In the epistle to John, Bishop of Lincoln, which opens the third part of Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625), the author boasts of offering his dedicatee ‘a World, yea, a New world, in great part one Age younger to mens knowledge then Amercia, sometimes stiled by that Name’. Yet, on turning the pages to the first accounts in the volume, the reader is surprised to find William of Rubruck, Marco Polo and other medieval travellers to Tartary showing the path to Purchas's younger-than-America ‘New world’. This example shows how as late as 1625, looking forward to a New World always further west still started with a framework of assumptions that paradoxically took the beholder back in time and to the East. This chapter concerns itself with one of those westward journeys of the mind that originate in a mythical East: the journey of the straits of Anian, the imaginary end on the Pacific side of the much sought-after Northwest Passage and allegedly the shortest way to reach Asia from the American New World. The journey in question does not belong to any given traveller or travel liar per se, but is the mental journey of a myth in the minds of many early modern European cartographers and explorers, a fiction of eastern descent begetting facts in the West. As Stephen Greenblatt warns us at the beginning of Marvelous Possessions: ‘Representations are not only products but producers, capable of decisively altering the very forces that brought them into being’.