The north cape, round which ships' must necessarily proceed' in order to pass into the White Sea, is in latitude 71° 10' and is usually passed in 72° and from that to 73° instead of 75°, and the port of St. Michael is in 643. These little mistakes could scarcely have been made by Maldonado, who was well skilled in the art of havigation,' and who had written a treatise on geography. The port, besides, in 1558, was named St. Nicholas, and the town Kholmogar; it then consisted of nine houses; and the trade, almost wholly English, was carried ou in nine ships. In 1637 the town was burned down, and on being re-built it took the name of Archangel, from an adjoining monastery dedicated to the Archangel Michael:-circumstances which lead us to suspect that the 'Relation' was written about the middle of the seventeenth, instead of the end of the sixteenth century.

The twentieth to the thirty-second paragraph inclusive contains a topographical description of the celebrated strait of Anian, and the adjoining coasts of Asia and America, which, Maldonado is pleased to inform the king of Spain, are separated by it. To ascertain its relative position, the author takes a cruise of fifteen days; sailing S. W. one hundred leagues along the coast of America, he was then in the latitude of 55°; but on the whole of this coast he saw no traces of population. Now it so happens, that, from his port in Anian, which he repeatedly tells us is situated in 60°, a S. W. course for one hundred leagues could not, as every common seaman could tell this skilful navigator,' bring him into Latitude 55°, nor permit him to see any part of the coast of Ame rica; its direction, instead of S. W. being rather to the Eastward of South. From the parallel of 55° however, he steers directly east 120 leagues, which would have brought him, in fact, to the very middle of the sea of Kamschatka; instead of which he found himself so near to the coast of a mountainous continent, that in many places he could see the natives; and on this he sagaciously observes, that, according to correct cosmography, he judged that the land belonged to Tartary or Catai, and that the great city of Cambalu (Pekin) was only a few leagues distant.'

Such gross blunders in plain sailing and geography could not possibly be committed by one skilled in navigation:'-but we proceed to his topography of the Strait, and his description of the port at its southern extremity. He says, that on the coast' of America, at the mouth of the strait which opens into the South Sea, there is a port capable of containing 500 vessels;that no human foot had trodden its shores, as would appear from a pond, on whose margin lay an infinite quantity of egg-shells of sea-fowls, which formed a kind of wall or dyke above a para (3 feet) high, and eight paces broad. A river fell into the harbour,

bour, into which a vessel of 500 tons might enter. The surrounding country was delightful to behold, consisting of plains of great extent, capable of tillage; the air soft and agreeable; and the mildness of the winter apparent from the excellent fruits found dried on the trees, and remaining on them from the preceding year. Birds, beasts and fishes abounded in this fine climate under the 60th parallel, in which nature would seem to have forgotten nothing but man; for none appeared during their stay.

We did not expect to find Cook called upon to support this description of Maldonado; yet so it is. Amoretti is so much prepossessed in favour of the veracity and the authenticity' of the Relation,' that he traces the most perfect accordance between the two navigators. No two descriptions however can be more at variance. Instead of any port, bay, or inlet, under the parallel of 60°, Cook found a straight coast; and a low point, to which he gave the name of Shoal-ness, occupies the place of Maldonado's harbour: the country perfectly naked, producing neither tree nor shrub; but no less than twenty-seven canoes came off from the very spot, each having a man in it. man in it. According to Cook, Behring's Strait is about sixty leagues long, and fourteen wide, in the narrowest part; the strait of Anian, in Maldonado, is fifteen leagues long, at the northern extremity not quite half an English mile wide, and at the southern about a quarter of a league, in the middle of which is a great rock or islet; so that, he observes, the whole strait is capable of being defended with a chain, provided one could be made strong enough; but at all events two sentinels on the northern part, and three on the southern, one on each continent, and one on the islet, could give immediate notice by signals of the approach of ships either from the Northern or the Pacific Ocean.

This description somewhat staggers Amoretti, though he is disposed to think that a point might be stretched on this occasion, by reading breadth for length, and thus bringing the fifteen leagues of Maldonado pretty nearly to the fourteen of Cook; but the difficulty of getting rid of the width would still remain. The Duc d'Almadover, however, helps him out of his dilemma, by suggesting that some extraordinary convulsion of the two coasts may have enlarged the strait since Maldonado's time, to the size which Cook found it to be; in short, any thing to give credit to the Voyage of Maldonado, and accommodate its geographical difficulties to the easy credulity of Amoretti. And though we now know that the Strait of Anian extends from the 66th to the 70th parallels of northern latitude, Maldonado, he says, called it 60, because all the preceding geographers of that century had laid down the Strait of Anian in 60° N. latitude,

as

as appears from the charts of Hortelius and Mercator, published in 1570. These charts might mislead the writer of a voyage made by the fireside, but it required not a 'skilful' navigator to detect their errors on the spot.

But the thirty-third paragraph, which exceeds in absurdity all the rest, establishes in the mind of Amoretti the authenticity of the Relation,' and places its veracity beyond all doubt. It states that being about to leave the harbour towards the middle of June, a large vessel of 800 tons burden was observed to approach from the South Sea, steering directly for the Strait. Finding the strangers to be pacifically inclined, mutual civilities were exchanged, and Maldonado received from them some presents of silks, porcelaine, &c. such as are brought from China. The people appeared to be Muscovites, or Hanseatics, from the bay of St. Nicholas or St, Michael to understand each other they were under the necessity of conversing in Latin; the strangers seemed to be Christians, and if not Catholics, were at least Lutherans. They said they came from a great city more than 100 leagues off, which Maldonado thinks (but he is not sure) they called Robr, or something like it, which they told him had a very extensive harbour, upon a navigable river, and belonged to the King of Tartary: they added, that they had left there another ship belonging to their countrymen. As they treated our discoverer with very little confidence, this was all that could be got out of them: they sailed together, it would seem, through the Strait, when coming into the North Sea, the stranger bore away to the westward, and Maldonado pursued his route for Spain the same way he had come.

