La Salle and the discovery of the great West - North Central ...

376 THE VOYAGE. [1685.he knew ;for in his ignorance of the longitude of theMississippi, he had sailed more than four hundredmiles beyond it.Of this he had not the faintest suspicion. In fullsight from his ship lay a reach of those vast lagoonswhich, separated from the sea by narrow strips ofland, line this coast with little interruption fromGalveston Bay to the Rio Grande. The idea tookpossession of him that the Mississippi dischargeditself into these lagoons, and thence made its way tothe sea through the various openings he had seenalong the coast, chief among which was that he haddiscovered on the sixth, about fifty leagues from theplace where he now was. 1Yet he was full of doubt as to what he should do.Four days after rejoining Beaujeu, he wrote him the1 " Depuis que nous avions quitte cette riviere qu'il croyoit infailliblementestre le fleuve Colbert [Mississippi] nous avions fait environ45 lieues ou 50 au plus." (Cavelier, Memoire.) This, taken inconnection with the statement of La Salle that this " principaleentree de la riviere que nous cherchions " was twenty-five or thirtyleagues northeast from the entrance of the Bay of St. Louis (MatagordaBay), shows that it can have been no other than the entrance ofGalveston Bay, mistaken by him for the chief outlet of the Mississippi.It is evident that he imagined Galveston Bay to form a partof the chain of lagoons from which it is in fact separated. Hespeaks of these lagoons as " une espece de baye fort longue et fortlarge, dans laquelle le fieuve Colbert se decharge." He adds thaton his descent to the mouth of the river in 1682 he had been deceivedin supposing that this expanse of salt water, where no shorewas in sight, was the open sea. Lettre de La Salle au Ministre, 4Mars, 1685. Galveston Bay and the mouth of the Mississippidiffer little in latitude, though separated by about five and a halfdegrees of longitude.