INTERNATIONAL DISCOVERIES 13 



England, and about seven hundred leagues or (with luck) 

 fifteen days distant, 1 and whose ' tides are generally so small 

 that they are practically disregarded ' ; 2 and he can hardly 

 have coasted three hundred leagues without hitting the then 

 undiscovered mainland of America. Moreover, three years 

 later an Italian sword and Venetian earrings were seen in 

 Labrador, a little north of Newfoundland, 3 and in A. D. 1500 

 a map named a cape, apparently in Labrador. ' the Cape of 

 England/ * and scattered along hundreds of miles of coast to 

 the south of it names which John Cabot must have given. 

 What is said is only a little less explicit than the Sagas of 

 Eric the Red ; but what is unsaid is far more perplexing than 

 what is said. ' The Genoese held on his way ' ; but whither ? 

 Did he join ' the lost adventurers his peers ' ? Did he end, 

 like La Pe'rouse, or not end, like Vanderdecken ? Are these 

 words an epitaph or a preface? Or was the end of the 

 voyage too humdrum to be recorded ? 5 And were those 

 three raw-meat-eating savages, who were caught in ' the New- 

 found Island' at the end of 1498, and exhibited to the king 

 then or in isoa, 6 the fruits of this, or of the former, or of some 

 other unrecorded expedition? Historians deepened the 

 mystery. In the next century, when Amerigo, Cabral, 

 Cortez, and Pizarro intensified European interest in American 

 discovery, histories of discovery were written, and all the 

 historians derived their knowledge of John Cabot from 

 Sebastian, his eldest son who, according to one con- 



1 E. Haie says 700 leagues, post, p. 38. Captain John Mason, 

 Discourse of the Newfoundland, 1620, says 14 to 20 days thither, 

 12, 16, or 20 days thence in good weather. Comp. W. Grenfell, 

 Labrador (1910), p. 320. 



2 Juke's Excursions in Newfoundland, 1 839-40, vol. i, p. 64. 



3 Letter of P. Pasqualigo, October 19, 1501 : Reale Commissione 

 Colombiana, Pt. Ill, vol. i, p. 90. 



4 Cavo de Inglaterra. See Juan de la Cosa's map. H. Harrisse, 

 Discovery of America, 1892, vol. i, p. 42. 



5 Sic G. P. Winship, Cabot Bibliography, 1900. Compare H. P. 

 Biggar, Voyages of the Cabots and Cortereals, Paris, 1903. 



' Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, vol. vii, p. 155; Stow, Annals, 

 p. 485. 



