of the name of the chief, we merely find the names of the corvettes la Descubierta and la Atrevida, which were commanded by Malaspina.

His expedition, which set out from Cadiz on the 30th July, 1789, only arrived at the port of Acapulco on the 2d February, 1791. At this period the court of Madrid again turned its attention to a subject which had been under dispute in the beginning of the 17th century, the pretended straits by which Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado passed in 1588 from the Labrador coast to the Great Ocean. A memoir read by M. Buache at the Academy of Sciences revived the hope of the existence of such a passage; and the corvettes la Descubierta and l'Atrevida received orders to ascend to high latitudes on the north-west coast of America, and to examine all the passages and creeks which interrupt the continuity of the shore between the 53° and 60° of latitude. Malaspina, accompanied by the botanists Haenke and Nee, set sail from Acapulco on the 1st May, 1791. After a navigation of three weeks he reached Cape S. Bartholomew, which had already been ascertained by Quadra in 1775, by Cook in 1778, and in 1786 by Dixon. He surveyed the coast,

*Extract from a journal kept on board the Atrevida, a manuscript preserved in the archives of Mexico.-Viage de la Sutil, p. cxiii.-cxxiii. Before the expedition in 1789, M. Malaspina had already been round the globe in the frigate l'Astré, destined for Manilla.

from the mountain of San Jacinto, near Cape Edgecumbe (Cabo Engano), lat. 57° 1' 30" to Montagu Island, opposite the entrance of Prince William's Sound. During the course of this expedition, the length of the pendulum and the inclination and declination of the magnetic needle were determined on several points of the coast. The elevation of S. Elie* and Mount Fairweather (or Cerro de buen Tempo), which are the principal summits of the Cordillera of New Norfolk, were very carefully measured. The knowledge of their height and position may be of great assistance to navigators when they are prevented by unfavourable weather from seeing the sun for whole weeks; for by seeing these pics at a distance of eighty or a hundred miles, they may ascertain the position of their vessel by simple elevations and angles of altitude.

After a vain attempt to discover the straits mentioned in the account of the apocryphal voyage of Maldonado, and after remaining some

* The expedition of Malaspina found the height of Mount Elie 5441 metres (6507,6 varas), and the height of Mount Fair-weather 4489 (5368,3 varas); consequently the elevation of the former of these mountains is nearly the same as that of Cotopaxi; and the elevation of the second is equal to that of Mont-Rose. See vol. i. p. 62, and my Geographie des Plantes, p. 153. Author.

The height of the first of these mountains is 17,850, and of the second, 14,992 feet English.—Trans.

time at Port Mulgrave, in Bering's Bay (lat. 59° 34′20′′), Alexander Malaspina directed his course southwards. He anchored at the port of Nootka on the 13th August, sounded the channels round the island of Yucuatl, and determined by observations purely celestial the positions of Nootka, Monterey, and the island of Guadaloupe, at which the galeon of the Philippines (la Nao de China) generally stops, and Cape San Lucas. The corvette la Atrevida entered Acapulco, and the corvette la Descubierta entered San Blas in the month of October, 1791.

A voyage of six months was no doubt by no means sufficient for discovering and surveying an extensive coast with that minute care which we admire in the voyage of Vancouver, which lasted three years. However, the expedition of Malaspina has one particular merit, which consists not only in the number of astronomical observations, but also in the judicious method employed for attaining certain results. The longitude and latitude of four points of the coast, Cape San Lucas, Monterey, Nootka, and Port Mulgrave, were ascertained in an absolute manner. The intermediate points were connected with these fixed points by means of four sea-watches of Arnold. This method, employed by the officers of Malaspina's expedition, MM. Espinosa, Cevallos, and Vernaci, is much better than the partial

corrections usually made in chronometrical longitudes by the results of lunar distances.

The celebrated Malaspina had scarcely returned to the coast of Mexico, when, discontented with not having seen at a sufficient nearness the extent of coast from the island of Nootka to Cape Mendocino, he engaged Count de Revillagigedo, the viceroy, to prepare a new expedition of discovery towards the north-west coast of America. The viceroy, who was of an active and enterprising disposition, yielded with so much the greater facility to this desire, as new information, received from the officers stationed at Nootka, seemed to give probability to the existence of a channel, of which the discovery was attributed to the Greek pilot, Juan de Fuca, in the end of the 16th century. Martinez had indeed, in 1774, perceived à very broad opening under the 48° 20′ of latitude. This opening was successively visited by the pilot of the Gertrudis, by Ensign Don Manuel Quimper, who commanded the Bilander la Princessa Real, and in 1791 by Captain Elisa. They even discovered secure and spacious ports in it. It was to complete this survey that the galeras Sutil and Mexicana left Acapulco on the 8th March, 1792, under the command of Don Dionisiso Galiano and Don Cayetano Valdes.

These able and experienced astronomers, accompanied by MM. Salamanca and Vernaci, sailed round the large island which now bears the

name of Quadra and Vancouver, and they employed four months in this laborious and dangerous navigation. After passing the straits of Fuca and Haro, they fell in with, in the channel del Rosario, called by the English the Gulph of Georgia, the English navigators Vancouver and Broughton employed in the same researches with themselves. The two expeditions made a mutual and unreserved communication of their labours; they assisted one another in their operations; and there subsisted among them till the moment of their separation a good intelligence and complete harmony, of which, at another epoqua, an example had not been set by the astronomers on the ridge of the Cordilleras.

Galiano and Valdes, on their return from Nootka to Monterey, again examined the mouth of the Ascencion, which Don Bruno Eceta discovered on the 17th August, 1775, and which was called the river of Columbia by the celebrated American navigator Gray, from the name of the sloop under his command. This examination was of so much the greater importance, as Vancouver, who had already kept very close to this coast, was unable to perceive any entrance from the 45° of latitude to the channel of Fuca; and as this learned navigator began then to doubt of the existence of the Rio de Colombia*, or the Entrada de Eceta.

I have already spoken (Vol. I. p. 20) of the facility which the fertile banks of the Colombia affords to Europeans