nderers
of the North Pacific, whose rickety keels first ploughed a furrow over
the trackless sea out from Asia. Marquette, Jolliet and La
Salle--backed by the prestige of the French government are not unlike
the English navigators, Cook and Vancouver, sent out by the English
Admiralty. Radisson, privateer and adventurer, might find counterpart
on the Pacific coast in either Gray, the discoverer of the Columbia, or
Ledyard, whose ill-fated, wildcat plans resulted in the Lewis and Clark
expedition. Bering was contemporaneous with La Verendrye; and so the
comparison might be carried on between Benyowsky, the Polish pirate of
the Pacific, or the Outlaw Hunters of Russia, and the famous buccaneers
of the eastern Spanish Main. The main point is--that both tides {viii}
of adventure, from the east, westward, from the west, eastward, met,
and clashed, and finally coalesced in the great fur trade, that won the
West.

The Spaniards of the Southwest--even when they extended their
explorations into the Northwest--have not been included in this volume,
for the simple reason they would require a volume by themselves. Also,
their aims as explorers were always secondary to their aims as treasure
hunters; and their main exploits were confined to the Southwest. Other
Pacific coast explorers, like La Perouse, are not included here because
they were not, in the truest sense, discoverers, and their exploits
really belong to the story of the fights among the different fur
companies, who came on the ground after the first adventurers.

In every case, reference has been to first sources, to the records left
by the doers of the acts themselves, or their contemporaries--some of
the data in manuscript, some in print; but it may as well be frankly
acknowledged that _all_ first sources have _not_ been exhausted. To do
so in the case of a single explorer, say either Drake or Bering--would
require a lifetime. For instance, there are in St. Petersburg some
thirty thousand folios on the Bering expedition to America. Probably
only one person--a Danish professor--has ever examined all of these;
and the results of his investigations I have consulted. Also, there
are in the State Department, Washington, some hundred old log-books of
the Russian hunters which {ix} have--as far as I know--never been
turned by a single hand, though I understand their outsides were looked
at during the fur seal controversy. The data on this era of adventure
I have