Voyages in Search of the North-West PassageHakluyt, Richard
History
Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage
Hakluyt, Richard
Arctic regions -- Discovery and exploration; Northwest Passage; Voyages and travels
Furthermore, it were to small purpose to make so long, so painful, so
doubtful a voyage by such a new found way, if in Cathay you should
neither be suffered to land for silks and silver, nor able to fetch the
Molucca spices and pearl for piracy in those seas. Of a law denying all
aliens to enter into China, and forbidding all the inhabiters under a
great penalty to let in any stranger into those countries, shall you read
in the report of Galeotto Petera, there imprisoned with other Portuguese,
as also in the Japanese letters, how for that cause the worthy traveller
Xavierus bargained with a barbarian merchant for a great sum of pepper to
be brought into Canton, a port in Cathay. The great and dangerous piracy
used in those seas no man can be ignorant of that listeth to read the
Japanese and Indian history.
Finally, all this great labour would be lost, all these charges spent in
vain, if in the end our travellers might not be able to return again, and
bring safely home into their own native country that wealth and riches
they in foreign regions with adventure of goods and danger of their lives
have sought for. By the north-east there is no way; the South-East
Passage the Portuguese do hold, as the lords of those seas. At the
south-west, Magellan's experience hath partly taught us, and partly we
are persuaded by reason, how the eastern current striketh so furiously on
that strait, and falleth with such force into that narrow gulf, that
hardly any ship can return that way into our west ocean out of Mare del
Sur. The which, if it be true, as truly it is, then we may say that the
aforesaid eastern current, or Levant course of waters, continually
following after the heavenly motions, loseth not altogether its force,
but is doubled rather by another current from out the north-east, in the
passage between America and the North Land, whither it is of necessity
carried, having none other way to maintain itself in circular motion, and
consequently the force and fury thereof to be no less in the Strait of
Anian, where it striketh south into Mare del Sur beyond America (if any
such strait of sea there be), than in the strait of Magellan, both
straits being of like breadth, as in Belognine Salterius' table of "New
France," and in Don Diego Hermano de Toledo's card for navigation in that
region, we do find precisely set down.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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