name of Cabot, and this will probably always rank next to that of Columbus in popular renown. On the death of his father, in 1498, Sebastian Cabot was left, according to Peter Martyr, very rich and full of ambition (ricchissimo et di grande animo). A patent for another voyage had just been given to the father, and the son made use of it, though some doubt still exists about the leadership of this expedition, and Mr. Deane thinks that John Cabot had not yet died, but went in command of it. Cabot went expressly, Gomara says, "to know what manner of lands these Indies were to inhabit." The King's privy purse account shows that bounties were given to those who enlisted under Cabot. "A reward of 2 to Jas. Carter for going to the new Isle, also to Thos. Bradley and Launcelot Thirkill, going to the new Isle £30." It would be curious to know if these sums represent the comparative value of the recruits; at any rate, besides two pounds' worth of Carters and thirty pounds' worth of Bradleys and Thirkills-these being respectable merchants-Cabot had a liberal supply of men upon whose heads no bounty was set, unless to pay him for removing them. Perkin Warbeck's insurrection had lately been suppressed, and had filled the jails; and the Venetian calendar tells us that "the King gave Cabot the sweepings of the prisons." It was poor material out of which to make colonists, as Captain John Smith discovered more than a century later. What with jail- birds and others, Cabot took with him in 1498 three hundred men, and sailed past Iceland, or Island, as it was then called, a region well known to Bristol (or Bristow) men, and not likely to frighten his rather untrustworthy ship's company. Then he sailed for Labrador, which he called "La Tierra de los Baccalaos," or, briefly, "The Baccalaos"-— this word meaning simply cod-fish. He said that he found such abundance of this fish as to hinder the sailing of his ships; that he found seals and salmon abundant in the rivers and bays, and bears which plunged into the water and caught these fish. He described herds of reindeer, and men like Eskimo, but he could find no passage to India among the "islands." This is what they were habitually called in those days, though the King more guardedly described the new region in his patent as “the said Londe [land] or Isles." Cabot left some colonists on the bleak shores of Labrador or Newfoundland, then returned and took the poor fellows on board again; he sailed south, following the coast as far as Florida, but not a man would go ashore to found another colony, and he returned to England with increased fame but little profit. Later he explored Hudson Bay, looking vainly for a passage, while the King was still giving bounties to those who went to "the new island," or sometimes to "the Newfounded island," which shows how easily the name Newfoundland came to be fixed upon one part of the region explored. Sebastian Cabot was certainly in one sense the discoverer of America: it was he who first made sure that it was a wholly new and unknown continent. In his early voyages he had no doubt that he had visited India, but after his voyage of 1498 he expressed openly his disappointment that a "New Found Land" of most inhospitable aspect lay as a barrier between Europe and the desired Asia. As the German writer, Dr. Asher, has well said, "Cabot's displeasure involves the scientific discovery of a new world." In his charts North America stands as a separate and continuous continent, though doubtless long after his time the separate islands were delineated, as of old, by others, and all were still supposed to be outlying parts of Asia. In this, as in other respects, Cabot was better appreciated fifty years later than in his own day. His truthful accounts for the time discouraged further enterprise in the same direction. "They that seek riches," said Peter Martyr, "must not go to the frozen North." And after one or two ineffectual undertakings he found no encouragement to repeat his voyages to the North American coast, but was sought for both by Spain and England to conduct other en terprises. He was employed in organizing expeditions to the Brazils, or to the North-pole by way of Russia, but the continent he had discovered was left unexplored. He was esteemed as a skilful mariner and one who had held high official sta tion; he died dreaming of a new and infallible mode of discovering the longitude which he thought had been revealed to him from Heaven, and which he must not disclose. The date of his death, like that of his birth, is unknown, and his burial-place is forgotten. But fifty years later, when Englishmen turned again for a different object towards the American continent, they remembered his early achievements, and based on them a claim of ownership by right of discovery. Even then they were so little appreciated that Lord Bacon, writing his "Reign of Henry VII.," gives but three or four sentences. to the explorations which perhaps exceed in real importance all else that happened under that reign. For about half a century the English seamen hardly crossed the Atlantic. When they began again it was because they had learned from Spain to engage in the slave-trade. In that base path the maritime glory of England found its revival. For fifty years Englishmen thought of the New World only as a possession of Spain, with which England was in more or less friendly alliance. It was France, not England, which showed at that time some symptoms of a wish to dispute the rich possession with Spain; and after the voyage of Verrazzano, in 1521, the name New France covered much of North America on certain maps and globes. It was little more than a name; but the Breton and Gascon fishermen began to make trips to the West Indies, mingling more or less of smuggling and piracy with their avowed pursuit, and the English followed them learned the way of them, in fact. Under the sway of Queen Elizabeth, England was again Protestant, not Catholic; the bigotry of Philip II. had aroused all the Protestant nations against him, and the hereditary hostility of France made the French sailors only too ready to act as pilots and seamen for the English. Between the two the most powerful band of buccaneers and adventurers in the world was soon let loose upon the Spanish settlements. It is a melancholy fact that the voyage which first opened the West Indian seas to the English ships was a slave-trading voyage. The discreditable promise made by Columbus that America should supply Europe with slaves had not been fulfilled; on the contrary, the demand for slaves in the Spanish mines and the Portuguese plantations was greater than America could supply, and it was necessary to look across the Atlantic for it. John Hawkins, an experienced seaman, whose father had been a Guinea trader before him, took a cargo of slaves from Guinea in 1562, and sold them in the ports of Hispaniola. Worshipful friends in London," it appears, shared his venture-Sir Lionel Ducket, Sir Thomas Lodge, and the like. He took three ships, the largest only 120 tons; he had but a hundred men in all. In Guinea, Hakluyt frankly tells us in the brief note which gives all that is known of this expedition, "he got into his possession, partly by the sword and partly by other meanes, to the number of three hundred negroes at the least, besides other merchandises which that country yeeldeth." With this miserable cargo he sailed for Hispaniola, and in three ports left all his goods behind him, loaded his own ship with hides, ginger, sugar, and pearls, and had enough to freight two other ships besides. This is almost all we know of the first voyage; but the second, in 1564, was fully described by John Sparke, one of his companions and a very racy record it is. This was the first English narrative of American adventure; for though Cabot left manuscripts behind him, they were never printed. When we consider that the slave-trade is now treated as piracy throughout the civilized world, it is curious to find that these courageous early navigators were not only slave-traders, but of a most pious description. When Hawkins tried to capture and enslave a whole town near Sierra Leone, and when he narrowly escaped being captured himself, and meeting the fate he richly deserved, his historian says, "God, who |