6 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



relations to the rough lishormen who thronged the harbours in summer 

 and to the settlers who came in IGIO were relations of hatred and aversion. 

 The Beothiks of Newfoundland were exterminated and made no sign — 

 their language perished with them, excepting the scant}' vocabularies of 

 doubtful value which Dr. Patterson * tells us were got from John August, 

 Mary March and Shanandithit, the only three individuals who fell alive 

 into the hands of the white men. Then, those lawless tishermen of every 

 nation who alone for 110 years frequented the coast in the tishing season, 

 they wei-e not such people as inquire into or perpetuate traditions. All 

 that can be said is that the English based their claims to the American 

 continent on Cabot's discovery and his sailing along the coast,^ not spec- 

 ially of Newfoundland but of Xova Scotia and of the American colonies as 

 far south as Florida as well. There is jDositive evidence of some kind for 

 Labrador and more still for Cape Breton but none for Bonavista until 

 John Mason's map of 1616. 



As regards Mason's map it is, com para tivel}', of recent date. The 

 supi^osition that he borrowed from an older map the words which indica,te 

 Bonavista as the landfall is a supposition and no more. The name Bona- 

 vista may have originally suggested in later years the kindred but ditfer- 

 ent idea of jorima vista, for no previous map has been found which contains 

 a similar statement. Cabot's discovery was in 1497 and this map was 

 published one hundred and nineteen years after, in 1616. Very many 

 maps were made and were engraved and published in the interim but 

 none until Mason's contained such a legend. His map has therefore not 

 the authority of the earlier maps to support it. 



Judge Prowse evidently feels the ditWculty that Bonavista is not 

 Italian, but Portuguese ; to which another may be added that Cabot, in 

 an English ship, with an English crew, and under an English royal 

 chartei-, would not be likely to give any but an English name to his land- 

 fall. As repeatedly pointed out by the writer in 1894, and previously by 

 the Eev. Dr. Patterson in the "Transactions" of this society for 1890, the 

 east coast of Newfoundland was named by the Portuguese." Bonavista is 

 a Portuguese word, and the fact is moreover strongly antagonistic to 

 Judge Prowse's theoiy that it is not laid down on any map until Gaspar 

 Tiegas' in 1534, that is for thirty-seven years after Cabot's discovery. 

 Although the whole east coast before that year was studded with names 

 that one is absent. This peculiar difficulty seems to have suggested Judge 

 Prowse's remark that Cabot may not have named it, though he dis- 

 covered it. If so, it is a unique in.stance of a discoverer not naming his 

 landfall. 



Again, Judge Prowse observes that Viegas must have got the name 

 from sailors on the coast, and not from the geograjihers. Viegas was 

 himself a geographer, and it could only be from sailors to the coast that 

 any information c<ndd be had about the coast. He says Viegas translated 



