Selkirk, is verging rapidly towards its ruin. The system of the North-west Company, he says, is to obtain a great immediate return of furs, without any regard to its permanent continuance, and with this view a war of extermination is waged against all the valuable fur-bearing animals; the beaver, the most valuable of them, will, he tells us, in no long period of time, be nearly extirpated by the gigantic system of poaching carried on by the North-west Company. It may be so; though we confess our fears incline rather towards the extermination of the Indians, than of the 'furbearing animals;' the former are confessedly disappearing in a rapid progression, while the latter will, from that circumstance, as rapidly increase. The enumeration of one year's supply to the North-west Company, as given by Sir Alexander Mackenzie, will afford some estimate of the number and kind of animals annually destroyed. They are as follows:-Skins of the beaver, 106,000; the bear, 2,100; the fox, 5,500; the otter, 4,600; the musquash, 17,000; the marten, 32,000; the mink, 1800; the lynx, 6,000; the wolverine, 600; the fisher, 1,650; the raccoon, 100; the wolf, 3,800; the elk, 700; the deer 1,950. By doubling those numbers in order to take in the consumption of the native Indians, those lost and destroyed on the passage, and those exported by the Hudson's Bay Company, we shall perhaps come pretty nearly to the actual number destroyed every year; nor is there any thing very surprizing in this great slaughter, when we consider what quantities of game are consumed even in well peopled countries, without the smallest risk of extirpating the breed. The only remarkable fcature here is the vast multitudes of various animals to be found within the cold and apparently barren regions of the Arctic circle. Mous. Jeremie, once governor of Fort Bourbon, (now York,) says, that when the rein-deer are driven out of the thickets by the clouds of mosquitoes which, on the return of summer darken the air, they fly to the shores of Hudson's Bay, in herds of ten thousand, scouring across these bleak and naked plains, untrodden perhaps by ten human beings in the course of as many years. We learn from the same authority, fully corroborated by the testimony of travellers, that the flocks of geese and swans, of cranes, cormorants, bustards, pelicans and ducks are so numerous as to obscure the sky, and so noisy, in rising from the ground, as to deafen the byestauders. M. Jeremie, and his garrison of eighty men, caught and consumed, in one winter, ninety thousand white partridges, and twenty-five thousand hares. The rein-deer are the most numerous of the larger animals, but elks, bears, buffaloes, the musk ox and the moose deer are all abundant. Nor are the waters.less productive. The sea and the straits are amply stocked with the whale and the narwal, the grampus, the seal, and the sea-horse

the

the lakes and rivers with salmon, sturgeon, trout, pike, and carp; so successfully are animals enabled to struggle against every inconvenience of soil or climate, and to increase and multiply, and replenish the earth,' when undisturbed by the presence of man. As far however as the beaver is concerned, Lord Selkirk's apprehensions may not be unfounded. His haunts are known, and his habitation, constructed with such wonderful industry and skill, is easily discovered: most of the others have a retreat beyond the reach of man.

In taking leave of Lord Selkirk, we shall just observe, that his Sketch of the Fur Trade' is in no respect equal, as to information, to the History' of that trade, by Sir Alexander Mackenzie. Its character, indeed, is less that of a history, than of a Bill of Indictment against the North-west Company-an angry attack on the provincial administration of justice-and a panegyric on the Hudson's Bay Company. The points at issue between the conflicting parties are matters not for us to intermeddle with; we have no desire to prejudice or prejudge the case of either; but we cannot join in the praise ascribed to the Hudson's Bay Company, whose only merits (if they have any) are, at any rate, of the negative kind. Their total disregard of every object for which they obtained, and have now held, a Royal Charter for nearly one hundred and fifty years, entitles them to any thing but praise. The great leading feature on which their petition for an exclusive charter was grounded, the discovery of a North-west Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, has not only been totally neglected, but, unless they have been grossly calumniated, thwarted by every means in their power. The examination of the work, whose title stands at the head of this article, will lead to a few observations on their conduct in this respect.

