6 LABRADOR 
China. They seem to have set him thinking. Like other 
men of his day, he had “studied the sphere,” as the saying 
went; and he seems to have conceived the idea, inde- 
pendently of Columbus, of reaching the country where the 
spices grew by sailing westward. In quest of merchants 
who would furnish him forth he went to the west of Eng- 
land. There he found, in the matter of the new route, 
affairs much farther advanced than he could have sup- 
posed. In 1480 two ships had sailed from Bristol to discover 
the fabulous islands of Brazil and the Seven Cities which 
were supposed to lie between Ireland and the east coast 
of Asia. The expedition was fruitless, but it shows that 
the project of the westward route was already in the air. 
From Bristol Cabot made a long series of attempts to 
reach the islands which the ships that sailed in 1480 had 
failed to find. He believed they would prove stepping- 
stones to the coast of Asia. Year after year expeditions 
went out under his direction; autumn after autumn they 
returned to Bristol empty-handed. Cabot’s patrons were 
already beginning to withdraw their support, when in the 
summer of 1493 news came to England that Christopher 
Columbus, with three Spanish ships, had reached the 
islands of Asia.t Cabot renewed his efforts, and on May 2, 
1497, he sailed under royal patent on the voyage which 
brought him out on the shores of North America. 
The voyages of the Cabots have been a storm-centre of 
1'The reason why Columbus succeeded where Cabot failed, is that 
Columbus crossed the Atlantic in a region where the trade-winds blow 
steadily from the east; whereas the tract of ocean from Ireland to 
America is one of the most unquiet in the world, and a vessel on its 
westward course in those latitudes has to contend, not only with ad- 
verse winds and broken weather, but with frequent and dense fogs. 
