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Updated: June 10, 2025


It had long been a notable nursery of hardy fishermen and adventurous navigators, men who had pressed their way to all the coasts of Europe and beyond. Cartier was one of these hardy sailors. His fathers before him had been mariners, and he had himself learned the way of the great waters while yet a mere youth.

Along with this general knowledge of the situation of continents, the sailors of the fifteenth century had learned a good deal about navigation. The compass had been used first by Italian navigators in the thirteenth century, mounted on the compass card in the fourteenth. Latitude was determined with the aid of the astrolabe, a device for measuring the elevation of the pole star above the horizon.

I mean to improve this ingenious and useful contrivance by forming an actual post-office on the highest point of the peninsula with an inscription in letters of a size so gigantic as to compel the attention of navigators who would not otherwise have touched at Port Famine. Curiosity will then probably lead them to send a canoe to examine the box, which will be fastened to the post.

I rather suppose that this current has no connection with that on the coast; and that we happened to fall into some stream which is neither lasting nor regular. But these are points which require much time to investigate, and must therefore be left to the industry of future navigators. We were now two degrees to the north of the parallel in which the isles of Denia and Marseveen are said to lie.

On the 5th of July, our navigators passed through Beering's Straits, having run along the Asiatic coast; they then stretched over to that of America, with a view of exploring it between the latitudes of 68 and 69 . But in this attempt they were disappointed, being stopped, on the 7th, by a large and compact field of ice connected with the land.

No doubt they held in scorn their few successors one where of old were a hundred who navigate the Rhône of to-day, clipped of its perils by dykes and beacons, in boats driven by steam. Yet these modern mariners, charged with the care of the great steamboats two and three hundred feet long, are more heroic characters than were the greatest of the old-time navigators.

Observing upon a table, Bougainville's Voyage Autour du Monde, he turned it over, and made some curious remarks on the illiberal conduct of that circumnavigator towards himself when they met and crossed each other; which made me desirous to know, in examining the chart of M. de Bougainville, the several tracks of the two navigators, and exactly where they had crossed or approached each other.

Such exact and unexceptional concurrence in the observation of distances for over two thousand miles, as this comparison exhibits, by two different navigators sailing at different times, under different circumstances of wind and weather, and under different plans of exploration, is impossible.

But, in the first place, this would do nothing to explain them; in the second, they find their natural explanation in observing that the scene of the wanderings is laid in other lands, beyond the circle of Achaian knowledge and tradition, and that Homer modifies his scheme to meet the ethnical variations as he gathered them from the trading navigators of Phoenicia, who alone could have supplied him with the information required for his purpose.

Such are the most important discoveries that have been made in Polynesia during the last century; but besides these, other discoveries of less importance have been made, either by navigators who have sailed expressly for the purpose, as Kotzebue, &c., or by accident, while crossing this immense ocean.

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