Sebastian perhaps left some of his three hundred men to explore
Newfoundland. He knew they couldn't starve because, as he often used to
tell his gaping listeners, the waters thereabouts were so thick with
codfish that he had hard work to force his vessels through. This first
of American fish stories, wildly improbable as it may seem, may yet have
been founded on fact. When acres upon acres of the countless little
capelin swim inshore to feed, and they themselves are preyed on by
leaping acres of voracious cod, whose own rear ranks are being preyed on
by hungry seals, sharks, herring-hogs, or dogfish, then indeed the
troubled surface of a narrowing bay is literally thick with the silvery
flash of capelin, the dark tumultuous backs of cod, and the swirling
rushes of the greater beasts of prey behind. Nor were certain other fish
stories, told by Sebastian and his successors about the land of cod,
without some strange truths to build on. Cod have been caught as long as
a man and weighing over a hundred pounds. A whole hare, a big guillemot
with his beak and claws, a brace of duck so fresh that they must have
been swallowed alive, a rubber wading boot, and a very learned treatise
complete in three volumes--these are a few of the curiosities actually
found in sundry stomachs of the all-devouring cod.

The new-found cod banks were a mine of wealth for western Europe at a
time when everyone ate fish on fast days. They have remained so ever
since because the enormous increase of population has kept up a
constantly increasing demand for natural supplies of food. Basques and
English, Spaniards, French, and Portuguese, were presently fishing for
cod all round the waters of northeastern North America and were even
then beginning to raise questions of national rights that have only been
settled in this twentieth century after four hundred years.

Following the coast of Greenland past Cape Farewell, Sebastian Cabot
turned north to look for the nearest course to India and Cathay, the
lands of silks and spices, diamonds, rubies, pearls, and gold. John
Cabot had once been as far as Mecca or its neighborhood, where he had
seen the caravans that came across the Desert of Arabia from the fabled
East. Believing the proof that the world was round, he, like Columbus
and so many more, thought America was either the eastern limits of the
Old World or an archipelago between the extremest east and west already
known. Thus, in the early days bef