Two centuries before the deaths of Bering and Cook, trying to find that
Passage, Drake's chronicler wrote: "_The cause of this extreme cold we
conceive to be the large spreading of the Asian and American continent,
if they be not fully joined, yet seem they to come very neere, from
whose high and snow-covered mountains, the north and north-west winds
send abroad their frozen nimphes to the infecting of the whole
air--hence comes it that in the middest of their summer, the snow
hardly departeth from these hills at all; hence come those thicke mists
and most stinking fogges, . . . for these reasons we coniecture that
either there is no passage at all through these Northerne coasts, which
is most likely, or if there be, that it is unnavigable. . . . Adde
there unto, that though we searched the coast diligently even unto the
48 degree, yet found we not the land to trend in any place towards the
East, but rather running continually North-west, as if it went directly
to meet with Asia. . . . of which we infallibly concluded rather than
coniectured, that there was none.
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