LOST COLONIES OF NORTHMEN AND PORTUGUESE. 49 



find it in my heart to make proof whether it be true or no, that I have 

 read, and heard, of Frenchmen and Portugals to be in that river" (the 

 St. Lawrence) " and about Cape Breton. If I had not been deceived 

 by the vile Portuguese descending of the Jews and the Judas kind, I 

 had not failed to have searched that river and the coast of Cape Bre- 

 ton which might have been found out to have benefitted our country." 

 The colony of Fagundes of 1521 has been unknown to historians, 

 though the circumstances that led to the attempt to colonize Terra 

 Nova have not escaped attention. Fagundes had already been an ex- 

 plorer, and his name is connected with the northeast coast of America 

 by early charts, while his discoveries, as we have seen, are referred to 

 in his commission. 



We also meet with a probable reference to this colony in connection 

 with the cattle and sw T ine which Champlain (1618) says "were left 

 there " (Sable Island) " more than sixty years ago " (i. e., before 1558) 

 by the Portuguese. In Haies's report of the voyage of Sir Humphrey 

 Gilbert, given by Hakluyt, and probably written about 1583, he says, 

 " Sablon lyeth about twenty-five leagues to the seaward of Cape Breton, 

 whither we were determined to go upon intelligence w r e had of a Port- 

 ugal during our abode at St John's, who was himself present when 

 the Portuguese (about thirty years past) did put on the said island 

 both neat and swine to breed, which were since exceedingly multiply- 

 ing." 



It appears that the Baron de Lery, in 1518, landed some cattle at 

 Canso, and the remainder on Sable Island, on his abandoning his inten- 

 tion of forming a settlement in Nova Scotia. It seems also probable 

 that the Portuguese must for the same reasons have landed their cattle 

 at Sable Island, and that the date is the probable time when the settle- 

 ment of Fagundes was broken up. 



III. A Portuguese Settlement at Inganish, Cape Breton, 

 1567. De Laet (book ii, chapter v) tells us that the Portuguese 

 placed Port Ningani from eighteen to twenty leagues to the northwest 

 of the cape which afterward gave its name to the Island Cape Breton, 

 " where they formerly had a settlement, which they have since aban- 

 doned." Champlain says that the Portuguese were forced to do this 

 by the cold and rigorous climate. 



Until recently this was all we knew about this colony, but Senhor 

 E. do Canto has now discovered a MS. charter in the Torre do Tombo, 

 at Lisbon, from which it appears that the king, on May 4, 1567, ap- 

 pointed Manuel Corte Real notary public of a colony about to be 

 founded in Terra Nova, and for which two ships and a caravel were 

 then about to start from Terceira. In 1579 the captaincy of that 

 colony was conferred upon Vasco Annes, the fourth in succession of 

 the Corte Reals. The author of the " Tractado das Ilhas Novas" ap- 

 pears to have sailed with the expedition of 1567, and it is quite clear 

 that up till then no tidings from the colony founded by Fagundes had 



VOL. XXVII. 4 



