The two men who opened America to Europe were of Italian parentage—Columbus the Genoese, and Cabot, born at Genoa, domiciled at Venice.14 The two great trading republics of the Middle Ages at once crowned their work in the world, and signed their own death warrant, in providing Spain and England with the sailors whose discoveries transferred the centre of life and movement from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. The King of France too turned to Italy for a discoverer to rival Columbus and Cabot, and sent Verrazano the Florentine, at the end of 1523, to search out the coasts of North America.
14 As to Cabot's parentage see [below]. If the voyages of the Zeni were genuine, the Venetians could have claimed a yet older share in the record of European connexion with America.
At the first dawn of discovery those coasts were not wholly given over to French or English adventurers. Though Florida was the northern limit of Spanish conquest and settlement, Spanish claims extended indefinitely over the whole continent; and the French King's scheme for the colonization of Canada, in 1541, under the leadership of Cartier and Roberval, roused the suspicion of the Spanish court as an attempt to infringe an acknowledged monopoly. The Portuguese at the very first took part in north-western discovery, and with good reason; for it was their own Indies which were the final goal, and they could not afford to leave to other nations to find a shorter way thither than their own route round the Cape. Thus it was that Corte Real set out from Lisbon for the north-west in the year 1500, having 'craved a general license of the King Emmanuel to discover the Newfoundland,' and 'sailed unto that climate which standeth under the north in 50 degrees of latitude.'15 We find, too, records of Portuguese working in the same direction under foreign flags. In 1501 two patents were granted by Henry VII of England to English and Portuguese conjointly to explore, trade, and settle in America;16 and, in 1525, Gomez, who had served under Magellan, and who, like Magellan, was a Portuguese in the service of Spain, set out from the Spanish port of Corunna to search for the North-West Passage.17
15 See Purchas' Pilgrims, pt. 2, bk. x, chap. i. A brief 'collection of voyages, chiefly of Spaniards and Portugals, taken out of Antoine Galvano's Book of the Discoveries of the World.'
16 See Doyle's History of the English in America, vol. i, chap. iv.
17 See Justin Winsor, vol. iv, chap. i, p. 10.
| The Basque fishermen. |
Basque fishermen were among the very first visitors to Newfoundland, and, even after the North American continent was becoming a sphere of French and English colonization, to the exclusion of the southern nations of Europe, the Spaniards and Portuguese still held their own in the fisheries. The record of almost every voyage to Newfoundland notices Spanish or Portuguese ships plying their trade on the banks.18 A writer19 in the year 1578, on 'the true state and commodities of Newfoundland,' tells us that, according to his information, there were at that date above one hundred Spanish ships engaged in the cod fisheries, in addition to twenty or thirty whalers from Biscay; that the Portuguese ships did not exceed fifty, and that those owned by French and Bretons numbered about one hundred and fifty. Edward Hayes, the chronicler of Gilbert's last voyage in 1583, relates how the Portuguese at Newfoundland provisioned the English admiral's ships for their return voyage, and adds that 'the Portugals and French chiefly have a notable trade of fishing upon this bank.'20
18 See Parkman's Pioneers of France in the New World (25th ed., 1888), pp. 189, 190, and notes.
19 Anthony Parkhurst. The letter was written to Hakluyt, and published in his collection, vol. iii, p. 171.