Christopher Columbus, the Genoese, conceived a similar idea, which also may have owed something to the tradition of the Norsemen's discovery of Vinland. But Columbus's theories were based on better evidence, such as the discovery on the coasts of the Azores archipelago, Madeira, and Portugal of strange seeds, tree trunks, objects of human workmanship, and even (it is said) the bodies of drowned savages—Amerindians—which had somehow drifted across, borne by the current of the Gulf Stream, and escaping the notice of the sharks.
Whilst Columbus was bestirring himself to find Asia across the Atlantic, a sea pilot, JOHN CABOT (Zuan Cabota)—Genoese by birth, but a naturalized subject of Venice—came to England and offered himself to King Henry VII as a discoverer of new lands across the ocean. At first he was employed at Copenhagen to settle fishery quarrels about Iceland, and probably Cabota, or Cabot, visited Iceland in King Henry's service, and there heard of the Icelandic colonies on the other side of the Atlantic, only recently abandoned.
In 1496 King Henry VII provided money to cover some of the expense of a voyage of discovery to search for the rumoured island across the ocean. The people of Bristol were ordered to assist John Cabot, and by them he was furnished with a small sailing ship, the Matthew, and a crew of fifteen mariners. Cabot, with his two sons, Luis and Sancio, sailed for Ireland and the unknown West in May, 1497, and, after a sea voyage quite as wonderful as that of Columbus, reached the coast of Cape Breton Island (or "the New Isle", as it was first named[6]) on June 24, 1497. They found "the land excellent, and the climate temperate". The sea was so full of fish along these coasts that the mariners opined (truly) that henceforth Bristol need not trouble about the Iceland trade. Here along this "new isle" were the predestined fisheries of Britain.[7]
They encountered no inhabitants, though they found numerous traces of their existence in the form of snares, notched trees, and bone netting needles. John Cabot hoisted the English flag of St. George and the Venetian standard of St. Mark; then—perhaps after coasting a little along Nova Scotia—fearful that a longer stay might cause them to run short of provisions, he turned the prow of the Matthew eastward, and reached Bristol once more about August 6, and London on August 10, 1497, with his report to King Henry VII, who rewarded him with a donation of £10. He was further granted a pension of £20 a year (which he only drew for two years, probably because he died after returning from a second voyage to the North-American coast), and he received a renewal of his patent of discovery in February, 1498. In this patent it is evidently inferred that King Henry VII assumed a sovereignty over these distant regions because of John Cabot's hoisting of the English flag on "the new Isle" (Cape Breton Island) in the preceding year.
The new expedition of 1498 was a relatively important affair. The king assisted to finance the ventures of the Bristol captains, and five of his ships formed part of the little fleet. It is probable that John Cabot was in command, and almost certain that his young son Sebastian was a passenger, possibly an assistant pilot. The course followed lay much farther to the north, and brought the little sailing vessels amongst the icebergs, ice floes, polar bears, and stormy seas of Greenland and Labrador. Commercially the voyage was a failure, almost a disaster. The ships returned singly, and after a considerable interval of time. Nevertheless, some of the king's loans were repaid to him; and in 1501 a regular chartered company was formed (perhaps at Bristol), with three Bristolians and three Portuguese as directors. Henry VII not only gave a royal patent to this association, but lent more money to enable it to explore and colonize these new lands across the western sea.
There can be little doubt that between 1498 and 1505 these Bristol ships, directed by Italian, English, and Portuguese pilots, first revealed to the civilized world of western Europe the coasts of Newfoundland, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, and Delaware. They must have got as far south as the State of Delaware (according to Sebastian Cabot, their southern limit was lat. 38°), because in 1505 they were able to bring back parrots ("popyngays"), as well as hawks and lynxes ("catts of the mountaigne"), for the delectation of King Henry; and parrots even at that period could not have been obtained from farther north than the latitude of New York.[8]
But after 1505 English interest in "the Newe founde launde" and the "Newe Isle" languished; the exploration of North America was taken up and carried farther by Portuguese, Bretons and Normans of France, Italians, and Spaniards.[9] It revived again under Henry VIII, owing to the irresistible attraction of the Newfoundland fisheries and the knowledge that the ships from France were returning every autumn with great supplies of fish cured and salted; for an adequate supply of salt fish was becoming a matter of great importance to the markets of western Europe. In 1527 Henry VIII sent two ships under the command of John Rut to explore the North-American coast, and Captain Rut seems to have reached the Straits of Belle Isle between Newfoundland and Labrador (then blocked with ice so that he took them for a bay), and afterwards to have passed along the east coast of Newfoundland—already much frequented by the Bretons, Normans, and Portuguese—and to have stopped at the harbour of St. John's, thence sailing as far south as Massachusetts.
