The Oregon Territory, Its History and Discovery. Travers Twiss
of San Bernardo, in 34°, where he died. His pilot, Bartolemé Ferrelo, continued his course northwards after the death of his commander. The most northern point of land mentioned in the accounts of the expedition which have been preserved, was Cabo de Fortunas, placed by Ferrelo in 41°, which is supposed by Mr. Greenhow to have been the headland in 40° 20′, to which the name of C. Mendocino was given, in honor of the viceroy, Mendoza. Other authors, however, whose opinion is entitled to consideration, maintain that Ferrelo discovered Cape Blanco in 43°, to which Vancouver subsequently gave the name of Cape Orford. (Humboldt, Essai Politique sur la Nouvelle Espagne, l. iii., c. viii. Introduccion al Relacion del Viage hecho por las Goletas Sutil y Mexicana en el año de 1792.)
The Bull of Pope Alexander VI., as is well known, gave to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain all the New World to the westward of a meridian line drawn a hundred leagues west of the Azores. When England, however, shook off the yoke of the Papacy, she refused to admit the validity of Spanish titles when based only on such concessions. Elizabeth, for instance, expressly refused to acknowledge “any title in the Spaniards by donation of the Bishop of Rome, to places of which they were not in actual possession, and she did not understand why, therefore, either her subjects, or those of any other European prince, should be debarred from traffic in the Indies.” In accordance with such a policy, Sir Francis Drake obtained, through the interest of Sir Christopher Hatton, the vice-chamberlain of the Queen, her approval of an expedition projected by him into the South Sea. He set sail from Plymouth in 1577, passed through the Straits of Magellan in the autumn of 1578, and ravaged the coast of Mexico in the spring of 1579. Being justly apprehensive that the Spaniards would intercept him if he should attempt to re-pass Magellan’s Straits with his rich booty, and being likewise reluctant to encounter again the dangers of that channel, he determined to attempt the discovery of a north-east passage from the South Sea into the Atlantic, by the reported Straits of Anian.
There are two accounts, professedly complete, of Drake’s Voyage. The earliest of these first occurs in Hakluyt’s Collection of Voyages, published in 1589, and is entitled “The Famous Voyage of Sir Francis Drake into the South Sea, and there-hence about the whole Globe of the Earth, begun in the yeere of our Lord, 1577.” It was re-published, by Hakluyt, with some alterations, in his subsequent edition of 1598–1600, and may be most readily referred to in the fourth volume of the reprint of this latter edition, published in 1811. The other account is intitled “The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake, collected out of the notes of Mr. Francis Fletcher, Preacher in this employment, and compared with divers others’ notes that went in the same Voyage.” This work was first published in 1628, by Nicholas Bourne, and “sold at his shop at the Royal Exchange.” It appears to have been compiled by Francis Drake, the nephew of the circumnavigator, as a dedication “to the truly noble Robert Earl of Warwick” is prefixed, with his name attached to it. It will be found most readily in the second volume of the Harleian collection of voyages. There are also to be found in Hakluyt’s fourth volume, two independent, but unfortunately imperfect, narratives, one by Nuño da Silva, the Portuguese pilot, who was pressed by Sir F. Drake into his service at St. Jago, one of the Cape Verde islands, and discharged at Guatulco, where his account terminates; the other by Edward Cliffe, a mariner on board the ship Elizabeth, commanded by Mr. John Winter, one of Drake’s squadron, which parted company from him on the west coast of South America, immediately after passing through the Straits of Magellan. The Elizabeth succeeded in re-passing the straits, and arrived safe at Ilfracombe on June 2d, 1579; and Mr. Cliffe’s narrative, being confined to the voyage of his own ship, is consequently the least complete of all, in respect to Drake’s adventures.
It is a disputed point, whether Drake, in his attempt to find a passage to the Atlantic, by the north of California, reached the latitude of 48° or 43°. The Famous Voyage, is the account, on which the advocates for the lower latitude of 43° rely. The World Encompassed, supported by Stow the annalist, and two independent naval authorities, cotemporaries of Sir F. Drake, is quoted in favour of the higher latitude of 48°. Before examining the interval evidence of the two accounts, it may be as well to consider the authority which is due to them from external circumstances, as Mr. Greenhow’s account of the two works is calculated to mislead the judgment of the reader in this respect.
