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Rh crossed to the coasts of Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island before the Genoese discoverer found for Spain the islands of America. To his last hour Columbus thought he had reached "an unfamiliar part of India," and for this reason he had named the indigines Indians. Deceived, perhaps, by the bruited discovery of the "West Indies," a Venetian merchant, by name John Cabotto, set out from Bristol on the twenty-fourth day of June, 1497, with the hope of finding, by going to the west, a sea-route to India. In the same year, Vasco da Gama, sailed to the east on the same mission, and was successful.

But in place of a tropic strand, the forbidding coast of Newfoundland was the first that Cabot sighted. Choosing a landfall on the eastward shore, he disembarked from the good ship Matthew and possessed himself of the island in the name of his patron, the seventh Henry of England. During a subsequent voyage, in the year 1498, he and his son Sebastian explored the coast from Labrador to the Carolinas.

Two Portuguese brothers named Cortoreal refound northern America in 1500, and as early as 1504, French and Spanish fishermen baited cod in the waters off Newfoundland and Cape Breton. Peter Martyr's Decades of the New World, written in 1516 and translated from French to English in 1555, affirms that "the Brytons and Frenche men are accustomed to take fysshe in the coastes