ght show what England had to barter, the little _Matthew_ sailed
from Bristol under the command of John Cabot with his nineteen-year-old
son Sebastian and a crew of eighteen--nearly all Englishmen, used to the
North Atlantic. The King's permission was for five ships, but the wise
Cabot had heard something of the hardships of the first expeditions to
Hispaniola, and preferred to keep within his means, and sail with men
whom he could trust.

But on this voyage they found locked harbors not closed by the order of
any King but by natural causes,--harbors without inhabitants or means of
supporting life, and so far north as to be blocked by ice for half the
year. They sailed seven hundred leagues west and came at last to a rocky
wooded coast. Now in all the books of travel in Asia, mention had been
made of an immense territory ruled by the Grand Cham of Tartary, whose
hordes had nearly overrun Eastern Europe in times not so very long ago.
The adventures of Marco Polo the Venetian, in a great book sent to Cabot
by his wife's father, had been the fairy-tale of Sebastian and his
brothers from the time they were old enough to understand a story. In
this book it was written how Marco Polo and his companions passed
through utterly uninhabited wilds in the Great Khan's empire, and
afterward came to a region of barbarians, who robbed and killed
travelers. These fierce people lived on the fruits and game of the
forest, cultivating no fields; they dressed in the skins of wild animals
and used salt for money. Could this be the place? If so it behooved the
little party of explorers to be careful. As yet, nobody dreamed that any
mainland discovered by sailing westward from northern Europe could be
anything but Asia.

Cautiously they sailed along the rugged shore, but not a human being was
to be seen. It was the twenty-fourth of June, when by all accounts the
people of any civilized country should be coasting along from port to
port fishing or engaged in traffic. The sun blazed hot and clear, but
the inquisitive noses of the crew scented no cinnamon, cloves or ginger
in the air. All of these, according to Marco Polo, were in the
wilderness he crossed, and also great rivers. On crossing one of these
rivers he had found himself in a populous country with castles and
cities. Were there no people on this desolate shore--or were they lying
in wait for the voyagers to land, that they might seize and kill them
and plunder the ship?

One thing