balmed in the poetry of Tasso; Da Gama is the hero of the national epic of Portugal; but the elder Cabot was so little celebrated that even the reality of his voyage has been denied ; and Sebastian derived neither benefit nor immediate renown from his expedition. His main object had been the discovery of a north-western passage to Asia, and in this respect his voyage was a failure; while Da Gama was cried up by all the world for having found the way by the south-east. For the next half century it was hardly borne in mind that the Venetian and his son had, in two successive years, reached the continent of North America, before Columbus came upon the low coast of Guiana. But England acquired through their energy such a right to North America as this priority could confer. The successors of Henry VII. recognised the claims of Spain and Portugal only so far as they actually occupied the territories to which they laid pretension; and, at a later day, the English parliament and the English courts derided a title founded not upon occupancy, but upon the award of a Roman. pontiff.

"Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit," were the words of Columbus, as on Ascension Day, 1506, he breathed his last. His great discovery was the triumph of free mind. In the year of his death, Copernicus, like him, emancipated from authority, attained the knowledge of the true theory of our solar system.

For nearly sixty years, during a period while marine adventure engaged the most intense public curiosity, Sebastian Cabot, from whom England derived a claim to our shores, was reverenced for his knowledge of cosmography and his skill in navigation. On the death of Henry VII. he was called out of England by the command of Ferdinand, the Catholic king of Castile, and was appointed one of the council for the New Indies, ever cherishing the hope to discover "that hidden secret of nature," the direct passage to Asia. In 1518 he was named Pilot Major of Spain, and no one could guide a ship to the Indies whom he had not first examined and approved. He attended the congress which in April, 1524, assembled at Badajoz to decide on the respective pretensions of Portugal and Spain to the islands of the Moluccas. A company having

been formed at Seville for commerce with the Indies, in April, 1526, he took command of an expedition with plans of passing into the Pacific, examining the south-western coast of the American continent, and opening a trade with the Moluccas. His larger purposes being defeated by a mutiny, he entered the Plata, and discovered the Parana and Paraguay. Returning to Seville in July, 1530, he was reinstated in his high office by the Emperor Charles V.

Manuel, king of Portugal in its happiest years, grieving at his predecessor's neglect of Columbus, was moved by emulation to despatch an expedition for west and north-west discovery. In the summer of 1501 two caravels, under the command of Gaspar Cortereal, ranged the coast of North America for six or seven hundred miles, till, somewhere to the south of the fiftieth degree, they were stopped by ice. Of the country. along which he sailed he admired the verdure, and the stately forests in which pines, large enough for masts and yards, promised an object of gainful commerce. But, with the Portuguese, men were an article of traffic; and Cortereal freighted his ships with more than fifty Indians, whom, on his return in October, he sold as slaves. The name of Labrador, transferred from the territory south of the St. Lawrence to a more northern coast, is perhaps the only permanent trace of Portuguese adventure within the limits of North America.

The French competed without delay for the New World. Within seven years of the discovery of the continent the fisheries of Newfoundland were known to the hardy sailors of Brittany and Normandy, and they continued to be frequented. The island of Cape Breton took its name from their remembrance of home; and in France it was usual to esteem them the discoverers of the country. A map of the Gulf of St. Lawrence was drawn in 1506 by Denys, a citizen of Honfleur.

In 1508, savages from the north-eastern coast had been brought to France; ten years later plans of colonization in North America were suggested by De Lery and Saint-Just.

There exists a letter to Henry VIII., from St. John, Newfoundland, written in August, 1527, by an English captain, in which he declares he found in that one harbor eleven sail of Normans and one Breton, engaged in the fishery. The

French king, engrossed by the unsuccessful rivalry with Charles V., could hardly respect so humble an interest. But Chabot, admiral of France, a man of bravery and influence, acquainted by his office with the fishermen on whose vessels he levied some small exactions for his private emolument, interested Francis in the design of exploring and colonizing the New World. James Cartier, a seaman of St. Malo, was selected to lead the expedition. His several voyages had a permanent effect in guiding the attention of France to the region of the St. Lawrence. On the twentieth of April, 1534, he, with two ships, left the harbor of St. Malo; and prosperous weather brought him on the tenth of May to the coasts of Newfoundland. Having almost circumnavigated the island, he turned to the south, and, crossing the gulf, entered the bay, which he called Des Chaleurs, from the heats of midsummer. Finding no passage to the west, in July he sailed along the coast, as far as the smaller inlet of Gaspé. There, upon a point of land at the entrance of the haven, a lofty cross was raised, bearing a shield with the lilies of France and an appropriate inscription. Leaving the bay of Gaspé, Cartier in August discovered the great river of Canada, and ascended it till he could discern land on either side. As he was unprepared to remain during the winter, on the ninth of that month he steered for Europe, and on the fifth of September his fleet entered the harbor of St. Malo. His native city and France were filled with the fame of his discoveries.

