sent Columbus on the famous voyage to the west, and certainly sent Vasco da Gama around the Cape of Good Hope.
Early in the sixteenth century men finally recognized the fact that to the south the New World barred the way to Cathay; and after 1540 the Spaniards knew well enough the span of the North American continent. But the search for the Northwest Passage, for the way to China through the Arctic regions, is one that has engrossed men's minds even to the present when Mr. Stefansson proposes a route by submarine liners under the polar ice cap. In the early seventeenth century the same dream set Captain John Smith to exploring the upper reaches of the Virginia rivers for a route to China. In 1634 it sent Jean Nicolet, despatched by Champlain from the struggling little French colony on the rock of Quebec, to the shores of Green Bay dressed in "a grand robe of China damask, all strewn with flowers and birds of many colors," — perhaps that he might make with due eclat his entry into the capital of the Great Khan. 1
" If he had voyaged three days more on a great river which issues from this lake, he would have reached the sea." 2 Such was Nicolet's later report of his achievement; based on information1 Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, XXIII, 279. 2 Ibid., XVIII, 236.
