uncertainty. It seemed to be the notion that the Arctic Sea was one and the same with that of Verrazano; also, that it came down to about the lat.i.tude of Puget Sound, and that the Gulf of California stretched nearly up to meet it.

[Sidenote: Francisco Gali.]

[Sidenote: Proves the great width of the Pacific.]

Francisco Gali, a Spanish commander, returning to Acapulco from China in 1583, tried the experiment of steering northward to about 38, when he turned west and sighted the American coast in that lat.i.tude. At this point he steered south, and showed the practicability of following this circuitous route with less time than was required to buffet the easterly trades by a direct eastern pa.s.sage. His experiment established one other fact, namely, the great width of water separating the two continents in those upper lat.i.tudes; for he had found it to be 1200 leagues across instead of there being a narrow strait, as the theorizing geographers had supposed. Gali seems also to have shown that the distance south from Cape Mendocino to the point of the California peninsula was not more than half as great as the maps had made it. His voyage was a significant source of enlightenment to the cartographers.

[Sidenote: Eastern coast of North America.]

[Sidenote: 1579. The English on the coast.]

To return to the eastern coasts, an English vessel under Simon Ferdinando spent a short season in 1579 somewhere about the Gulf of Maine, and was followed the next year by another under John Walker, and in 1593 by still a third under Richard Strong.