Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 71

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 ship, 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 ship 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 ships, 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.

[Sidenote: Sir Humphrey Gilbert.]

For eighty years England might have rested her claim to North America on the discoveries of the Cabots; but Queen Elizabeth first gave prominence to these pretensions when she granted to Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1578 the right to make a settlement somewhere in these more northerly regions. Gilbert's first voyage accomplished nothing, and there was an interdict to prevent a second, since England might have use for daring seamen nearer home. "First," says Robert Hues, "Sir Humphrey Gilbert, with great courage and forces, attempted to make discovery of those parts of America which were yet unknown to the Spaniards; but the success was not answerable." The effort was not renewed till 1583, when Gilbert took possession of Newfoundland and attempted to make settlements farther south; but disaster followed him, and his ship foundered off the Azores on his return voyage.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GILBERT'S MAP, 1576.]

[Sidenote: Sir Walter Ralegh.]

It was at this time that Sir Walter Ralegh came into prominence in pushing English colonization in America. He had been a.s.sociated with his half-brother, Gilbert, in the earlier movements, but now he was alone.

In 1584 he got his new charter, partly by reason of the urgency of Hakluyt in his _Westerne Planting_. Ralegh had his eye upon a more southern coast than Gilbert had aimed for,--upon one better fitted to develop self-dependent colonization. He knew that north of what was called Florida the Spaniards had but scantily tracked the country, and that they probably maintained no settlements. Therefore to reach a region somewhere south of the Chesapeake was the aim of the first company sent out under Ralegh's inspiration. These adventurers made their landfall where they could find no good inlet, and so sailed north, searching, until at last they reached the sounds on the North Carolina coast, and tarried awhile. Satisfied with the quality of the country, they returned to England; and their recitals so pleased Ralegh and the Queen that the country was named Virginia, and preparations were made to dispatch a colony. It went the next year, but its history is of no farther importance to our present purpose than that it marks the commencement of English colonization, disastrous though it was, on the North American continent, and the beginning of detailed English cartography of its coast, in the map, already referred to, which seems to open a pa.s.sage, somewhere near Port Royal, to an interior sea.

[Sidenote: 1585-86. John Davis.]

In 1585-86 John Davis had been buffeting among the icebergs of Greenland and the north in hopes to find a pa.s.sage by the northwest; on June 30, 1587, he reached 72 12' on the Greenland coast, and discovered the strait known by his name, and in 1595 when he published his _World's Hydrographical Description_, he maintained that he had touched the threshold of the northwest pa.s.sage. He tells us that the globe of Molineaux shows how far he went.

[Sidenote: English seamanship.]

Seamanship owes more to Davis than to any other Englishman. In 1590, or thereabout, he improved the cross-staff, and giving somewhat more of complexity to it, he produced the back-staff. This instrument gave the observer the opportunity of avoiding the glare of the sun, since it was used with his back to that luminary; and when Flamsteed, the first astronomer royal at Greenwich, used a gla.s.s lens to throw reflected light, the first approach to the great principle of taking angles by reflection was made, which was later, in 1731, to be carried to a practical result in Hadley's quadrant.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BACK-STAFF.]

The art of finding longitude was still in an uncertain state. Gemma Frisius, as we have noted, had as early as 1530 divined the method of carrying time by a watch; but it was not till 1726 that anything really practicable came of it, in a timekeeper constructed by Harrison. This watch was continually improved by him up to 1761, when the method of ascertaining longitude by chronometer became well established; and a few years later (1767) the first nautical almanac was published, affording a reasonably good guide in lunar distances, as a means in the computations of longitude.

[Sidenote: 1676.]

In 1676 the Greenwich observatory had been founded to attempt the rectification of lunar tables, then so erroneous that the calculations for longitude were still uncertain. In 1701 Edmund Halley had published his great variation charts. These dates will fix in the reader's mind the advance of scientific skill as applied to navigation and discovery.

It will be well also to remember that in 1594 Davis published his _Seaman's Secrets_, the first manual in the English tongue, written by a practical sailor, in which the principles of great circle sailing were explained.

[Sidenote: 1583-84. Earliest marine atlas.]

[Sidenote: 1592. Dutch West India Company.]

[Sidenote: 1598.]

The first marine atlas had been printed at Leyden in 1583-84; but the Dutch had not at that time taken any active part in the development of discovery in the New World. Their longing for a share in it, mated with a certain hostile intention towards the Spaniards, instigated the formation of the West India Company, which had first been conceived in the mind of William Usselinx in 1592, though it was not put into execution till twenty-five years later. It was claimed by the Dutch that in 1598 the ships of their Greenland Company had discovered the Hudson River, though there can be little doubt that the French, Spanish, and perhaps English had been there much earlier. It is also claimed that the straits shown in Lok's map in 1582 had instigated Heinrich Hudson to his later search. But the truth in all these questions which involve national rights is very much perplexed with claim and counter-claim, invention and perversion, in which historical data are at the beck of political objects.

[Sidenote: 1598. The Dutch on the North American coasts.]

[Sidenote: The English.]

By the end of the sixteenth century the Dutch began to appear on the coasts of the Middle and New England States, and the cartography of those regions developed rapidly under their observation; but it was through the boating explorations of Captain John Smith in 1614 that it took a shape nearer the truth. It is to him that the northerly parts owe the name of New England, which Prince Charles confirmed for it. The reports from Hudson, May, and others instigated a plan marked out in 1618, but not directly ordered by the States General till 1621, which led to the Dutch occupation of Manhattan and the neighboring regions, introducing more strongly than before a Dutch element into the maps.

[Sidenote: The English leaders in maritime discovery.]