The Portuguese monarchy had begun to take possession of the Azores archipelago from the year 1432. These islands were probably known to the Phoenicians, and even to the Arabs of the Middle Ages; between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they had been rediscovered by Catalans, Genoese, Flemings, and Portuguese; and after 1444 the Azores began to prove very useful to the sea adventurers of this wonderful fifteenth century, as they became a shelter and a place of call for fresh water and provisions almost in the middle of the Atlantic, 800 to 1000 miles due west of Portugal. Portuguese vessels sailed northwards from the Azores in search of fishing grounds, and thus reached Iceland, which they called Terra do Bacalhao.[10] They may even before Cabot have visited in an unrecorded fashion the wonderful banks of Newfoundland—an immense area of shallow sea swarming with codfish.
As soon as the news of the Cabot voyages reached the King of Portugal he arranged to send an expedition of discovery to the far north-west, perhaps to find a northern sea route to Eastern Asia. He gave the command to Gaspar Corte-Real, a Portuguese noble connected through family property with the Azores. Starting from the Azores in the summer of 1500, Corte-Real discovered Newfoundland, and called it "Terra Verde" from its dense woods of fir trees, which are now being churned into wood pulp to make paper for British books and newspapers. He then sailed along the coast of Labrador,[11] and thence crossed over to Greenland, the southern half of which he mapped with fair accuracy. His records of this voyage take particular note of the great icebergs off the coast of Greenland. His men were surprised to find that sea water frozen becomes perfectly fresh—all the salt is left out in the process. So that his two ships could supply themselves with fresh water of the purest, by hacking ice from the masses floating in these Greenland summer seas. The next year he started again, but on a more westerly course. His two ships reached the coasts of New Jersey and Massachusetts, and sailed north once more to Labrador. They captured a number of Amerindian aborigines, but only one of the two ships (with seven of these savages on board) reached Portugal; Gaspar Corte-Real was never heard of again. His brother Miguel went out in search of him, but he likewise disappeared without a trace.
Nevertheless these Portuguese expeditions to North America have left ineffaceable traces in the geography of the Newfoundland coast, of which (under the name of Terra Nova[12]) the governorship was made hereditary in the Corte-Real family. Cape Race for example—the most prominent point of the island—is really the Portuguese Cabo Raso—the bare or "shaved" cape—and this was by the Spaniards regarded as the westernmost limit of Portuguese sovereignty in that direction. For the Spaniards were by no means pleased at the intrusion of other nations into a New World which they desired to monopolize entirely for the Spanish Crown. They did not so much mind sharing it, along the line agreed upon in the Treaty of Tordesillas, with the Portuguese, but the ingress of the English and French infuriated them. The Basque people of the north-east corner of Spain were a hardy seafaring folk, especially bold in the pursuit of whales in the Bay of Biscay, and eager to take a share in the salt-fish trade. This desire took them in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to Ireland and Iceland. They began to fish off the Newfoundland coasts perhaps as early as 1525. About this time also the Emperor Charles V, King of Spain, having through one great Portuguese sea captain—Magalhães (Magellan)—discovered the passage from Atlantic to Pacific across the extremity of South America, thought by employing another Portuguese—Estevão Gomez—to find a similar sea route through North America, which would prove a short cut from Europe to China. This was the famous "North-west Passage" the search for which drew so many great and brave adventurers into the Arctic sea of America between 1500 and 1853, to be revealed at last by our fellow countrymen, but to prove useless to navigation on account of the enormous accumulation of ice.