Читать книгу The Beginners of a Nation - Eggleston Edward - Страница 6

Seeking the Pacific on James River. Twenty years after the return of Ralegh's first colonists the Jamestown company was sent to plant the germ of an English-speaking nation in North America. Beginning with the first voyage of Columbus, the search for a route through America had lasted a hundred and fourteen years. No passage north of Magellan's Strait had been found, yet a belief in the existence of such a water-way remained a part of the geographical creed of the time. The Jamestown emigrants were officially instructed to explore that branch of any river that lay toward the northwest, perhaps because the charmed latitude of 40° might thus be reached. It was in carrying out this instruction that Captain John Smith came to grief at the hands of the Indians while looking for the Pacific in the swamps of the Chickahominy. Smith rarely mixed his abounding romance with his geography; he is as sober and trustworthy in topographical description and in map-making as he is imaginative in narration. But Smith was at this time under the influence of the prevailing delusion, and he hoped that his second voyage up the Chesapeake would lead him into the Pacific. Hudson. His belief in a passage to the westward in latitude 40°, just beyond the northward limit of his own explorations, he communicated to his friend Henry Hudson, who was so moved by it that he sailed to America in 1609 in violation of his orders, and in seeking the strait to the South Sea penetrated the solitudes of the picturesque river that bears his name. Dermer. The explorer Dermer was intent on winning immortality by finding a passage to the Pacific when, in 1619, he was storm-driven into Long Island Sound. At Manhattan Island, or thereabout, he got information from the obliging Indians that made plain his way to the Orient. He was very secretive about this route, which, however, seems to have lain through Delaware Bay.

A false notion once generally accepted is able to live in some ghostly shape after the breath is out of its body. The hope of a passage to the Pacific by means of a strait and the belief in a narrow isthmus in latitude 40° could not long survive the increase of knowledge that followed the settlement of Virginia and Captain Smith's explorations. 5 But sixteen years after the landing at Jamestown, when these two geographical jack-o'-lanterns had ceased to flicker, the poet George Sandys, who was secretary of the colony, wrote that he was ready to venture his life in finding a way to the South Sea, but this way was now to be by an overland route. Sandys's plan. About the same time Henry Briggs, the famous Savile lecturer at Oxford, proved to the satisfaction of many that the rivers running westward from the Virginia mountains must reach the Pacific in about one hundred and fifty miles. 6 One Marmaduke Parkinson, an explorer sailing in the Potomac, confirmed the theory of the learned mathematician by discovering in the house of a chief a "China Boxe," whatever that may have been. Luke Fox. In 1631 Luke Fox set sail by the northwest, carrying a letter from Charles I addressed "to the Emperor of Japan," which he probably was not able to deliver. Northwest. Fox, p. 172. In 1634 Captain Thomas Yong got as far as the falls of the Delaware in the endeavor to go through the continent in latitude 40°. The strait and isthmus and northwest passage having failed, Yong was content to go by fresh water till he should reach a Mediterranean Sea in the heart of America, which he believed to open into both the "North Ocean" and the South Sea. Weston Documents 45 and 47 and ff. As the century advanced the fresh-water route had in turn to be finally abandoned, and seekers after the Pacific were fain to betake themselves to dry-shod travel, and even to mountain-climbing, as George Sandys had proposed. Catlet and Lederer. A Colonel Catlet is mentioned who reached the Alleghanies in the endeavor to find a river flowing westward, but he was daunted by what seemed to him almost impassable ranges of mountains that barred his way. Glover, in Phil. Trans., xi 626. Comp. Perfect Descr. of Va., 1649 and Lederer's Voyage. Over these "rocky hills and sandy desarts" scarce a bird was seen to fly. In 1669, Lederer, a German surveyor, set out from Virginia on a similar futile exploration. Lawson's Carolina, 47. As late as 1700 the well-informed Lawson speaks hopefully of the proximity of the Pacific to North Carolina. This fallacy had prompted many desperate adventures, and had been the cause of many important discoveries, in the two centuries that it held possession of men's minds. Scot's Magazine, 1765, page 161. It reached its last attenuation in 1765, when the public prints announced that large boats were fitting out at Quebec to try the whale-fishing in Lake Ontario, and that "they have hopes of finding a communication by water with the western ocean, founded on the favorable reports of some Indians, who inform that a river runs westward many hundreds of miles as large as the Mississippi."