Lawrence is to
the East. For Puget Sound and its allied waters he had done exactly
what Carrier accomplished for the Atlantic side of America. His next
step was to learn if the Straits of Fuca leading northward penetrated
America and came out on the Atlantic side. That is what the old Greek
pilot in the service of New Spain, Juan de Fuca, had said some few
years after Drake and Cavendish had been out on the coast of California.
Though Vancouver explored the Pacific coast more thoroughly than all
the other navigators who had preceded him,--so thoroughly, indeed, that
nothing was left to be done by the explorers who came after him, and
modern surveys have been unable to improve upon his charts,--it seemed
his ill-luck to miss by just a hair's breadth the prizes he coveted.
He had missed the discovery of the Columbia. He was now to miss the
second largest river of the Northwest, the Fraser. He had hoped to be
the first to round the Straits of Fuca, disproving the assumption that
they led to the Atlantic; and he came on the spot only to learn that
the two English traders, Meares and Barclay, the two Americans,
Kendrick and Gray, and two Spaniards, Don Galiano and Don Valdes, had
already proved {273} practically that this part of the coast was a
large island, and the Straits of Fuca an arm of the Pacific Ocean.
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