Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/61

Rh find it in my heart to make proof whether it be true or no, that I have read, and heard, of Frenchmen and Portugals to be in that river" (the St. Lawrence) "and about Cape Breton. If I had not been deceived by the vile Portuguese descending of the Jews and the Judas kind, I had not failed to have searched that river and the coast of Cape Breton which might have been found out to have benefittedbenefited [sic] our country." The colony of Fagundes of 1521 has been unknown to historians, though the circumstances that led to the attempt to colonize Terra Nova have not escaped attention. Fagundes had already been an explorer, and his name is connected with the northeast coast of America by early charts, while his discoveries, as we have seen, are referred to in his commission.

We also meet with a probable reference to this colony in connection with the cattle and swine which Champlain (1618) says "were left there" (Sable Island) "more than sixty years ago" (i. e., before 1558) by the Portuguese. In Haies's report of the voyage of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, given by Hakluyt, and probably written about 1583, he says, "Sablon lyeth about twenty-five leagues to the seaward of Cape Breton, whither we were determined to go upon intelligence we had of a Portugal during our abode at St John's, who was himself present when the Portuguese (about thirty years past) did put on the said island both neat and swine to breed, which were since exceedingly multiplying."

It appears that the Baron de Lery, in 1518, landed some cattle at Canso, and the remainder on Sable Island, on his abandoning his intention of forming a settlement in Nova Scotia. It seems also probable that the Portuguese must for the same reasons have landed their cattle at Sable Island, and that the date is the probable time when the settlement of Fagundes was broken up.

—De Laet (book ii, chapter v) tells us that the Portuguese placed Port Ningani from eighteen to twenty leagues to the northwest of the cape which afterward gave its name to the Island Cape Breton, "where they formerly had a settlement, which they have since abandoned." Champlain says that the Portuguese were forced to do this by the cold and rigorous climate.

Until recently this was all we knew about this colony, but Senhor E. do Canto has now discovered a MS. charter in the Torre do Tombo, at Lisbon, from which it appears that the king, on May 4, 1567, appointed Manuel Corte Real notary public of a colony about to be founded in Terra Nova, and for which two ships and a caravel were then about to start from Terceira. In 1579 the captaincy of that colony was conferred upon Vasco Annes, the fourth in succession of the Corte Reals. The author of the "Tractado das Ilhas Novas" appears to have sailed with the expedition of 1567, and it is quite clear that up till then no tidings from the colony founded by Fagundes had