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 from the coast. Ralph Morton asked a charter for the region (besides the five-mile belt along the Potomac from the Eastern Branch to the source of the river) extending from the thirty-eighth to the forty-first parallel, and from the crest of the highest range of the mountains of Virginia to the South Sea. This range, Morton assured the king, was more than a hundred and fifty miles from the coast. The American continent was then thought by the English to be very narrow, and the South Sea not very far beyond the mountains. Morton had taken care that no account of his expedition beyond the mountains should be sent to England. In view of the fact that the explorations of De Soto along the lower Mississippi and of Coronado and Cabeza de Valca in New Mexico had long been published, it is difficult to understand how the English notion of the narrowness of the American continent could survive, as it did. Powhatan repeatedly told John Smith that the stories of the great salt sea beyond the mountains were lies. How could a mind at all philosophical suppose that so great a river as the historians of De Soto's expedition described could be collected in a very narrow continent? More than one Eng-