The dullest sea-boat soon shall wing her way. At our antipodes are cities, states, And thronged empires, ne'er divined of yore. To glad the nations with expected light." Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella. No doubt other fragments of the historic thread are yet to be found, and, though broken and tangled, they will lead along from the Nile to Palos, and so across over the sunken Atlantis. But down into the days of the Great Admiral, the Western world has its secret of existence in its own keeping. The mariner's compass, "navigation's soul," had had rude construction and awkward use for two hundred years or so, but could not divine land three thousand miles away; while the steamer, the telegraph, and the telephone that was to whisper the secrets of the world, were waiting three or four centuries down the future. There was no printingpress with mail-pouches, to record and treasure and scatter all abroad the philosophy and theories and facts of scholarly navigators. Can the world's puzzle in geography be solved? Not yet. But this world can keep no secrets. Venus confesses, centuries in advance, when she will proceed to make her transit. An old mastodon, unearthed from a New Jersey bog, confesses, through a microscope, that he breakfasted on cedar browse the day he died, seven thousand years before, more or less. Ancient Babylon has reluctantly surrendered to us her stone ledgers, showing the stock prices at her brokers' board, when Nebuchadnezzar went down her Wall Street to see the Assyrian and Chaldæan "bulls" and "bears." Daring and science can serve subpoenas on all witnesses, and they must appear on the stand. Ages and distances, heights and depths, are no longer barriers, but ladders and steppingstones, to inquisitive people. Finally America must confess to her existence; but when? The horizon is only a pretending cover, and lifts and moves on for those boldly approaching, and Columbus leaves Palos, with the question of Egypt, already on human lips twenty-two hundred years: Is there another continent? That question how many on the coast of Europe all the way from North Cape to Gibraltar, have sent out westward over the dark, mysterious Atlantic. The Great Admiral carries the question and demands its answer. The horizon lifts and moves on, while the new lands stand and confess. The answer is partial, equivocal and ambiguous. An island is discov ered, the puzzle is half solved in an archipelago, and Columbus dies without knowing that the continent beyond Atlantis still holds its secret in its own keeping. Even the American birds conspired against him to foil his purpose, and when his prows were well on to the Virginia coasts, they lured him off to a little island, and then hurried him back to the Old World. So the prophetic inklings of the Egyptian, and of the Greeks, Plato and Strabo, end in an archipelago. The latter had written thus in his eighty-fourth year-probably the year when our Lord entered on his public ministry: "There may be in the same temperate zone two, and indeed more inhabited lands, especially nearest the parallel of Thinæ [or Athens] prolonged into the Atlantic Ocean." + From the date of the great discovery of Columbus the puzzle evades solution by shifting the question. The problem henceforth is for a passage through the American archipelago to the East Indies. America had adroitly avoided entrance on an atlas of the world as a continent, but gave forced consent to the pseudonym of archipelago. It is the amusement of the antiquary to trace the struggle of navigators, merchants and kings to sail a vessel overland from our eastern to our western coast; and the history of the struggle, that shows in details how it was not done, is a most thrilling romance of facts, showing how nautical scholarship and commercial energy and kingly ambitions made continuous and total mistakes and failures for three hundred years. It must be sufficient for us at this time to illustrate by scattered cases, somewhat chronologically arranged, how European energy in discovery and trade expended itself in seeking that ship passage through the islands, which composed America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. When Cabot, Sebastian, the son, visited the continent, in 1497, he had more regret that he did not pass through to China, than satisfaction that he, first of English navigators, sighted the coast from Nova Scotia to the Carolinas. He considered his voyage a failure, because he was braving those unknown seas "ever with the intent to find said passage to India." The same ambition and end ruled Cortez, as he confesses to his king, Charles V.: "Being well aware of the great desire of your Majesty to know concerning the supposed Strait, and of the great advantage the Crown would derive from its discovery, I have laid aside all other schemes more obvious, tending to promote my interests, in order to pursue this object alone." On the literary side, the Reverend Richard Hakluyt did *Humboldt's Kosmos. Vol. II., pp. 516, 556-557, 645. Lib. I., p 65; Lib. II., p. 118. Cortez' Dispatches, p. 419. Oct. 15, 1524. much to stimulate the search for this inland passage. He made a compilation of Divers Voyages to America, which much promoted enterprises in that line. Speaking of the settlement of Virginia, Roberst son says, in his History of America: "The most active and efficacious promoter of this was Richard Hakluyt, prebendary of Westminster, to whom England is more indebted for its American possessions than to any man of that age.” Hakluyt himself confesses to his own untiring industry and irrepressible ardor to stimulate England to this by his publications. In the preface to his General Collection of Voyages, he makes a noble declaration to his scholarly labors in this line. We fear his sermons must have had a marine sameness about Noah in the Ark, and Jonah somewhere else, and St. Paul in Adria. He quotes authority that the Pacific has been discovered in back of Montreal. He quotes an exhortation of one Robert Thorne to Henry VIII., on this wise: "With a small number of shippes there may bee discouered diuers newe landes & kingdomes, in the whiche, without doubt, Your Grace shall winne perpetuall glory, and your subiects infinite profite. To which places there is left one way to discouer, which is into the North. . . And in mine opinione, it will not seeme well to leauve so great & profitable an enterprise. Seeing it may so easily, & with so little coste, labour and danger bee followed & obteined." In his "Epistle Dedicatorie" of his book to Sir Philip Sidney, this quaint old author and enthusiast on the West thus writes: "I maruaile not a little, Right Worshipfull, that since the first