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 laid 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 

 glance 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 



