92 SAMUEL EDWAKD J>AAVSON— THE VOYAGES OF THE CABOTS, ETC. 



I have not considered it necessary to prove that if Cabot's landfall were Cape î^orth he 

 could not have discovered the low-lying shore of Prince Edward island on the same day. I 

 have preferred to sliow that Prince Edward island was not known as an island and did not 

 appear on an}- map for one liuiidred years after John Cabot's death. If Cabot had possessed 

 a modern map, and had been looking for Prince Edward island, and had pushed on without 

 landing at the north cape of Cape Breton, and had sliaped his course soi;tbward, he might 

 have seen it in a long midsummer daj' ; but C'abot did not press on. lie landed and 

 examined the country, and foxind close to it St. John's island, which he also examined. 

 Upon that easternmost point of this N'ova Scotian land <if our common country tlohn Cabot 

 planted the banner of St. George on June 24, 1497, more than one year before Columbus 

 set foot upon the main continent of America, and now, after almost four hundred years, 

 despite all the chances and changes of this western world, that banner is floating there, a 

 witness to our existing union with our distant mother land across the ocean. May the cavo 

 descubierto j)or Ingleses ever be thus adorned ; and, meantime, when in 1897 St. John the 

 Baptist's day arrives, what shall Canadians do to commemorate the fourth centenary of that 

 auspicious day when the red cross was planted on the mainland across the western sea, 

 and when on a point of land in our own Dominion the English tongue was heard, of all 

 the languages of Europe the lirst, upon this great continent — from the desolate shores of the 

 Arctic ocean on the north to the silent wastes of the Antarctic on the south ? 



