There can be no doubt that early maps exist with northwestern straits marked Anian. There are two in the Congressional Library, in atlases of the years 1680 and 1717; but these are of a date comparatively modern. Engel, in his “Mémoires Géographiques,” mentions several earlier, which he believes genuine. There is one purporting to be by Zaltieri, and bearing date 1566, an authentic pen-and-ink copy of which is now before me, from the collection of our own Coast Survey. On this very interesting map, which is without latitude or longitude, the western coast of the continent is delineated with a strait separating it from Asia not unlike Behring’s in outline, and with the name in Italian, _Stretto di Anian_. Southward the coast has a certain conformity with what is now known to exist. Below is an indentation corresponding to Bristol Bay; then a peninsula somewhat broader than that of Alaska; then the elbow of the coast; then, lower down, three islands, not unlike Sitka, Queen Charlotte, and Vancouver; and then, further south, is the peninsula of Lower California. Sometimes the story of Anian is explained by the voyage of the Portuguese navigator Gaspar de Cortereal, in 1500, when, on reaching Hudson Bay in quest of a passage round America, he imagined that he had found it, and proceeded to name his discovery “in honor of two brothers who accompanied him.” Very soon maps began to record the Strait of Anian; but this does not explain the substantial conformity of the early delineation with the reality, which seems truly remarkable. The other branch of inquiry is more easily disposed of. This turns on a Spanish document entitled “A Relation of the Discovery of the Strait of Anian, made by me, Captain Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado, in the Year 1588.”[5] If this early account of a northwest passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific were authentic, the whole question would be settled; but recent geographers indignantly discard it as a barefaced imposture. Clearly Spain once regarded it otherwise; for her Government in 1789 sent out an expedition “to discover the strait by which Laurent Ferrer Maldonado was supposed to have passed, in 1588, from the coast of Labrador to the Great Ocean.”[6] The expedition was unsuccessful, and nothing more has been heard of any claim from this pretended discovery. The story of Maldonado has taken its place in the same category with that of Munchausen. REASONS FOR CESSION BY RUSSIA.