400 THE PROGRESS OP MARITIME DISCOVERT. 



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 

 Yafiez 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- 



