A TYPICAL "HOLE IN THE WALL" AT "KITTY VIDDY," NEAR ST. JOHN'S, NEWFOUNDLAND
England went mad over Cabot. He was granted the title of admiral and allowed to dress in silks as a nobleman. King Henry gave him 10 pounds, equal to $500 of modern money, and a pension of 20 pounds, equal to $1000 to-day. It is sometimes said that modern writers attribute an air of romance to these old pathfinders, which they would have scorned; but "Zuan Cabot," as the people called him, wore the halo of glory with glee. To his barber he presented an island kingdom; to a poor monk he gave a bishopric. His son, Sebastian, sailed out the next year with a fleet of six ships and three hundred men, coasting north as far as Greenland, south as far as Carolina, so rendering doubly secure England's title to the North, and bringing back news of the great cod banks that were to lure French and Spanish and English fishermen to Newfoundland for hundreds of years.
SEBASTIAN CABOT
Where was Cabot's landfall?
I chanced to be in Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland, shortly after the 400th anniversary of Cabot's voyage. King's Cove, landlocked as a hole in a wall, mountains meeting sky line, presented on one flat rock in letters the size of a house claim that it was here John Cabot sent his sailors ashore to plant the flag on cairn of bowlders; but when I came back from Newfoundland by way of Cape Breton, I found the same claim there. For generations the tradition has been handed down from father to son among Newfoundland fisher folk that as Cabot's vessel, pitching and rolling to the tidal bore, came scudding into King's Cove, rock girt as an inland lake, the sailors shouted "Bona Vista—Beautiful View"; but Cape Breton has her legend, too. It was Cabot's report of the cod banks that brought the Breton fishermen out, whose name Cape Breton bears.
As Christopher Columbus spurred England to action, so Cabot now spurred Portugal and Spain and France.
Gaspar Cortereal comes in 1500 from Portugal on Cabot's tracks to that land of "slaty rocks" which the Norse saw long ago. The Gulf Stream beats the iron coast with a boom of thunder, and the tide swirl meets the ice drift; and it isn't a land to make a treasure hunter happy till there wander down to the shore Montaignais Indians, strapping fellows, a head taller than the tallest Portuguese. Cortereal lands, lures fifty savages on board, carries them home as slaves for Portugal's galley ships, and names the country—"land of laborers"—Labrador. He sailed again, the next year; but never returned to Portugal. The seas swallowed his vessel; or the tide beat it to pieces against Labrador's rocks; of those Indians slaked their vengeance by cutting the throats of master and crew.