The Spaniards cannot disavow the name of Maldonado, as they have done that of Fuente. It has been registered with applause by their most authentic bibliographers; and consecrated, as it were, by assigning to it the best port in their possessions on the east side of South America: nor can they deny the existence of the journal of such a voyage, as the one in question; having sent so recently as 1789, the corvettes la Discubierta et l'Atravida, under the orders of Malaspina, to examine the passages and inlets, which might be found to break the continuity of the line of coast of North-west America, between 53° and 60° of N. latitude; in order to discover the strait by which Laurent Ferrer Maldonado was supposed to have passed in 1588, from the coast of Labrador to the Great Ocean.' That this was the main object of the expedition appears from a letter of a friend of Malaspina, employed on the voyage, which was seen by Amo

retti, and which states that the journal of Maldonado was in the hands of the Duc de l'Infantado: the same circumstance is mentioned by the writer of the Introduction to the voyage of Le Sutil and Mexicana, published at Madrid in 1802, who says that the Commander of this expedition was furnished with a copy of it, taken from that of the Duc de l'Infantado.-It is sufficiently clear, therefore, that the Spaniards of the present day are disposed to believe that some such voyage was made: they have, in fact, very strong testimony concerning it. In the Bibliotheca Hispana of Nicolao Antonio, under the article 'Laurent Ferrer Maldonado,' we are told that he was well skilled in nautical matters and in geography; that he published a book entitled Imagen del Mundo, &c.-and that he (Nicolao Antonio) had seen in the hands of Masscareñas, bishop of Segovia, the manuscript of a Voyage, 'being the Relation of the Discovery of the Strait of Anian, made by the author in the year 1588.'* Antonio de Leon Pinelot also bears testimony to his talents as a navigator, and tells us, that he presented to the Council of the Indies (of which Pinelo was a member) two plans, one relating to rendering the magnetic needle not subject to variation, the other, to finding the longitude at sea. Now Pinelo, Antonio, the Bishop of Segovia, and Maldonado, were contemporaries; so that all doubt of the co-existence of such a person and such a manuscript is removed; and it is to be presumed that the members of the Consejo de las Indias' had the latter in their keeping, Mascareñas being a member and senator of that board. The question is, whether the manuscript, of which Amoretti has published the translation, in Italian, and afterwards in French, is the identical one mentioned by Antonio, and written by Maldonado?

He

The account which Amoretti gives of it is this: and we have always found so much good faith in the Italian publishers of voyages and travels, from Ramusio to the present time, that we are inclined to yield implicit credence to his story. says, that in examining the manuscripts of the Ambrosian library of Milan, of which he is librarian, with a view to publish (agreeably to the intention of its founder, the Cardinal Boromeo) such of them as should be found to contain new and instructive matter, his attention was arrested by a small volume written

Laurentius Ferrer Maldonado militiæ olim, &c.— Imagen del Mundo sobre la Esfera, Cosmografia, Geografia, y arte de Navigar, compluti apud Johannem Garsiam,

1626.'

'Relacion del Descubrimiento del Estrecho de Anian hecho por el Autor. Quam vidi M.S. apud D. Hieronymum Mascareñas regium ordinum militarium, deinde Concilia Portugalliæ Senatorem, Segoviensem nunc Antistitem. Expeditionem autem hang nauticam se fecisse anno 1588 autor ait.'-Bib. Hisp. tom. ii. p. 2.

+ Epitome de la Biblioteca Oriental y Occidental, Nautica y Geografica, Madrid.

VOL. XVI. NO. XXXI.

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in the Spanish language, and entitled 'A Relation of the Discovery. of the Strait of Anian by Captain Laurent Ferrer Maldonado, towards the end of the 16th century,' &c. At first he considered it only as a tale to amuse the curious; but on reading it with attention, he found it stamped so strongly with the character of authenticity and veracity, that he determined to translate it, and to add to it some notes and a treatise to prove the truth of the 'Relation;' and as M. de Humboldt and others had consigned it to the rank of geographical impostures, before they knew what it contained, he conceived himself called upon to justify the manuscript and his own researches, by giving to the world the present volume. He states fairly that he has not been able to trace, nor can he conjecture, how this manuscript had come into the possession of the founder of the Milan library; but the writing, he observes, is that of the end of the sixteenth, or beginning of the seventeenth century; and from the paper having on it le filigrane du Pèlerin,' a common mark on the paper of that period, he conjectures it was written at Milan; concluding from the frequent omissions and the faults in the orthography, that it must have been copied in haste. How far this document may be entitled to the character of 'veracity or authenticity' a brief examination will enable us to judge. The memoir, or 'Relation' as it is called, consists of thirty-five paragraphs.

