ROBERT THORNE, 1527.
The English on the coast.
William Hawkins.
During this period the English also were up and down the coast, but they contributed little to our geographical knowledge. Slave-catching on the coast of Guinea, and lucrative sales of the human plunder in the Spanish West Indies and neighboring regions, seem to have taken William Hawkins and others of his countrymen to these coasts not infrequently between 1525 and 1540.
John Rut.
There is some reason to believe that John Rut, an Englishman, may have explored the northeast coasts of the present United States in 1527, a proposition, however, open to argument, as the counter reasonings of Dr. Kohl and Dr. De Costa show. It is certain that at this time Robert Thorne, an English merchant living in Seville, was gaining what knowledge he could to promote English enterprise in the north, and there has come down to us the map which in 1527 he gave to the English ambassador in Spain, Edward Leigh, to be transmitted to Henry VIII.