Our English sailors would most certainly have at once set down this mysterious vessel for the Flying Dutchman,' so frequently seen off the Cape of Good Hope, but luckily for Maldonado his more enlightened crew were addicted to no such idle superstitions. It would seem,' says Amoretti, with great naïveté,' that this vessel, turning to the left after passing the Strait, coasted Siberia, and consequently that Deschnew was not the first who made this voyage. After all that Cook and King have discovered and published; after all the fruitless attempts of the Russians to zircumnavigate the northern coast of Siberia, one can scarcely imagine that any man of common understanding, much less of some research, which M. Amoretti certainly is, could for a moment lend himself to such an idle tale, which, as the editor of the Voyage of Sutil and Mexicana observes, is full of false calculations, of incredible circumstances, and gross fictions of every kind.' -But he who can really believe that the north-west passage has actually been made by several navigators; that some straits have been shut up, others opened, and that islands have disappeared by

'con

'convulsions of nature' within the last two centuries, is capable of believing any thing, however absurd. We can safely assure M. Amoretti that the account of one Cluny' having made this passage in 1745; of his having solicited the reward offered by our government, without obtaining it; of the Hudson's Bay Company finding means to prevent his journal being published, is destitute of all foundation. The compiler of the Histoire Générale des Voyages' is not the only Frenchman in whose hands an English work is not safe from misrepresentation or misapprehension. Cluny wrote a book called the American Traveller,' in which he reprobates in strong language the conduct of the Hudson's Bay Company, and lays down a variety of plans and projects for the improvement of the American colonies; but he is so far from pretending to have made the north-west passage, that he even doubts its existence; but in his chart prefixed, there are two parallel dotted lines from Repulse Bay to the Icy Sea, over which is written Here is supposed to be the North-west Passage-which Vaugondy, the king's geographer, in a chart approved by the Académie Royale des Sciences,' has thus translated Côte parcourue par le Capitaine Cluny, auteur de l'American Traveller.'

We suspect this pretended voyage of Maldonado to be the clumsy and audacious forgery of some ignorant German, from the circumstance of 15 leagues to the degree being used in some of the computations. It is, indeed, a fit companion for Damberger's Travels; and we cannot but regret that Amoretti should have thought he was fulfilling the intention of the pious founder of the Ambrosian library in selecting so palpable a fiction for publication, and still more that he should have undertaken to defend it. We do not, however, hesitate to express our firm belief that Maldonado did perform a voyage; and that Nicolao Antonio did see the journal of that voyage in the hands of the Bishop of Segovia: it was not, however, a voyage for the discovery of the north-west passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific,' (no such discovery being once mentioned by the Spanish bibliographer,) but simply for the discovery of the Strait of Anian.' That Spain should be extremely anxious for the security of her possessions in the Pacific and Indian oceans, when she saw the English with extraordinary perseverance sending out expeditions year after year, for the avowed purpose of discovering a nearer route to those seas; and when their armed cruizers, unauthorized it is true, but countenanced by the government, were destroying the Spanish commerce on the western coasts of America, was exceedingly natural. She must have seen these bold undertakings with alarm, and that would dictate to her the policy of ascertaining whether any and what kind of an outlet into the Pacific" was likely to favour the enterprize of so active an enemy, and what K 4 the

the means were to secure from surprize her valuable possessions, extending from Peru to the Philippine islands:-in short, to ascertain the existence and the nature of this Strait of Anian as marked in all the early charts, and now become an object of the first importance. For such a purpose Maldonado was a proper person to be employed; and that he was so employed, but proceeded round Cape Horn, we have very little doubt. No Spaniard, that we know of, ever entered, or attempted to enter, Hudson's Bay in search of the N. W. passage, except Estovan Gomez in 1525; but of this Steven Gomez,' says Purchas, little is left us but a jest.' He reached only the coast of Newfoundland in the 50th parallel of latitude, and carried off some of the natives. Being asked, on his return, what he had brought home, he answered Esclavos, which the inquirer mistaking for clavos, or cloves, concluded that Gomez had discovered the north-west passage to the Moluccas; and so posted to the Court,' says Purchas, to carry the first news of this spicy discovery.'

The object of Maldonado's voyage being that of reconnoitring rather than of making discoveries, it could not be expected that the Spaniards would publish it; they had, indeed, at that time, matters of far greater importance to attend to the arms of England had just destroyed what the elements had spared of their 'invincible Armada.'-Under these circumstances the precautionary voyage of Maldonado was likely to remain among those unpublished manuscripts which the Duc d'Almadover supposes to have been buried in the dust of the archives of Madrid,' and which Delisle says, have been so carefully concealed, that at this day the Spaniards themselves know nothing about them.' If by any means the spurious production in question was foisted into the records of the Council for the Indies,' its members, by withholding it from publication, have given a further proof of that sound discretion which induced them to bury in the dust of their archives' forty-nine of the fifty memorials which Capitan Pedro Fernandez de Quiros presented to the king, eight of which, by his own statement, related to a settlement which it behoved his majesty to make on a land then undiscovered (Australia incognita), and since known to have no existence.

But Maldonado probably discovered the strait he was sent in search of, and there are grounds for concluding that he describes it to lie about the 59th or 60th parallel of latitude, because the instructions of Malaspina directed him to look for it as far as 60° north. Now Maldonado, in coasting America from the southward, could not have reached that latitude before he fell in with Cook's Inlet, which extends from about 581° to 611°, and is a strait of considerable magnitude,the width between Cape Douglas and Cape Elizabeth being about