Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/215

Rh country they had discovered they gave the name of Prima Vista (First View), which, however, it soon lost, having been since successively called Corterealis, from Gaspar Cortereal, a Portuguese, who fell in with the same coast in 1500; Estotiland, from its having been supposed to be the country so denominated in the (possibly fabulous) account of the voyage of the Zeni, about 1350; New France, after Canada was taken possession of and settled by the French; New Britain, by the English after their discoveries, in the early part of the seventeenth century, along the coasts of Hudson's Bay; and by the Portuguese Labrador, or Tierra di Labrador, said to be a corruption of Laborador (labour), from some traces of cultivation which the part of the coast they first saw seemed to present.

Sebastian Cabot appears to have made two more voyages in the two following years, in the second of which, taking a course declining towards the south, he reached the Gulf of Mexico. Columbus also, on the 30th of May, 1498, sailed from San Lucar de Barrameda, on his third voyage, in which he discovered the island of Trinidad and the country adjacent to the mouths of the Orinoco—his first view of the American continent, the northern coast of which, as we have just seen, had been reached about a year before by the Cabots. And contemporaneously with these voyages towards the west, by the Spanish and English navigators, those of Portugal were prosecuting the passage towards the east around the extremity of Africa, which had been laid open by Bartholomew Diaz. On the 8th of July, 1497, Vasco de Gama sailed from the Tagus on the first voyage by that route to India, the western coast of which, at