The court listened to the urgency of the friends of Cartier; a new commission was issued; three well-furnished ships were provided by the king; and some of the young nobility of France volunteered to join the new expedition. The whole company, repairing to the cathedral, received absolution and the bishop's blessing, and in May, 1535, sailed for the New World, full of hopes of discoveries and plans of colonization.

After a stormy voyage they arrived within sight of Newfoundland. Carried to the west of it by a route not easily traced, in August, on the day of Saint Lawrence, they gave the name of that martyr to a part of the noble gulf which opened before them; a name which has gradually extended to

the whole, and to the river. After examining the isle of Anticosti, they reached in September a pleasant harbor in the isle since called Orleans. The natives, Indians of Algonkin descent, received them with unsuspecting hospitality. After exploring the island and adjacent shore, Cartier moved his two large vessels safely into the deep water of the river now known as the St. Charles, and in his galiot sailed up the majestic stream to the chief Indian settlement on the Island of Hochelaga. The language of its inhabitants proves them to have been of the Huron family of tribes. The town lay at the foot of a hill, which he climbed. As he reached the summit he was moved to admiration by the prospect before him of woods and waters and mountains. Imagination presented it as the emporium of inland commerce, and the metropolis of a continental province; filled with bright anticipations, he called the hill Mont-Réal, and time, that has transferred the name to the island, is realizing his visions. Cartier gathered from the Indians some indistinct account of the countries now contained in northern Vermont and New York; of a cataract at the west end of Lake Ontario; and of the waters now known as the bay of Hudson. Rejoining his ships, the winter, rendered frightful by the ravages of the scurvy, was passed where they were anchored. At the approach of spring, a cross, erected upon the land, bore a shield with the arms of his country, and an inscription declaring Francis to be the rightful king of this new-found realm, to which the Breton mariner gave the name of New France. On the sixth of July, 1536, he regained St. Malo.

The description which Cartier gave of the country on the St. Lawrence furnished arguments against attempting a colony. The severity of the climate terrified even the inhabitants of the north of France; and no mines of silver and gold, no veins abounding in diamonds and precious stones, had been promised by the faithful narrative of the voyage. Three or four years, therefore, elapsed before plans of colonization were renewed. Yet imagination did not fail to anticipate the establishment of a state upon the fertile banks of a river which surpassed all the streams of Europe in grandeur, and flowed through a country situated between nearly the same parallels

as France. Soon after a short peace had terminated the third desperate struggle between Francis I. and Charles V., attention to America was again awakened; men at court deemed it unworthy a gallant nation to abandon the acquisition; and in January, 1540, a nobleman of Picardy, Francis de la Roque, Lord of Roberval, a man of provincial distinction, sought and obtained a commission as lord of the unknown land then called Norimbega, and viceroy, with full regal authority, over the immense territories and islands which lie near the gulf or along the river St. Lawrence. But the ambitious nobleman could not dispense with the services of the former naval commander, who possessed the confidence of the king. Cartier was accordingly in October appointed captain-general and chief pilot of the expedition; he was directed to collect persons of every trade and art; to repair with them to the newly discovered territory; and to dwell there among the natives. To make up the complement of his men, he might take from the prisons whom he would, excepting only those arrested for treason or counterfeiting money. The enterprise was watched with jealousy by Spain.

The division of authority between Cartier and Roberval defeated the undertaking. Roberval was ambitious of power; and Cartier desired the exclusive honor of discovery. They neither embarked in company nor acted in concert. In May, 1541, Cartier sailed from St. Malo. Arrived at the scene of his former adventures, near the site of Quebec, he built a fort; but no considerable advances in geographical knowledge appear to have been made. The winter passed in sullenness and gloom. In June, 1542, he and his ships returned to France, just before Roberval arrived with a considerable re-enforcement. Unsustained by Cartier, Roberval accomplished no more than a verification of previous discoveries. Remaining about a year in America, he abandoned his immense viceroyalty. Perhaps the expedition on its return entered the bay of Massachusetts.

For the next years no further discoveries were attempted by the government of a nation which was rent by civil wars and the conflict with Calvinism. Yet the number and importance of the fishing stages increased; in 1578 there were one