IN NORTHERN MISTS 



John Cabot returned to Bristol at the beginning o£ August, 

 probably about the 6th (15th, N.S.)- He naturally hastened to 

 London to tell the King of his discovery, and we know that he 

 must have been there on the loth (20th, N.S.) of August, for 

 there is an entry in the accounts of the King's privy purse : 

 " 10 August, 1497. To hjrm that found the new isle, £10." 



This cannot be called an exaggerated regal payment for 

 discovering a new continent, even though £10 in the money 

 of that time corresponds to about £120 now. Later in the 

 same autumn Cabot was granted a pension from the King of 

 £20 a year. 



Meanwhile, as the letters already quoted show, his discovery 



doubtful whether Sebastian Cabot was with his father in 1497, though, on 

 the other hand, he probably knew his father's map, and in 1544 had a copy of 

 it, or, at any rate, of La Cosa's. Then he saw the French maps representing 

 Cartier's discoveries, e.g., Deslien's map of 1541; and it was a question of iden- 

 tifying his father's discoveries with this map. It would then be perfectly nat- 

 ural to assume that C. de Ynglaterra answered to Cape Breton, which looked 

 like the easternmost point of the mainland in that region, while farther east 

 there was a group of islands which might well answer to S. Grigor and Y. 

 Verde on La Cosa's map. Perhaps he also had a note to the effect that it was 

 on St. John's day that the first land was sighted. On his father's map he 

 found an island of St. John off this promontory, or he knew it from the tradi- 

 tion of Reinel's and later maps, and so placed his " Prima tierra vista " at 

 Cape Breton. If the view that C. de Ynglaterra is Cape Race be regarded as 

 correct, it might be assumed that Cauo descubierto was really the place where 

 Cabot first made the land, perhaps in the neighborhood of Cape Breton, and 

 that from thence he sailed eastward, the supposed 300 leagues, along the south 

 coast of Newfoundland. The two islands he discovered to starboard might 

 then be Grand Miquelon and St. Pierre, though this is not very probable, and 

 he would then have sailed between them and the land. But in that case we 

 have a difficulty with the two islands, S. Grigor, and Y. Verde, which must 

 then lie east of Cape Race, where no islands exist. That they were icebergs 

 taken for islands is not very likely. It is more probable that, as already sug- 

 gested, they are the ghosts of the " Ilia verde " and " Ilia de Brazil " of earlier 

 compass-charts (of the fifteenth century; see above, pp. 279, 318). But the 

 whole of this explanation seems rather artificial, and the even coast of La 

 Cosa's map is difficult to reconcile with the extremely uneven coast-line we 

 should get between Cape Breton Island and Cape Race. There is the further 

 difficulty, if La Cosa's coast was the south coast of Newfoundland, that we 

 should have to assume that John Cabot was aware of the variation of the 

 compass, and allowed for it on his chart. 

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