through North America and make discoveries by the way. Jacques Cartier's
second, made in 1535, was the greatest and most successful. He went up
the St. Lawrence as high as the site of Montreal, the head of ocean
navigation, where, a hundred and forty years later, the local wits
called La Salle's seigneury 'La Chine' in derision of his unquenchable
belief in a transcontinental connection with Cathay.

But that was under the wholly new conditions of the seventeenth century,
when both French and English expected to make something out of what are
now the United States and Canada. The point of the witling joke against
La Salle was a new version of the old adage: Go farther and fare worse.
The point of European opinion about America throughout the wonderful
sixteenth century was that those who did go farther north than Mexico
were certain to fare worse. And--whatever the cause--they generally did.
So there was yet a third reason why the fame of Columbus eclipsed the
fame of the Cabots even among those English-speaking peoples whose
New-World home the Cabots were the first to find. To begin with,
Columbus was the first of moderns to discover any spot in all America.
Secondly, while the Cabots gave no writings to the world, Columbus did.
He wrote for a mighty monarch and his fame was spread abroad by what we
should now call a monster publicity campaign. Thirdly, our present
point: the southern lands associated with Columbus and with Spain
yielded immense and most romantic profits during the most romantic
period of the sixteenth century. The northern lands connected with the
Cabots did nothing of the kind.

Priority, publicity, and romantic wealth all favored Columbus and the
south then as the memory of them does to-day. The four hundredth
anniversary of his discovery of an island in the Bahamas excited the
interest of the whole world and was celebrated with great enthusiasm in