London, April to September 1822;
Revised in December 1846
I WAS IMPATIENT to continue my journey. It was not Americans that I had come to see but something completely different from the men that I knew, something more in accordance with the habitual order of my ideas. I yearned to throw myself into an enterprise for which I had prepared nothing but my imagination and my courage.
When I formed the idea of discovering the Northwest Passage, no one knew whether the northern part of America extended to the Pole and adjoined Greenland, or whether it terminated in some body of water that linked the Hudson Bay with the Bering Strait. In 1772, Hearne had discovered the sea at the mouth of the Copper Mine River, latitude 71 deg. 15 min. north, longitude 119 deg. 15 min. west of Greenwich.*
On the coast of the Pacific Ocean, the efforts of Captain Cook and the explorers who followed him had left some doubts. In 1787, a ship was said to have entered the inland sea of North America. According to the account of this ship’s captain, all that had been taken for the uninterrupted coastline north of California was merely a chain of islands set extremely close together. The English Admiralty sent Vancouver to verify these reports, which were found to be false. Vancouver had not yet made his second voyage.
In the United States, in 1791, rumors of Mackenzie’s course were just beginning to circulate: departing from Fort Chipewyan on Mountain Lake, June 3, 1789, he had made his way to the Arctic Ocean by the river to which he gave his name.
This discovery might have made me change my direction and head due north; but I would have had some scruples about altering the plan drawn up by me and M. de Malesherbes. I therefore decided to travel west, in order to cut across to the northwest coast above the Gulf of California: from there, following the profile of the continent, keeping always in sight of the sea, I intended to explore the Bering Strait, double around the northernmost cape of North America, come down southeastward along the shores of the Polar Sea, and return to the United States by way of Hudson Bay, Labrador, and Canada.
What means did I have to carry out this prodigious peregrination? None. Most French travelers have been solitary men, abandoned to their own resources; it is rare that a government or a company employs or assists them. Englishmen, Americans, Germans, Spaniards, and Portuguese have accomplished, with the aid and support of their nations, what certain forsaken Frenchmen have begun in vain. Mackenzie and several others after him have made conquests in the vastitude of America, to the advantage of the United States and Great Britain, such as I dreamed of making for my native land. If I had succeeded, I would have had the honor of imposing French names on unexplored regions, endowing my country with a colony on the Pacific Ocean, robbing a rival power of the rich commerce of the fur trade, and preventing that rival from opening a shorter route to the Indies by putting France herself in possession of that route. I have recorded these plans in my Essai historique, published in London in 1796, and these plans were drawn directly from the notebook of my travels written in 1791. These dates prove that I was ahead, both in my hopes and my works, of even the latest explorers of the Arctic ice.
I found no encouragement in Philadelphia. I had begun to sense that I would not reach my destination on this first journey and that my travels were only the prelude to a second and longer journey. I wrote something along these lines in a letter to M. de Malesherbes, and while I waited for the future to arrive, I promised to poetry whatever might be lost to silence. Indeed, even if I did not find what I was seeking in America, the polar world, I did find a new muse there.
A stagecoach similar to the one that had brought me from Baltimore carried me from Philadelphia to New York, a gay, populous, commercial city, but far from being what it is today, and further still from what it will be in a few years: for the United States are growing faster than this manuscript. I made a pilgrimage to Boston to salute the first battleground of American liberty. I saw the fields of Lexington and searched there, as I have since searched in Sparta, for the tomb of those warriors who died “in obedience to the sacred laws of their country.”[1] What a memorable example of the interrelation of all human things! A finance bill passed in the English Parliament in 1765 gives rise to a new empire on this earth in 1782, and then causes the disappearance of one of the oldest kingdoms of Europe in 1789!
*This latitude and longitude are now considered too high by 4¼ deg. (Geneva, 1832)