Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/232

 178 ENGLAND'S ATTEMPTS TO REACH INDIA the same, and changing ships and victualing them, they set sail to come into England." The haggard sur- vivors reached Cornwall in October, 1536, so worn by hunger and misery that one of them could not be rec- ognized by his own father and mother save by a wart on his knee. The French captain, whom they had plun- dered, afterwards appealed to Henry VDX His Maj- esty, however, was so moved by the sufferings of the English crews " that he punished not his subjects, but of his own purse made full and royal recompense unto the French." The next expedition which must be noticed was the famous one of Sir Hugh Willoughby in 1553 to find a passage by the northeast. Sebastian Cabot stands ar- raigned as a disloyal son who filched his father's achievements to fabricate a reputation for himself. But he was also a skilled geographer and an indefat- igable projector of voyages. Born in Bristol, and asso- ciated with his father in the patent of Henry VII for the expedition which in 1497 discovered North America, he became dissatisfied with the meagre rewards of Henry VIII for his map-making, and about 1513 re- paired to Spain. There he found employment under King Ferdinand as a cartographer and member of the Council of the New Indies. After various vicissitudes, during which he retrans- ferred his services to England and back again to Spain, Sebastian Cabot finally returned to England in 1547, and gained distinction as arbitrator in an old-standing dispute between the London merchants and the Han-