A century and a half of navigation along the Atlantic coast had generally dispelled the mirage of an easy Northwest Passage. Nevertheless it was commonly thought that if one could find a good overland route to the Pacific, “The Sea of China”, a way might open to the riches of the East. There were good reasons, to the minds of many American colonists as well as of armchair theorists in Europe, for believing that the shortest practicable route might lie at or near the latitude of Virginia. One of these was a widespread belief in Verrazano’s Sea, a great bay or gulf of the “South India Sea” which, according to Verrazano and those geographers who followed him, left only a narrow isthmus between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It is evident from Verrazano’s accounts that while sailing along the Banks of North Carlina in 1524, he mistook Pamlico or Albemarle Sound for the arm of an ocean extending to the East Indies and China. Later maps of the Verrazano type usually placed the “passage” farther to the north and lengthened the distance to the Pacific, but throughout the Sixteenth Century and most of the Seventeenth, explorers from the east coast continued their search: Governor John Lane made an expedition up the Roanoke in expectation of finding the passage, John White’s manuscript map shows it, and later writers comment on it.
Another theory was the North American continent was narrow and that the Sea of China lay just beyond the Appalachian range. The most effective contemporary exponent of this idea was John Farrer, an official of the Virginia Company, who in 1650 drew a map placing the “the happy Shoers” of Drake’s New Albion (California) “in ten dayes march with 50 foote and 30 horsemen from the head of the Jeames River.” Mercator had given a fairly accurate delineation of the width of the continent as early as 1569; but, although the determination of latitude by instruments by that time was quite accurate, longitude the distance from one place to another east or west presented unsolved problems. Closely related to this theory illustrated by Farrer’s group was the belief that rivers flowed from the western slopes of the Appalachian “hills” into the Pacific. Batts and Fallam left Fort Henry on the Appomattox River a little over a year after Lederer’s discoveries, with a commission from Major General Abraham Wood “for finding out the ebbing and flowing of the Waters on the other side of the Mountaines in order to the discovery of the South Sea.” It was not until 1673 that the French Joliet and Marquette discovered that the river to which they had portaged from Lake Michigan flowed down to the Gulf of Mexico and not to the Pacific. This news, and its full import, did not reach English ears for some years.
The above two paragraphs are quoted from “
The Discoveries of John Lederer
”, as edited with commentary by William P. Cumming, 1958, The University of Virginia Press.
(30 Sep 04)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.