22 
A VOYAGE TO SPITZBERGEN 
1497, and the taking possession by Sir Humphrey Gil¬ 
bert in 1583. 6 It is estimated, that, about the year 1600, 
ten thousand men and boys were employed on board 
and on shore in the business. The first birth from 
European parents, at Newfoundland, was in 1613. 7 
So dilatory were the English in availing themselves of 
this great source of wealth, from which the merchants 
of other nations were realizing magnificent fortunes. 
Their efforts to discover new routes of trade with the 
Indies were also slow in progress, and subject to similar 
intermissions. 
Sebastian Cabot, after his voyages under Henry VII., 
went into the service of Spain. He is said to havp 
returned, and made another voyage in search of the 
north-west passage about 1517, and even to have entered 
the bay afterwards discovered by Hudson; but the story 
is not free from obscurity. 8 In 1527, Robert Thorne, a 
merchant of Bristol, endeavored to show, by reasoning, 
the practicability of a passage by the North: 9 and there 
is a somewhat mythical account of two ships being sent ; 
one of them called the “Dominus vobiscum.” 1 In 1536, 
“ one Master Hore, of London, a man of goodly stature 
and great courage,” went as far as Newfoundland; 
6 Sabine. 
7 Ibid. Mr. Sabine expresses his conviction, “ after long and patient inquiry,” that 
the emigration of the Pilgrims from Leyden to Plymouth was due to the inducements 
of the fishing trade; a business by which every fifth person in Holland was said to earn 
his subsistence. His reasoning is even more applicable to the rise of the Colony of 
Massachusetts Bay. — Sabine's Report , part iii. 
8 Biddle’s Memoir, pp. 102-117. 
9 Letters to Henry VIII. and Dr. Leigh, in Hakluyt, vol. i. pp. 235, 237. Thorne 
claimed that his father had been concerned in a voyage to Newfoundland with Hugh 
Elliot and Thomas Ashurst in 1502. If the voyage was made, no record of it re- 
rnaihs. 
1 Compare Hakluyt, Barrow, and Biddle. 
