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28 effort to colonize for another eighty years, and the immediate effect of the discovery was not great. The times were not yet ripe. Exploration and land-grabbing were games for kings, and not for private endeavor, as the merchants of Bristol had doubtless found; and Henry, as the Milanese ambassador observed, was "not lavish."

Owing to the great demand for fish in a Catholic Europe, however, the shores of Newfoundland soon became the accustomed resort of English, French, and Portuguese. The coast between Canada and Florida, nevertheless, remained practically unexplored, and the maps of the period either break the continent into islands, or connect the two known portions by a fanciful delineation, considered by some students to represent the eastern coast of Asia. Where nothing is certain, all is possible, and it was thought that the passage to the East, so vainly sought elsewhere, might yet be found in this unknown part of the world. In 1524, Verrazano, under the flag of France, and, a year later, Gomez, under that of Spain, undertook again the task of finding a westward route to Zipangu and Cathay. The Frenchman, apparently, coasted northward from Carolina to Newfoundland, and the Spaniard seems to have covered part of the same range, though the limits are not known, nor even the direction in which he sailed.

The three main contestants for empire in North America had now appeared. Spain, France, and England had all planted their flags upon our shores, although their future struggles were as yet hardly foreshadowed. The fishing grounds, on the high seas and far from the routes of Spain's gold-laden galleons, were open to all, though the English seem early to have established some sort of authority over the rough fishermen of the nations