10 LABRADOR 
first half of the sixteenth century Greenland is Labrador; 
it was only owing to the fact that the early geographers 
thought that Davis Strait was a gulf, and that the main- 
land continued all the way, that the name got shifted 
down to the northeast coast of North America. For many 
years what is now known as Labrador was merely desig- 
nated ‘‘ Terra Corterialis.” 
The real explanation is to be found in the Wolfenbiittel 
map of 1534, which bears along the coast of Greenland 
the legend: ‘Country of Labrador, which was discovered 
by the English of the port of Bristol, and because he who 
first gave notice of seeing it was a farmer (llavrador) from 
the Azores, this name became attached to it.” We have 
even a suspicion as to who this llavrador was. He was 
probably one Jo&o Fernandes, who accompanied Cabot 
on his second voyage, who was born on the same island 
of the Azores as Gaspar Corte-Real, and who was probably 
instrumental in 1500 in persuading Corte-Real to make 
his first expedition. In 1499 he himself obtained letters 
patent from King Manoel, but he does not seem to have 
used them. 
On his third voyage, in 1502, Gaspar Corte-Real was 
lost. His brother Miguel went in search of him, and he 
too disappeared. No trace of the two brothers has ever 
been found. They may have gone down in the broad 
Atlantic, or they may have been lured to their fate by the 
unforgetting Indians. They pass from history. 
For the next fifty years the exploration of Labrador 
was at a standstill. So far as the contour of the coast is 
concerned, the map of Salvat de Pilestrina (1503) is nearer 
the truth than any map up to Mercator’s great chart of 
