stian not only becomes
henceforth a prominent figure in the maritime history of the period,
but has been given by his admirers even the place which his father
alone fairly won as the leader in the two voyages on which {23} England
has based her claim of priority of discovery on the Atlantic coast of
North America. The weight of authority so far points to a headland of
Cape Breton as the _prima tierra vista_, or the landfall which John
Cabot probably made on a June day, the four hundredth anniversary of
which arrived in 1897, though the claims of a point on the wild
Labrador coast and of Bonavista, an eastern headland of Newfoundland,
have also some earnest advocates. It is, however, generally admitted
that the Cabots, in the second voyage, sailed past the shores of Nova
Scotia and of the United States as far south as Spanish Florida.
History here, at all events, has tangible, and in some respects
irrefutable, evidence on which to dwell, since we have before us a
celebrated map, which has come down from the first year of the
sixteenth century, and is known beyond doubt to have been drawn with
all the authority that is due to so famous a navigator as Juan de la
Cosa, the Basque pilot. On this map we see delineated for the first
time the coast apparently of a continental region extending from the
peninsula of Florida as far as the present Gulf of St. Lawrence, which
is described in Spanish as _mar descubierta por los Ingleses_ (sea
discovered by the English), on one headland of which there is a _Cavo
de Ynglaterra_, or English Cape. Whether this sea is the Gulf of St.
Lawrence and the headland is Cape Race, the south-eastern extremity of
Newfoundland, or the equally well-known point which the Bretons named
on the southeastern coast of Cape Breton, are among the questions which
enter into the domain of {24} speculation and imagination. Juan de la
Cosa, however, is conclusive evidence in favour of the English claim to
the first discovery of Northern countries, whose greatness and
prosperity have already exceeded the conceptions which the Spanish
conquerors formed when they won possession of those rich Southern lands
which so long acknowledged the dominion of Spain.

But Cabot's voyages led to no immediate practical results. The Bristol
ships brought back no rich cargoes of gold or silver or spices, to tell
England that she had won a passage to the Indies and Cathay. The idea,
however, that a short passage would be dis