of a triangular shape, and in that respect are equally entitled to consideration in connection with the description of the island of Louise, but are all incompatible with it in other particulars.  Louise is represented as being a very large island, equal in size to the famous island of Rhodes, which has an area of four hundred square miles, and as being situated ten leagues distant from the main land.  The first of the three islands met with, eastward of Long Island, is Block island.  It contains less than twenty square miles of territory and lies only three leagues from the land; and thus both by its smallness and position cannot be taken as the island of Louise.  It has, however, been so regarded by some writers, because on the main land, about five leagues distant, are found Narraganset bay and the harbor of Newport, which, it is imagined, bear some resemblance to the bay and harbor which the explorers entered fifteen leagues beyond the island of Louise, and which cannot be elsewhere found.

But Narraganset bay does not correspond in any particular with the bay described in the letter, except as to its southern exposure and its latitude, and as to them it has no more claim to consideration than Buzzard’s bay, three leagues further east, and in other respects not so much.  Newport harbor, several miles inside of Narraganset bay, faces the north and west, and not the south.  The whole length of that bay, including the harbor of Newport from the ocean to Providence river, is less than five leagues, and its greatest breadth not more than three.  But the harbor described in the letter first as extending twelve leagues and then enlarging itself, formed a large bay of twenty leagues in circumference.  The two, it is clear, are essentially unlike.  The great rock rising out of the sea at the entrance of the harbor, has no existence in this bay or harbor.  Narraganset bay, therefore, affords no support to the idea that Block island, or any other, is the island of Louise.  Martha’s Vineyard, the second of the three islands before mentioned, is the largest of them, but it contains only one hundred and twenty square miles of land, and is within two leagues of the main land.  Nantucket, the last of the three, is less than half the size of Martha’s Vineyard, and is about thirty miles from Cape Cod, the nearest part of the continent.  From neither of them is any harbor to be reached corresponding with that mentioned in the letter.  It is incontrovertible, therefore, that there is neither island nor bay on this coast answering the description.  It is not difficult to perceive that the island of Louise was a mere invention and artifice on the part of the writer to give consistency to the pretension that the voyage originated with Francis.  This island is the only one of which particular mention is made in the whole exploration.  Yet it was not visited or seen except, in sailing by it, at a distance.  Its pretended hills and trees disclosed nothing of its character; and, under such circumstances, its alleged dimensions were all that could have entitled it to such particular notice and made it worthy of so exalted a designation; and to those no island on this coast has any claim.