But it was the wrong continent!
Although Christopher Columbus made four voyages, reaching the mainland of South America in 1498, he never knew that he hadn’t really come upon Asia—that the natives he encountered were not wild, borderland East Indians.
In the meantime, a Genoese-born Venetian navigator sailing for an English king landed on the North American coast in 1497 and claimed the country for England. John Cabot was his English name. Cabot made the North Atlantic crossing in a small bark called the Matthew with eighteen men, following the route of the Vikings, and landed first somewhere near Cape Breton. After sailing northern coasts for a week he decided the country was Siberia. Like Christopher Columbus, he returned quickly to report that he had discovered a route to Asia.
Like Columbus too, John Cabot was given a fleet of trading ships and was sent back the next year by an excited monarch and hopeful Bristol merchants to collect the spoils of his discovery. His ships were “fraught with sleight and grosse merchandizes, as course cloth, Caps, laces, points, and other trifles.”
This time Cabot cruised the coast south, possibly as far as Cape Fear, for signs of Cathay or India before he returned to England. He carried back a few mangy furs taken in trade with the Indians—for the surprised Indians could think of nothing much to give the white god other than the clothes off their backs—but no gold, pearls, silks or spices.
It was hard to believe that this was the Asia about which Marco Polo had written.
It took another decade for Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine astronomer who had gone along on several Spanish and Portuguese voyages to the western lands, to declare that they were in reality a new world. A German savant named Waldseemuller who greatly admired Vespucci revised the map of the earth. He drew in a new continental land mass between Europe and Asia, and he honored Vespucci by calling it Amerigo’s Land—in Latin, Terra America.
Meanwhile, Spain’s only world rival had not been neglecting the west. Portuguese caravels reached Brazil as early as 1500 and explorers from Portugal visited Labrador and Newfoundland in 1501. Within a few years after John Cabot’s crewmen first told Bristol fishermen that the waters off Newfoundland boiled with codfish, Portuguese fishing boats led the way to those American waters.
Armed and battling, rival fishing fleets of the other European countries followed them across the North Atlantic. Soon, almost a hundred sail yearly were frequenting the fabulous Newfoundland banks where fish could literally be hauled in by basket.
These fishermen, Normans, Bretons, Basques, Bristolmen, fell to bartering with the natives when they went ashore to dry their catches. In sailorly tradition they no doubt had a handy reserve of appealing gew-gaws for any chance meetings with the opposite sex. One thing leading to another, it was not long before looking-glasses, beads, tin bells and other trinkets were being exchanged for the fur skins that the natives wore. And the aborigines in turn were then lured into trapping and curing prime skins for this trade.