He had not completed his forty-second year.
The western boundary claimed by the republic was the Rio Grande to its source and the meridian of longitude from that point to the forty-second parallel, although as a political division of Mexico its limits never extended farther west than the Nueces and the Medina.
It is known that within thirty years after the discovery of the Pacific Ocean the Spaniards had explored the western coasts of the American continent from the isthmus to the vicinity of the forty-second parallel of north latitude, and it is possible that the Spanish pilot Bartolome Ferrelo (or Ferrer), who in 1 543 made the farthest northward voyage in the Pacific recorded in the first half of the 16th century, may have reached a point on the Oregon coast.
