460 THE PROGRESS OF MARITIME DISCOVERY. 
was the most distant port to which English vessels resorted. 
Soon afterwards they ventured into the Baltic, and it was not 
before the middle of the following century that they began to 
frequent some of the Castilian and Portuguese ports. Towards 
the end of the fifteenth century the English flag was. still 
a stranger to the Mediterranean, and direct intercourse with 
the Levant only began with the sixteenth. Edward the Second, 
preparing for his great Scottish war, was obliged to hire five 
galleys from Genoa, the same town whence a few years back 
our giant steamers transported a whole Sardinian army to the 
shores of the Crimea, where centuries before the Genoese had 
been established as lords and masters. Such are the changes 
in the relative position of nations that have been brought about 
by the power of time! 
After this short digression I return to America, where, in 
1499, Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci were the first to sail along 
the coast of Paria. The following year was uncommonly rich 
in voyages of discovery, as well in the south as in the north. 
In the western ocean the line was first crossed by Vincent 
Yanez Pinson, who doubled Cape Saint Augustin, discovered 
the mouths of the Amazon river, and thence sailed northwards 
along the coast as far as the island of Trinidad, which Columbus 
had discovered two years before. About the same time a 
Portuguese fleet, sailing under the command of Pedro Alvarez 
Cabral to the Indian Ocean, was driven by adverse winds to the 
coast of the Brazils; so that, if the genius of Columbus had not 
evoked, as it were, America out of the waves, chance would 
have effected her discovery a few years later. 
A third voyage, which renders the year 1500 remarkable in 
maritime annals, is that of Gaspar Cortereal, a son of John Vaz 
Cortereal whom I have already mentioned as one of the doubtful 
precursors of Columbus. 
Hoping to realise the dream of a north-west passage to the 
riches of India, Gaspar appeared on the inhospitable shores 
of Labrador, and penetrated into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. 
Storms and ice-drifts forced him to retreat, but firmly resolved 
to prosecute his design, he again set sail in the following year 
with two small vessels. It is supposed that on this second 
voyage he penetrated into Frobisher Bay, but here floating ice- 
