reat merchant," he announced, "the King
will let me send my ships all over the world."

John Cabot stroked the wavy dark hair with a lingering, tender touch.
"God grant thee thy wish, little one," he said. And Sebastian, with a
shout in answer to a call from the sunny out-of-door world, scampered
away.

John Cabot, who had been born in Genoa, married while a merchant in
Venice, and had now lived for many years in Bristol, felt sometimes that
the life of a trader was like that of a player at dice. And the dice
were often loaded.

He was a good navigator, or he would not have been a true son of the
Genoese house of Caboto--Giovanni Caboto translated meant John the
Captain, and in a city full of sea-captains a man must know more than a
little of the sea to win that title. He had made a place for himself in
Venice as Zuan Gaboto, and now he was a known and respected man in the
second greatest seaport of England, with a house in the quarter of
Bristol known as "Cathay," the only part of the city where foreigners
were allowed to live. It had its nickname from the fact that the foreign
trade of Bristol was largely with the Orient.

English trade in those days was hampered by a multitude of restrictions.
There were monopolies, there were laws forbidding the export of this and
that, or the making of goods by any one outside certain guilds, there
were arrangements favoring foreign traders who had got their foothold
during the War of the Roses,--when kings needed money from any source
that would promise it. The Hanse merchants at the Steelyard alone
controlled the markets of more than a hundred towns. Their grim stone
buildings rose like a fort commanding London Bridge, and they paid less
both in duties and customs than English merchants did. They employed no
English ships, and could underbuy and undersell the English manufacturer
and the English trader. Their men were all bachelors, with no families
to found or houses to keep up in England. The farmer might get half
price for his wool and pay more than one price for whatever he was
obliged to buy. There was plenty of private exasperation, but no open
fighting, against this ruling of the London markets by Hamburg, Luebeck,
Antwerp and Cologne. Cabot's clear head and wide experience plainly
showed him the enormous waste of such a system, but he did not see how
to unlock the harbors. Neither, at present, did the King, whose shrewd
brain was at work on the problem.

Henry Tudor