Mr. Greenhow, (p. 73,) in referring to the Famous Voyage, says that it was “written by Francis Pretty, one of the crew of Drake’s vessel, at the request of Hakluyt, and published by him in 1589. It is a plain and succinct account of what the writer saw, or believed to have occurred during the voyage, and bears all the marks of truth and authenticity.”
This statement could not but excite some surprise, as the Famous Voyage has no author’s name attached to it, either in the first edition of 1589, or in any of the later editions of Hakluyt, the more so because Hakluyt himself, in his Address to the favorable reader, prefixed to the edition of 1589, leads us to suppose that he was himself the author of the work. “For the conclusion of all, the memorable voyage of Master Thomas Candish into the South Sea, and from thence about the Globe of the Earth doth satisfie me, and I doubt not but will fully content thee, which as in time it is later than that of Sir F. Drake, so in relation of the Philippines, Japan, China, and the isle of St. Helena, it is more particular and exact; and therefore the want of the first made by Sir Francis Drake will be the lesse; wherein I must confess to have taken more than ordinary paines, meaning to have inserted it in this worke; but being of late (contrary to my expectation,) seriously dealt withall, not to anticipate or prevent another man’s paines and charge in drawing all the services of that worthie knight into one volume, I have yielded unto those my friends which pressed me in the matter, referring the further knowledge of his proceedings to those intended discourses.”
Hakluyt, however, appears to have had the narrative privately printed, and, contrary to the intention which he entertained at the time when he wrote his preface, and compiled his table of contents, and the index of his first edition, in neither of which is there any reference to the Famous Voyage, he has inserted the Famous Voyage between pages 643 and 644, evidently as an interpolation. It is nowhere stated that any copy of this edition exists, in which this interpolation does not occur. It is alluded to by Lowndes in his Bibliographical Manual, vol. ii., p. 853, art. “Hakluyt.” It is printed apparently on the same kind of paper, with the same kind of ink, and in the same kind of type with the rest of the work, but the signatures at the bottom of the pages, by which term are meant the numbers which are placed on the sheets for the printer’s guidance, do not correspond with the general order of the signatures of the work. This fact, combined with the circumstance that the pages are not numbered, furnishes a strong presumption that it was printed subsequently to the rest of the work. On the other hand there is evidence that it was printed to bind up with the rest, from the circumstance that at the bottom of the last page the word “Instructions” is printed to correspond with the first word at the top of p. 644, being the title of the next treatise—“Instructions given by the Honorable the Lords of the Counsell to Edward Fenton, Esq. for the order to be observed in the voyage recommended to him for the East Indies, and Cathay, April 9, 1582.”
It can hardly be doubted that this account is the narrative about which Hakluyt himself “had taken more than ordinary paines.” Hakluyt, as is well known, was a student of Christ Church, Oxford, who like his imitator Purchas, was imbued with a strong natural bias towards geographical studies, and himself compiled many of the narratives which his collection contained.
This inference as to the authorship of the Famous Voyage, drawn from the allusion in Hakluyt’s preface to the work, will probably appear to many minds more justifiable, if the claim set up in behalf of Francis Pretty can be shown to be utterly without foundation. It may be as well, therefore, to dispose of this at once. What may have been Mr. Greenhow’s authority it would be difficult to say, though it may be conjectured, from another circumstance which will be stated below, that he has been misled by an incorrect article on Sir Francis Drake in the Biographie Universelle. M. Eyriés, the writer of this article, refers to Fleurieu as his authority. Fleurieu, however, who was a distinguished French hydrographer, and edited, in Paris, in the year VIII. (1800) a work intitled “Voyage autour du Monde, par Etienne Marchand,” with which he published some observations of his own, intitled “Recherches sur les terres de Drake,” enumerates briefly in the latter work the different accounts of Drake’s voyage, but he no where mentions