The first eight are employed chiefly in enumerating the advantages that would result to Spain from the navigation to the Indies by the North-west passage; as the shortness of the voyage—the monopoly of the spice trade-the facility of sending troops to the colonies-and the opening of a new door for the conversion of pagans. To secure these advantages, the necessity is pointed out of Spain being the first to get possession of the Strait of Anian; and the king is reminded that, the year before, the English had sent some ships in search of it, all of which might just as well have been written by a clerk in the India Board of Madrid as by Maldonado. The last observation, however, is so far important that it determines the date of the memorial to be that of the voyage, the expedition of Davis in 1587 being that of the preceding year alluded to.

The ninth to the sixteenth inclusive contains general instructions for the navigation. They inform us, that by steering N.W. and running 450 leagues from Lisbon, the navigator will reach Friesland, anciently called Thyle, an island somewhat less than Iceland, lying in 60° N. latitude, and by continuing on that parallel 120 leagues, he will open the Strait of Labrador, 30 leagues in width; the land, on the left, low; on the right, mountainous; the latter forming two straits, one running to the N. E., the other to the N.W.-that to the north-west must be taken, and when the navi

gator

gator has run 80 leagues, he will find himself in 64°: from hence the strait takes a northerly direction, 120 leagues, to 72°, and then changes to the N. W. for 90 leagues, or to the 75th degree of latitude; the whole length of the Strait of Labrador being 240 leagues, (it should be 290). From the northern extremity of the Strait of Labrador, the course changes to S.W. W. through an open sea, 350 leagues, which will reduce the latitude to 71%, and here some high land will appear on the coast of America. The course then changes to W.S.W. for 440 leagues, when the navigator will find himself on the 60th parallel of latitude, and at. the entrance of the Strait of Anian. Maldonado then recapitulates the distances which he himself sailed, and which he states to be, from Spain to Friesland, 460 leagues; from thence to Labrador, 180; from thence through the Straits, 280; making 920; to which adding 790 across the sea, the total distance from Spain to the Strait of Anian is 1710 leagues.

Passing over the numerical blunders, we shall content ourselves. with two observations on this part of the 'Relation:' the first is, that he sails along the northern coast of Labrador, or through Hudson's Straits, 290 leagues, an intricate and perilous navigation,. through narrow passes so choked up with ice as frequently to make it nearly impracticable even in the summer months;--yet Maldonado clears the whole of them, up to the 75th degree of latitude, before the month of March; that is to say, when the sun at noon was about 18° high, and the day not five hours long.-The second observation is, that taking the courses and distances steered from the northern mouth of the Strait of Labrador, namely S.W. W. 350. leagues, and W.S.W. 440 leagues; the latitude at the end of the first would not be 71°, nor at the end of the second 60°; and that, with these courses and distances, the navigator, instead of arriv ing at the Strait of Anian, (now Behring's Strait,) would be astonished to find himself on the other side of the peninsula of Kamschatka, in the midst of the sea of Oskotsk, if the old Spanish league of 17 to the degree be reckoned; and 20 leagues to the degree would have carried him to the middle of the sea of Kamischatka.

The seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth paragraphs relate chiefly to the short days and cold weather in going, the long days. and warm weather in returning, the ease with which the Northern Ocean is navigated, and the error of those who suppose it to be. entirely frozen over: he had before adverted to the possibility of persons being surprized to hear him talk of navigating in so high a latitude; but, says he, the Hanseatics live in 72°, and we see every year, in their port of St. Michael, from 500 to 1000 ships, which must necessarily proceed to the parallel of 75° before they can pass thither from the Sea of Flanders.

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