manned by English sailors. In all probability he was accompanied by
Sebastian, then about 21 years of age, who, in later times, through the
credulity of his friends and his own garrulity and vanity, took that
place in the estimation of the world which his father now rightly fills.
Some time toward the end of June, they made a land-fall on the
north-eastern coast of North America. The actual site of the land-fall
will always be a matter of controversy unless some document is found
among musty archives of Europe to solve the question to the satisfaction
of the disputants, who wax hot over the claims of a point near Cape
Chidley on the coast of Labrador, of Bonavista, on the east shore of
Newfoundland, of Cape North, or some other point, on the island of Cape
Breton. Another expedition left Bristol in 1498, but while it is now
generally believed that Cabot coasted the shores of North America from
Labrador or Cape Breton as far as Cape Hatteras, we have no details of
this famous voyage, and are even ignorant of the date when the fleet
returned to England.

The Portuguese, Gaspar and Miguel Cortereal, in the beginning of the
sixteenth century, were lost somewhere on the coast of Labrador or
Newfoundland, but not before they gave to their country a claim to new
lands. The Basques and Bretons, always noted for their love of the sea,
frequented the same prolific waters and some of the latter gave a name
to the picturesque island of Cape Breton. Giovanni da Verrazzano, a
Florentine by birth, who had for years led a roving life on the sea,
sailed in 1524 along the coasts of Nova Scotia and the present United
States and gave a shadowy claim of first discovery of a great region to
France under whose authority he sailed. Ten years later Jacques Cartier
of St. Malo was authorised by Francis I to undertake a voyage to these
new lands, but he did not venture beyond the Gulf of St. Lawrence,
though he took possession of the picturesque Gaspé peninsula in the name