182 



DAHLGREN, THE DISCOVERY OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS. 



more welcome 011 that account: it was the French ships, which, between the years 1700 

 and 1725, to a number of more than 150 carried on illicit trade in Chili and Peru, and 

 in exchange for smuggled European goods took back to France silver to a value of at 

 least 200 million livrés. Some of these vessels continued the voyage from America across 

 the Ocean to China or the Philippines, and some completed the circumnavigation of the 

 globe: four crossed the Pacific in both directions, eleven only from east to west, and two 

 only from west to east. From a geographical point of view these voyages are of no great 

 interest: the French captains in the main followed the track of the Spanish galleons; only 

 one of them, Nicolas de Frondat, in the ship "Saint Antoine", sailed in 1709 from China 



22. The^Islands of the Far East. From Guillaume Delisle's "Carte d'Asie", 1723. 



to California on a more northerly course than anyone before him, and his course was 

 therefore laid out on the maps down to Cook's time as the northern limit of the knowledge 

 of the Pacific Ocean (see Figg. 21 and 23 ). 1 



To guide them in these voyages the French captains employed, as a rule, Dutch 

 charts and had ample opportunities of becoming acquainted with their defects. Their 

 own observations were worked out, after their return home, by French cartographers, 



1 I have given a list of all these French voyages in an artide with the title Yoyatjcs frangais å 

 destination de la mer du Sud avant Bougainville (1695 — 1749) in Nouvelles Archivcs des Missions Scientitiques, 

 XIV, Paris 1907, pp. 423—568. See also the following works by the present writer: Les relations commer- 

 ciales et maritimes entré la France et les cotes de V Ocean Pacifiquc, T. I, Paris 1909; Z' expedition de 

 Martinet et la fm du commerce frangais dans la mer Sud (Revue de 1'histoire des Colonies frau(;aises, 1913). 



