Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/32

20 ica, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans on a straight route from Europe to Asia.

How this mythical strait idea ever got possession of the minds of the sea rovers of that age, has never been satisfactorily explained, and its real origin will probably never be discovered. But that the idea did get possession of the minds of many navigators, causing vast expenditures of money and the loss of many lives, there is ample proof. Many of the old maps of that period show the strait connecting the two oceans, and one of these maps made by one Conrad Low in 1598, and printed in his Book of Six Heroes, is almost a perfect map of what all the world now knows of Bering Strait, and even showing the Yukon river under the name of Obila. And yet all these maps were purely imaginary; California being platted close up to where our late hero Dr. Cook crossed hundreds of miles of ice to reach the north pole. And to show how the mythical and mysterious had taken possession of men's minds in that age, and finally located Oregon in the very core of all this fanciful geography and imaginary wilderness of myths; we may refer to a few examples of these grand stories of the bold sea rovers. In 1592 one Juan de Fuca, claiming to have been born a Greek in the Island of Cephalonia, reported that while in the employ of the Spanish viceroy of Mexico, he sailed north along the Oregon coast, and discovered an entrance into the land between 47 and 48 degrees latitude; and entering therein with his ship, he sailed through the strait for twenty days and came out on the Atlantic coast. Now when De Euca's report was analyzed by subsequent navigators, a great majority disbelieved the whole story, did not believe that he even found the Strait of Fuca, as we know it; while those who admit that he might have found the strait to which his name is attached, all concur that he simply sailed into the strait, kept his course north and came out into the Pacific ocean again, having simply sailed around Vancouver island. The British government had ofifered a reward of one hundred thousand dollars to any ship that should discover and report a navigable route for ships from the Atlantic through to the Pacific ocean. This stimulated hundreds of sea captains to look for such a passage, and still believing in the mythical Strait of Anian, the search was kept up for two hundred years, and practically all the voyages to America for the first sixty years after its discovery was to find the short route to Asia across North America. All sorts of imaginary countries were reported; Cabot reported that the north of America is all divided into islands. In 1610 the English navigator, Henry Hudson, searched the whole Atlantic coast from the river that bears his name north to the great inland sea of Hudson's bay, looking for the passage through the continent. And about the same time on the Pacific coast we get a first-class sensation from Spanish sources. One Lorenzo Maldonado, gave it out for a fact that he had in 1588, actually sailed through the Strait of Anian from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean in thirty days, during the months of November and December, starting in at latitude 78 north and coming out at 75 north. Such a voyage would have started from the north end of Baffin's bay, passed through Jones sound, and come out on the Pacific side in the middle of the Arctic ocean, which at the date named, would all have been solid immovable ice. On hearing this story, and examining his maps, the Spanish authorities denounced Maldonado as an embustero, which is doubtless where we get the name of our latter day "booster."

Another one of the geographical myths of that age was the belief that California was an island. A Spanish navigator by the name of Nicholas Cordoba, investigated the subject in 1615, and after exploring the Gulf of California and talking the matter over with his fellow sea captains, reported that California was in fact an island, and printed a long document describing the country as "a far extended kingdom of which the end is only known by geographical conjectures which make it an island stretching from the northwest to southeast, forming a Mediterranean sea, adjacent to the incognita contracosta de la Florida. It is one of the richest lands in the world, with silver, gold, pearls, etc."