78 REPORTED DISCOVERT OF URDANETA. [1560. 



existence of the passage called the Strait of Anian, joining the 

 Atlantic, under the 60th parallel of north latitude, through which 

 Cortereal was said to have sailed, in 1500, into a great western sea; 

 and those who pretended to have made northern voyages from either 

 ocean to the other, generally asserted that they had passed through 

 the Strait of Anian. The accounts of all such voyages yet made 

 public are now known to be as false, with regard to the principal 

 circumstances related, as those of the discovery of the philosopher's 

 stone and the elixir vitee, current at the same period in Europe ; 

 and the former, like the latter, had their origin, generally, in the 

 knavery or the vanity of their authors, though some of them were 

 evidently mere fictions, invented for the purpose of exercising 

 ingenuity, or of testing the credulity of the public. But, as the 

 conviction of the possibility of transmuting all other metals into 

 gold, and of prolonging life indefinitely, led to the knowledge of 

 many of the most important facts in chemistry, so did the belief in 

 the existence of a north-west passage from the Atlantic to the 

 Pacific serve to accelerate the progress of geographical discovery 

 and scientific navigation. 



Among those who were earliest believed to have accomplished 

 northern voyages from the Atlantic to the Pacific, or vice versa, was 

 the celebrated Friar Andres de Urdarieta, the discoverer of the mode 

 of navigating the Pacific from east to west. " One Salvatierra, a 

 gentleman of Victoria, in Spain, that came by chance out of the 

 West Indies into Ireland, in 1568,"* there assured Sir Humphrey 

 Gilbert and Sir Henry Sydney, that Urdaiieta had, more than 

 eight years previous, told him, in Mexico, " that he came from Mar 

 del Sur [the Pacific] into Germany through the northern passage, 

 and showed Salvatierra a sea-card, [chart,] made by his own expe- 

 rience and travel in that voyage, wherein was plainly set down and 

 described the north-west passage." This was, however, most proba- 

 bly, a falsehood or amplification on the part of Salvatierra, to induce 

 Sir Humphrey to employ him on a voyage which he then projected, 

 as nothing appears in the history or character of Urdarieta to justify 

 the belief that he would have made such a declaration. In the 

 archives of the Council of the Indies,f which have been examined 



* " A Discourse to prove a Passage by the North- West to Cathaia [China] and the 

 East Indies, by Sir Humphrey Gilbert," first published in 1576, and republished by 

 Hakluyt, in his "Voyages, Navigations, Traffics, and Discoveries, of the English 

 Nation." See the reprint of Hakluyt, vol. iii. p. 32. 



t Introduction to the Journal of Galiano and Valdes, p. 36. 



