Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/59

Rh that the eastern portion of British North America was the first part of the New World that was constituted a colony, that from 1500 to 1579 commissions were regularly issued to the Corte Reals as governors of Terra Nova, and that by virtue of this claim on the part of the Portuguese at least three settlements were made by the Portuguese themselves, and later by the Spaniards (after they had annexed Portugal), one of these colonies being the earliest European settlement in North America after the discovery of the New World by Cabot.

A flood of light has been shed upon this early colonization by Senhor Ernesto do Canto, of San Miguel, Azores, whose most recent publication on early Portuguese exploration consists mainly of a selection of documents connected with the family of the Corte Reals, the explorers and first governors of Northeastern America.

The information contained in Senhor do Canto's work enables me to claim for the northeastern parts of America almost a century of historical existence prior to the seventeenth century. This colony, embracing Labrador, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia, and, under the grant to Fagundes, probably a large portion on the east coast of the present United States, was far the earliest European colony (excepting perhaps Vinland) not only in North America, but also in the New World, for the commissions of the Corte Reals date in regular succession from 1500 (i. e., two years after America had been discovered by Columbus, and six years after its discovery by Cabot) until 1579, soon after which Portugal and its possessions were annexed to Spain.

This colony of the Corte Reals was not merely a nominal one, for in the course of the sixteenth century the Portuguese made a settlement in Cape Breton in 1521, and another in 1567, while the Spaniards—their successors—sent a third to the same country. Of these three colonies little or nothing is known; even the colony of Terra Nova has lost its place in history, which begins the annals of British North America a century later with the arrival of French settlers in La Nouvelle France.

In 1500 Gaspar Corte Real explored the coast of Labrador, probably nearly as far north as Hudson Strait, and also Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. He brought back several of the natives, who resembled the present Micmac Indians. He went there again, in 1501, with three vessels, but that in which he sailed never returned. In 1502 his brother, Miguel, sailed in search of Gaspar, and met with the same fate. Again, in 1503, an expedition was sent out to try to get some tidings of the two gallant brothers, but without success, and the king, discouraged by these disasters, refused to allow Vasco Annes, the elder brother, and one of the ornaments of his court, to continue the search.

In early charts of this continent the Portuguese flag is frequently represented as waving over Labrador, Newfoundland (Baccalaos), and