absorbed so much of the carrying trade of the Mediterranean) sending
their ships through the Straits of Gibraltar into the northern seas
and trading with the Baltic for amber and salt fish. In the course of
this trade some Venetians, such as Antonio Zeno, found their way to
Norway and Iceland.[5] It is thought that by this means Venice became
acquainted with the records of the Icelandic voyages to North
America, and that her explorers thus grew to entertain the idea of a
sea journey westward, or north-westward, of Britain, bringing mariners
to a New World represented by the far-eastern extension of Asia.

[Footnote 5: Antonio Zeno served as pilot to Earl Sinclair of the
Faeroe Islands and of Roslyn, a Norman-Scottish nobleman who owed
joint fealty to the kings of Norway and Scotland. Sinclair was so
impressed with the stories of a "Newland" beyond Greenland that he
sailed to find it about 1390, but only reached Greenland.]

Christopher Columbus, the Genoese, conceived a similar idea, which
also may have owed something to the tradition of the Norsemen's
discovery of Vinland. But Columbus's theories were based on better
evidence, such as the discovery on the coasts of the Azores
archipelago, Madeira, and Portugal of strange seeds, tree trunks,
objects of human workmanship, and even (it is said) the bodies of
drowned savages--Amerindians--which had somehow drifted across, borne
by the current of the Gulf Stream, and escaping the notice of the
sharks.

Whilst Columbus was bestirring himself to find Asia across the
Atlantic, a sea pilot, JOHN CABOT (Zuan Cabota)--Genoese by birth, but
a naturalized subject of Venice--came to England and offered himself
to King Henry VII as a discoverer of new lands across the ocean. At