reached the coast of New Brunswick. After that the French
from Brittany, Normandy, and the west coast of France laid bare the
_west_ coast of Newfoundland, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the River St.
Lawrence, and the Great Lakes.

Sir Francis Drake led the way in the exploration of the north-west
coast of North America. He reached, in 1579, as far north on that side
as the country of Oregon, which he christened New Albion. This action
stirred up the Spaniards, who explored the coast of California, and in
1591-2 sent an Ionian Island pilot, Apostolos Valeriano (commonly
called Juan de Fuca), in charge of an expedition to discover the
imagined Straits of Anian. He gave strength to this idea of a
continuous water route across temperate North America by entering (in
1592) the straits, since called Juan de Fuca, between Vancouver Island
and the modern State of Washington, and passing thence into the
Straits of Georgia, which bear a striking resemblance in their
features to the Straits of Magellan.

French explorers and adventurers, as we have seen, penetrated from the
basin of the St. Lawrence to the north and west until they touched the
southern extension of Hudson Bay (James's Bay), discovered Lake
Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan Rivers, the upper Missouri and the whole
course of the Mississippi, and finally recorded the existence of the
Rocky Mountains.

Parallel with these movements the British discovered the broad belt of
sea between Greenland and North America and the whole area of Hudson
Bay. After the French had ceased to reign in North America, the
British were to reveal the great rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean,
the coasts and islands of the Arctic Ocean, the Yukon River, and the
coasts and islands of British Columbia and Alaska.

The first Europeans, however, to reach Alaska were Russians led by
Vitus Bering, a great Danish sea captain in the Russian service.
Bering was born in 1680 at Horsens, in the province of Aarhuus, E.
Denmark, and entered the service of Peter the Great, who was desirous
of knowing where Asia terminated and America began. Bering discovered
the straits which bear his name in 1728, and in 1741 was wrecked and
died on Bering's Island. Captain James Cook, the British discoverer of
Australia and of so many Pacific islands, completed the work of Bering
in 1788 in charting the north-west American coast right into the
Arctic Ocean.

It has already been related in Chapter III how the Hudson's