68 VOYAGE OF GALI. [1584. 



some of these voyages have been preserved, but they are of little 

 value at present, from their want of precision. One of them is a 

 letter from Francisco Gali, addressed to the viceroy of Mexico, 

 describing his passage from Macao to Acapulco, in 1584, in the 

 course of which he sailed along the west coast of America, from the 

 latitude of thirty-seven and a half degrees southward to Mexico.* 

 It has, however, been maintained, on the evidence of papers found 

 in the archives of the Indies,f that Gali arrived on that coast in the 

 latitude of fifty-seven and a half degrees, and is therefore to be 

 considered as the discoverer of the whole shore between that par- 

 allel and the forty-third : but this assertion is supported by no 

 evidence sufficient to overthrow the express statement of the 

 navigator in his letter, the genuineness of which is not denied ; and 

 Gali, moreover, there declares that the land first seen by him was 

 " very high and fair, and wholly without snoiv" which could not 

 have been the case with regard to the north-west coast of America, 

 under the parallel of fifty-seven and a half degrees, in the middle 

 of October. In 1595, Sebastian Cermenon, in the ship San 

 Augustin, on his way from Manilla to Acapulco, examined the 

 same coasts, by order of the viceroy of Mexico, in search of some 

 harbor in which the galleons might take refuge, and make repairs, 

 or obtain water ; but nothing has been preserved respecting his 

 voyage, except that his ship was lost near the Bay of San Francisco, 

 south of Cape Mendocino. 



The Spanish government was, in the mean time, engaged in 

 devising, and applying to its dominions in the New World, those 

 measures of restriction and exclusion, which were pursued so 

 rigidly, and with so little variation, during the whole period of its 

 supremacy in the American continent. The great object of this 

 system was simply to secure to the monarch and people of Spain 

 the entire enjoyment of all the advantages which were supposed to 

 be derivable from those dominions, consistently with the perpetual 

 maintenance of absolute authority over them ; and, for this object, it 



* In Hakluyt, vol. iii. p. 526, the letter from Gali to the viceroy is given at length, 

 as "translated out of the original Spanish into Dutch, by John Huyghen Van 

 Linschoten, and out of Dutch into English." In Linschoten, as in Hakluyt, thirty- 

 seven and a half degrees is given as the northernmost part of the coast seen by Gali. 



t See the note in the Introduction to the Journal of Galiano and Valdes, at page 

 46, in which two letters from the viceroy of Mexico to the king of Spain, relative 

 to the voyage of Gali, are mentioned ; but the account there given differs in nothing, 

 except as to the latitude, from that in the letter published by Linschoten and Hak- 

 luyt. Humboldt adopts the opinion of the author of the Introduction, without, 

 however, adding any information or reasoning on the subject. 



