76 PART OF NORTH-WEST COAST SEEN BY DRAKE. [1579, 



discovered the American coast to the 48th degree was again brought 

 forward, and it has been since admitted generally by British writers. 

 Burney, who has examined the question at length in his History of 

 Voyages in the South Sea, published in 1803, pronounces that 

 " the part of the coast discovered by Drake is to be reckoned as 

 beginning immediately to the north of Cape Mendocino, and ex- 

 tending to 48 degrees of north latitude," — on the authority of the 

 World Encompassed, especially of the assertion in that narrative 

 that " the English searched the coast diligently even unto the 48th 

 degree, yet they found not the land to trend so much as one point, 

 in any place, towards the east." Burney, however, with his usual 

 want of candor, omits to quote the remainder of the sentence, — 

 " but rather running on continually north-west, as if it went directly 

 to meet with Asia," — well knowing that it destroyed the value of 

 the evidence in the first part ; for the west coast of America no- 

 where, between the 40th and the 48th degrees of latitude, runs 

 north-west, its course being nearly due north. Lastly, Barrow, in 

 his Life and Times of Sir Francis Drake, which appeared in 1843, 

 presents his hero as the discoverer of the west coast of America 

 from the 38th to the 48th parallels, without giving the slightest inti- 

 mation that any doubt on the subject had ever existed or could exist. 

 To conclude : the World Encompassed is the only direct authority 

 for the belief that Drake, in 1579, discovered the west coast of 

 America as far north as the 48th degree of latitude. In examining 

 the particulars of that account, we find that, between the 1st and 

 the 5th of June, in two days, the English vessel sailed through six 

 degrees of latitude, northward, with the wind blowing constantly 

 and violently from that very quarter — a rate of sailing which could 

 scarcely be attained at the present time under similar circumstances. 

 We moreover learn, that, during the whole period in which the lati- 

 tudes are given thus positively, the heavens v/ere obscured by thick 

 fogs, and the vessel constantly agitated by storms, in either of which 

 cases alone, no observations worthy of reliance could have been 

 made with the instruments then in use. When we also take into 

 consideration the direct falsehoods, in the same narrative, respect- 

 ing the cold in that part of the Pacific, which is represented as so 

 intense, during the months of June and July, that meat was frozen 

 so soon as taken from the fire, and ropes and sails were stiffened by 

 ice, we may safely conclude that further evidence is requisite to 

 establish the certainty that Drake, in 1579, saw any part of the west 

 coast of North America which had not been seen by the Spaniards 

 in 1543. 



