1500.] THE STRAIT OF ANIAN. 47 



The English, however, disregarding the Papal prohibitions, imme- 

 diately entered the career of discovery in the west ; and, under iheir 

 flag, John Cabot, first of all Europeans, reached the American conti- 

 nent in 1497. They were soon followed by the French, who, during 

 the early part of the sixteenth century, made numerous expeditions 

 across the Atlantic ; and the Portuguese, notwithstanding the restric- 

 tions of the treaty of partition, also endeavored to find a passage to 

 India in the same direction. It was, indeed, long believed that 

 Gaspar Cortereal, a Portuguese navigator, who explored the coasts 

 of Labrador in 1499 and 1500, had actually sailed through a narrow 

 channel, named by him the Strait of Anian ,* westward from the 

 Atlantic, nearly in the course of the 58th parallel of latitude, into 

 another great sea, communicating with the Indian Ocean. This 

 channel may have been the same, now called Hudson's Strait, con- 

 necting the Atlantic with Hudson's Bay, the discovery of which is 

 generally attributed to Sebastian Cabot ; it was certainly known as 

 the Strait of Labrador long before its entrance by the navigator 

 whose name it bears. The belief in the existence of such a north- 

 west passage to India, joining the Atlantic in the position assigned 

 to the mouth of Cortereal's Strait of Anian, caused many voyages 

 to be made to the coasts of northern America, on both sides, during 

 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and many false reports to 

 be circulated of the discovery of the desired channel ; the effects of 

 which reports, in promoting the exploration of those coasts, will 

 be hereafter shown. 



* " It is stated in several collections of voyages, that the name of Anian was given 

 to the strait supposed to have been discovered by Gaspar Cortereal, in honor of two 

 brothers, who accompanied him ; but there are no grounds for such a supposition. * * 

 In the earliest maps, Ania is marked as the name of the north-westernmost part of 

 America. Ani, in the Japanese language, is said to signify brother ; hence, probably, 

 the mistake." (Chronological History of Voyages in the Arctic Regions, by John 

 Barrow, page 45.) — In an article on the subject of a north-west passage, in the 

 London Quarterly Review for October, 1816, supposed to have been written by 

 Barrow, it is asserted that Cortereal " named the Strait of Anian, not in honor 

 of two brothers who accompanied him, but because he deemed it to be the eastern 

 extremity of a strait whose western end, opening into the Pacific, had already received 

 that name." The value of this assertion may be estimated from the fact, that 

 the ocean on the western side of America was not discovered by Europeans until 

 thirteen years after Cortereal's voyage and death. The review abounds in similar 

 errors. 



Many of the most important errors in Barrow's Chronological History have been 

 exposed by Mr. R. Biddle, in his admirable Memoir of Sebastian Cabot, to which the 

 reader is referred for the most exact accounts, so far as they can be obtained, of these 

 early voyages to the north-west coasts of the Atlantic. A concise and clear view of 

 the results of these voyages will be found in the first chapter of Bancroft's History 

 of the United States. 



