229 
includi ng a 'view of -previous Discoveries. 
Strait of Anian, through which he passed into the South Sea. 
It may be very safely pronounced that he never did any such 
thing. But we must observe, that he pretends not to have sail- 
ed more than a very small space through, or to have reached 
any ascertained point of this imagined sea. All his statements 
amount to this, that, after a long voyage, he passed through a 
Strait into a Sea. All the rest is mere inference. This strait, 
he says, appears to be what geographers name the Strait of 
Anian ; and, 44 if it be so, it mast be a strait having Asia on 
one side, and America on the other. r) In sailing along the op- 
posite coasts, he says of one, cc zee concluded that all that coast 
belonged to America and of the other, 44 This country, ac- 
cording to the charts must belong to Tartary or Cataia ; and, 
at a few leagues from the coast must be situated the famed city 
of Cambala.” All is inference, except the mere passage through 
a strait into a sea. Now, there appears nothing to us very 
strange, in supposing, that, after beating in perhaps a devious 
course round Baffin's Bay, with which his directions and lati- 
tudes seem very closely to agree, he may have entered one of 
the straits leading into Hudson’s Bay, and, on seeing that wide 
expanse opening before him, may have imagined that it was the 
South Sea. Navigators, at that time, had no idea of the breadth 
of America, but imagined, that whenever they turned its north- 
ern point they would enter the Pacific ; and this delineation is 
retained by Sanson, in the middle of the 17th century. Re- 
turning, as already observed, almost immediately by the route 
he came, he could have no opportunity of discovering his er- 
ror. In supposing the allusion to the discoveries of Quiros fa- 
tal to the credit of the narrative, Mr Barrow does not advert, 
that, though the date assigned to the voyage be 1588, the ac- 
count does not profess to be written till 1609, two years after 
these discoveries were known. (See Voyages to the Arctic Re- 
gions, App. p. 26.) The only thing which bears the marks of 
decided fable, is a strange story of their meeting on the south 
side of the Strait with an European ship coming from China to 
pass through it. It seems scarcely possible, however, not to 
consider this as a clumsy interpolation by another hand. It is 
entirely at variance with the rest of the document, the whole 
train of reasoning in which implies Maldonado as the first dis- 