discouerie of America, which is nowe full four score & tenne yeeres, after so great conquests & plantings of the Spaniardes & Portingales, that wee of Englende could neuer have the grace to set fast footing in such fertile & temperate places as are left us vnpossessed of them." At this time there was but one book in English on maritime discoveries-Eden's Historie of Travayle -but Hakluyt soon remedied the defect. He made an epitome of researches for the northwestern passage down to 1582, and also gave, in his Letter Dedicatorie to Sir Philip Sidney, eight reasons for believing that there is one. In 1584 he published a Discourse on Western Planting, apparently to draw Elizabeth into the grand work, who husbanded, at least, her resources. Eight years before Frobisher had led off, first among Englishmen, in trying this continuous puzzle, and recorded his name and failure on the straits that bear his name. He had also made another famous record when he said that the discovery of that hidden passage was "the only thing of the world that was yet left undone, by which a notable mind might be made famous and fortunate." He finds room in his Voyages for this note from Sebastian Cabot: It seemeth that God doth yet still reserue the great enterprise for some great Prince to discouer this voyage of Cathaio by this way." Certain old maps greatly affected Hakluyt, whose blunders, now so laughable, did much to lead him on and kindle enthusiasm, showing that ignorance is quite a schoolmaster. "A great olde round carde," shown to him by the King of Portugal, located the strait of his desires in latitude fifty-seven on the Labrador coast. Another "mightie large old map in parchment showed him in latitude forty the Atlantic and Pacific close together, with only a strip of land between, "much like the streyte neck or isthmus of Darienna." An old globe belonging to Elizabeth had this isthmus extended on it, "with the sea joynninge hard on both sides as it doth on Panama." Contemporary and sympathetic with Hakluyt was Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who published a work in 1576, to show "that there is a passage on the north side of America to go to Cataia, China, and to the East Indies." He had the boldness of his convictions and the blindness of his age, for he founded a short-lived colony in Newfoundland, and perished himself in the excursion. Of course, we are ready to see these theories put to romantic use in any colony planted in America, and they furnish lively illustrations. Fooled by the Indians, Lane, Raleigh's first governor, went up the Roanoke to see the fountain-spring from which it issues, and so near to the Pacific, that in heavy storms the salt spray breaks over and makes the river brackish. It was a long chase and hunt for the ocean and the gold that lined its shores, but even the dog-meat diet to which the party was reduced did not break the delusion, and a map sent back to Europe, and now in the British Museum, shows the river Roanoke as an estuary running back into a connection with the Pacific Ocean. Captain Newport, of the Jamestown colony, pushed up the James with a strong force as far as Richmond, looking for the Pacific, and it was one of the sham charges against Captain Smith that he had not, in accordance with the sealed instructions of the council, gone up the Chickahominy, to sec if it did not connect with the Pacific. He went, but his most important discovery was the redoubted Powhatan and his romantic Pocahontas. The delusion of an archipelago was well sustained, and the continent of Geoffrey "beyond the realms of Gaul" played hide and seek with the navigators and map-makers for three hundred years. The Egyptian puzzle was varied to a labyrinthine hunt for the Straits of Anian-the northwest passage-the game and the chase steadily working toward and into the Arctic. Ariadne would have been perplexed to spin and draw her spider-thread through all the mazy channels of ice and storm and arctic night, up which bold men went to die. The jolly gods must have had lively times all to themselves, while they looked on for a century or two to see the naval officers of the world, weighty with knowledge and dignity, and decorations of knightly orders, struggling to sail a frigate from the Chickahominy over the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, and by it, and through its head-waters, into the Pacific. Or to see them laying their course from the Great Lakes, through prairies and wheat-fields and ice-fields to the Western Sea, and thence to "Cataia, China, and to the East Indies" of Sir Humphrey Gilbert. We will make long historic steps with a few facts till we come down to the solution of the world's puzzle. In 1673, one Peche, an English buccaneer, pretended that he found this Strait of Anian somewhere north of Japan, and but for head winds could have sailed through to the St. Lawrence or some other eastern waters. Jonathan Carver, hardened up in the French war for such toils, started from Boston, 1766, on a three years' tour to the heads of the Mississippi. His plan was to establish military posts "in some of those parts about the Straits of Annian "-much to the westward. On the map of Ogilby's America, London, 1671, the Strait of Anian is Behring's Strait. "This I am convinced" (Carver) "would greatly facilitate the discovery of a northwest passage, or a communication between Hudson's Bay and the Pacific Ocean." His Three Years' Travels through the Interior Parts of North America, looking up ship channels, is interesting reading now on those ocean-like prairies. His heirs have lately produced a document of doubtful appearance, and on it lay claim to the territory around the Falls of St. Anthony, as conveyed to him by the Indians. The paper certainly bears some very savage signatures. Lieutenant Zebulon M. Pike, whose name justly stands so high on the mountains of this continent, made a more creditable purchase in the same region. "They gave me the land required, about 100,000 acres, equal to $200,000. [Government land then sold for $2 per acre.] . . . I gave them presents to the amount of about $200, and, as soon as the council was over, I allowed the traders to present them with some liquor, which, with what I myself gave, was equal to sixty gallons. You will perceive that we have obtained about 100,000 acres for a song." Ten years after Carver started out, the English admiralty instructed Cook, 1776, to run up the northwest coast, past the sixty-fifth degree of latitude, and thence, coasting, to search for " such rivers or inlets as might appear to be of considerable extent, and pointing towards Hudson's or Baffin's Bays. He was not to commence search south of sixty-five, since I |