California and the North-west Coast. 245 



English were butting their ships against the ice in the 

 western inlets of Hudson's bay, believing that they should 

 come out into the vast Pacific due west or south-west, 

 where we now find land stretching over fifty degrees of 

 longitude. The name chosen for the ship of 1749, the 

 California, indicates the region where the explorers hoped 

 to emerge. So well convinced was the British govern- 

 ment that the passage was through Hudson's bay, that 

 Gov. Dobbs secured, at this late period, that £20,000 should 

 be voted to the one who should discover a passage through 

 Hudson's bay to the Pacific. 



While master Briggs, as mentioned in Purchas (III, p. 

 851), was making use of the argument of the narrowness 

 of the continent as a reason why the English should per- 

 sist in making voyages by the north, the Spaniards at a 

 very early period got out maps, on which the coast went 

 steadily north-west by west from California for eighty de- 

 grees of longitude to the fifty-fifth degree of latitude, for 

 the purpose one would think of discouraging their rivals 

 from the attempts they were making. This fact appears 

 plainly from the current maps which were published dur- 

 ing the seventeenth century. 



Fourth: The English trading companies and those of 

 other nations concealed their own acquired knowledge of 

 the country, and discouraged rather than stimulated all at- 

 tempts at discovery, except what they made for themselves, 

 so as to secure the monopoly of the trade in furs. That 

 this allegation is true is manifest from the writings of 

 Dobbs, Middleton, Ellis, Barrow and others. 



Thus much we state concisely as the reasons for the 

 long continued ignorance of the north-west coast. 



I will now proceed to illustrate this ignorance and the 

 extent to which credulity and speculation took the place 

 of information, only a hundred years since, by exhibiting 



