210 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



exploring bays and rivers, hunting, etc., and to do three hundred leagues 

 in twent}^ days, they would only require to have sailed fifteen leagues 

 c.r thirty-five miles a day, which would have occupied only six hours and 

 a half out of the twenty-four hours. All the rest of the time, namely 

 eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, might have been employed in 

 sleeping, hunting and exipioring. I think, then, I have clearly shown 

 that there is no foundation in Ilarrisse's argument, that the 24th of 

 June could not have been the date of the landfall, and that nothing 

 brought forward by him can shake the strong and unbroken chain of 

 tradition, which has always, held that Cabot made his landfall on the 

 24th of June, and called the land found by him by the name of St. 

 John, after the great precursor, the Baptist, whose festival the church 

 celebrates on that day. 



It is not necessary that I should here bring forward any proof of this 

 tradition. No one, I think, has ever before placed it in doubt, and it is 

 to be regretted that a writer of such learning and industry as Harrisse, 

 should have broached such an untenable theory. I will now proceed 

 to prove the second point of my thesis, namely, that the site of the 

 landfall was not Labrador, but St. John's, Newfoundland, Though 

 various points of the north eastern sea-board of America have been 

 championed by different writers as the site of the landfall, I think 

 the many differing theories may be reduced to two main heads or 

 classes: Namely, 1st, those who maintain that the landfall must have 

 been somewhere on the east coast of Newfoundland or Labrador; 2nd, 

 those who believe that Cabot, having passed Cape Kace without seeirig 

 it or any part of the coast of Newfoundland, drifted onwards some five 

 or six hundred miles further and struck some part of Cape Breton 

 Island or some land in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. 



This latter theory is so absolutely impassible; so utterly irrecon- 

 cilable with the distances and courses already mentioned, and with 

 the facts which we now know concerning this voyage, that I cannot 

 conceive how any person could for a moment maintain it. I pass it 

 by withiout delaying to refute it. I will merely say that the distance 

 instead of seven hundred leagues wo'uld be more than nine hundred, 

 that it could not possibly be done in fifteen days; that considering the 

 well known fact that Cabot steered northward on the west coast of 

 Ireland till he reached somewhere about the 60th degree of north 

 latitude; then steered westwardlly till he made Cape Farewell in Green- 

 land, and still oontinued trying to make land to the westward, it is a 

 physical impossibility that he could have escaped making either Labra- 

 dor or some part of Newfoundland. The learned Dr. Dawson, arguing 

 on this point, draws a compariison between the voyages of Columbus 



