THE ENGLISH VOYAGES 



throne, Sebastian Cabot was relegated to the safer employ 

 of making charts of the coast of France. In 15 12 he 

 went to Spain, and for the next thirty-six years, with 

 one brief interval after the death of Ferdinand, he was 

 in the service of the Spanish government. On the 

 accession of Edward VI he returned to England, at a 

 time when a fresh impulse was given to English naviga- 

 tion. But in the meantime the dominion of the New 

 The progress World had been strengthened in foreign hands. While 

 ^ ^^^^' Mexico and Peru were being added to the dominion of 

 Spain, the voyages made by the English, under King 

 Henry VIII, were few and profitless. In 1 5 1 7 Sir Thomas 

 Pert, assisted by Cabot, attempted the North West passage, 

 without success. In 1527 a nameless canon of St. Paul's 

 in London, who was ' a great mathematician, and a man 

 endowed with wealth,' fitted out two ships for Labrador, 

 where one of them was lost. In 1536 Master Hore, 

 a learned lawyer, took a company of a hundred to the 

 same coast, whence, their stores being exhausted, they 

 returned in a stolen French ship. It was to speak with 

 the only surviving witness of this voyage, one Master 

 Thomas Buts, that Hakluyt, at a much later date, 

 travelled two hundred miles on horseback. But the 

 most important document of this early period is ' the 

 Book made by the right worshipful Master Robert 

 Thome's Thorne,' in the year 1527, where the true policy of 

 ^^^^f^^^^ England is outlined and discussed at length. Thorne, 



the Northern ^ . r - ^ ^ r • ^ r r-1 



passage. who was a native of Bristol and a friend of the Cabots, 

 dwelt long in Seville, and his writings show traces of the 

 later sententious courtly style which Guevara brought 

 to perfection. In 1513 he exhorted King Henry to 

 take the business of discovery in hand; fourteen years 



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