<P> In 1539, Hernán Cortés commissioned Francisco de Ulloa to sail along the Baja California Peninsula on the western coast of North America . Ulloa concluded that the Gulf of California was the southernmost section of a strait supposedly linking the Pacific with the Gulf of Saint Lawrence . His voyage perpetuated the notion of the Island of California and saw the beginning of a search for the Strait of Anián . </P> <P> The strait probably took its name from Ania, a Chinese province mentioned in a 1559 edition of Marco Polo's book; it first appears on a map issued by Italian cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi about 1562 . Five years later Bolognini Zaltieri issued a map showing a narrow and crooked Strait of Anian separating Asia from the Americas . The strait grew in European imagination as an easy sea lane linking Europe with the residence of Khagan (the Great Khan) in Cathay (northern China). </P> <P> Cartographers and seamen tried to demonstrate its reality . Sir Francis Drake sought the western entrance in 1579 . The Greek pilot Juan de Fuca, sailing from Acapulco (in Mexico) under the flag of the Spanish crown, claimed he had sailed the strait from the Pacific to the North Sea and back in 1592 . The Spaniard Bartholomew de Fonte claimed to have sailed from Hudson Bay to the Pacific via the strait in 1640 . </P> <P> The first recorded attempt to discover the Northwest Passage was the east - west voyage of John Cabot in 1497, sent by Henry VII in search of a direct route to the Orient . In 1524, Charles V sent Estêvão Gomes to find a northern Atlantic passage to the Spice Islands . An English expedition was launched in 1576 by Martin Frobisher, who took three trips west to what is now the Canadian Arctic in order to find the passage . Frobisher Bay, which he first charted, is named after him . </P>

Who sailed to canada looking for a sea route to asia