JOHN AND SEBASTIAN CABOT. 459 
wonderful accounts of the gold and enchanting beauty of Haiti 
spread from land to land. As in former times, half Europe had 
thrown itself upon the Orient to liberate the tomb of our 
Saviour from the tyranny of the Moslem; so now one flood of 
adventurers followed another to the new land of promise, which 
held out such glittering prospects of wealth and enjoyment. 
Obeying the mighty impulse, England and France now entered 
upon the path on which Portugal and Spain had so gloriously 
preceded them, and, as the fruit of this general emulation, we 
see after a few years the whole western shore of the great 
Atlantic basin drawn into the circle of the known earth. 
If Columbus was undoubtedly the first discoverer of the West 
Indian islands (the Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, 1492; Lesser Antilles, 
1493; Jamaica, 1494), the honour of having preceded him on 
the American continent belongs to John Cabot, a Venetian 
merchant settled in Bristol, and to the youthful energy of his 
son Sebastian, since they landed on the coast of Labrador (24th 
June, 1497) seventeen months before the continent of Tropical 
America, in the delta of the Orinoco, was discovered by 
Columbus on his third voyage. 
Thus Genoa and Venice, the great Mediterranean rivals, divide 
the glory of having revealed a new world to mankind, but it 
was ordained that the laurels of their sons should bloom under 
a foreign flag, and the fruits of their endeavours be reaped by 
other nations. For as Columbus steered into the western ocean 
in the service of the Spanish monarch, the Cabots were sent by 
Henry the Seventh of England across the Atlantic to discover a 
north-western passage to India. This, of course, they did not 
accomplish, but the discovery of Newfoundland and of the coast 
of America from Labrador to Virginia rewarded their efforts, 
and jaid the foundation of Britain’s colonial greatness. Their 
voyage is also remarkable as having been the first expedition of 
the kind that ever left the shores of England, which at that 
time held a very inferior rank among the maritime nations, and 
gave but taint indications of her future naval supremacy. On 
this occasion it may not be uninteresting to cast a retrospective 
slance on the modest beginnings of British navigation In 
the year 1217 the first treaty of commerce was concluded with 
Norway, and in the beginning of the fourteenth century Bergen 
