5. It is believed that North America was known to the mariners of the North of Europe as early as the tenth century; and that settlements, that afterwards perished, were made from Iceland and Greenland as far south as the shores of New England. This, however, is only a dim tradition, there being no detailed and authentic history of these events left on record so far as is yet known.
6. An English mariner, by descent a Venitian, disputes with Columbus the first sight of the main continent in 1498. He first touched the coast of Labrador, and sailed as far south as Florida in the next year. It was near a hundred years later before a permanent settlement was made within the territory that is now the United States, by the English, though the city of St. Augustine was founded in Florida by the Spaniards in 1565.
In 1607 a settlement was made at Jamestown, on the Potomac river, in Virginia, and in 1620 the Puritans of England, persecuted there for their religious views, sought liberty of worship in the new world, establishing a colony at Plymouth, in the eastern part of New England. Others followed in succession until many distinct colonies had been planted on the eastern coast of the United States; all of which—except Florida, belonging to the Spaniards, on the south, and Canada, settled by the French, on the north—were under the control of, and received their laws from, England.
CHAPTER III.
CHRONOLOGICAL HISTORY OF ANGLO AMERICAN COLONIZATION FROM 1492 TO 1763.
1493—October 12, Christopher Columbus discovered land belonging the Western Hemisphere—one of the Bahama Islands. He touches at Cuba and Hayti before his return.
1497—John Cabot, master of an English vessel, and his son Sebastian, touched at Newfoundland in June, and soon after explored the coast of Labrador.
1498—Columbus, on his third voyage, discovers the American Continent, near the mouth of the Orinoco river, in South America.
—Sebastian Cabot, in a second voyage, first of Europeans, explores our Atlantic coast as far south as Maryland.