Of the French and English explorers of later years--Cartier, Champlain,
Marquette, Hudson, Drake--who came to Cape Breton, the St. Lawrence,
Hudson, and Mississippi valleys, the California coast--the motives
were different. These came to fish for cod, to explore the country, to
plant the banners of the Sun King and Queen Bess over new territories,
to convert the Indians, to find a northwest passage--that problem of
the navigators which baffled them all until 1854--362 years after the
landing of Columbus--when an English ship, under Sir Robert McClure,
sailed from Bering Sea to Davis Strait, and thus proved that America,
North and South, was an island.

Spaniards, however, had dreamed of a northwest passage before any of
these. When Magellan passed through the strait that bears his name,
and his ship completed the first circumnavigation of the globe, men
began first to see that America was no part of Asia. In further proof
they sought to find a passage into the Pacific from the north, as a
complement to Magellan's passage from the south. Such an attempt was
first made by the Spaniards under Vasquez d'Ayllon, four years after
the voyage of Magellan; that is, in 1524. Ayllon was hoping to find
this passage when he put in at Hampton Roads, just as Hudson hoped to
find it, eighty-five years afterward, when he entered the harbor of
New York--Hudson, who in a later voyage, sought it once more in Hudson
Bay, and perished miserably there, set adrift in an open boat and
abandoned by his own mutinous sailors.

F.W.H.