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Senior Colony was first settled when "Ireland was inhabited by barbarians, England and Scotland were separate kingdoms and men wore plate armour." Hundreds of years before that interesting period, Bjarni and Leif Erikson looked on its granite east wall, if sagas are credible. John Cabot's landfall in 1497 is identified by most historians with Cape Bonavista, the land he "first saw" from the deck of the Matthew, A generation later Jacques Cartier sighted the same outstanding naze but because of ice in the bay landed in a more southerly harbour, which he named St. Katherine for his wife, home in St. Malo.

Previous to Cabot's and Cartier's discoveries fishermen from Brittany and Biscay had profited by the fisheries of the western continent. Later came Portuguese, Spanish and English adventurers unafraid of stormy seas and took their toll of cod inshore and off the Banks of Newfoundland. A map of 1541 represents the New-founde-launde as