explore, trade, and settle in America;¹⁶ and, in 1525, Gomez, who had served under Magellan, and who, like Magellan, was a Portuguese in the service of Spain, set out from the Spanish port of Corunna to search for the North-West Passage.¹⁷

¹⁵ See Purchas' Pilgrims, pt. 2, bk. x, chap. i. A brief 'collection of voyages, chiefly of Spaniards and Portugals, taken out of Antoine Galvano's Book of the Discoveries of the World.'

¹⁶ See Doyle's History of the English in America, vol. i, chap. iv.

¹⁷ See Justin Winsor, vol. iv, chap. i, p. 10.

Basque fishermen were among the very first visitors to Newfoundland, and, even after the North American continent was becoming a sphere of French and English colonization, to the exclusion of the southern nations of Europe, the Spaniards and Portuguese still held their own in the fisheries. The record of almost every voyage to Newfoundland notices Spanish or Portuguese ships plying their trade on the banks.¹⁸ A writer¹⁹ in the year 1578, on 'the true state and commodities of Newfoundland,' tells us that, according to his information, there were at that date above one hundred Spanish ships engaged in the cod fisheries, in addition to twenty or thirty whalers from Biscay; that the Portuguese ships did not exceed fifty, and that those owned by French and Bretons numbered about one hundred and fifty. Edward Hayes, the chronicler of Gilbert's last voyage in 1583, relates how the Portuguese at Newfoundland provisioned the English admiral's ships for their return voyage, and adds that 'the Portugals and French chiefly have a notable trade of fishing upon this bank.'²⁰

¹⁸ See Parkman's Pioneers of France in the New World (25th ed., 1888), pp. 189, 190, and notes.

¹⁹ Anthony Parkhurst. The letter was written to Hakluyt, and published in his collection, vol. iii, p. 171.

²⁰ Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 190.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Spanish Government still claimed for its subjects the right to fish on the Newfoundland coast, among other grounds on that of prior discovery, a claim which was only finally relinquished under the provisions of the Peace of Paris in 1763;²¹ and, writing about the same date, the author of the European Settlements in America noted that the Spaniards still shared in the fishery.²²

²¹ As to the question whether Basque fishermen had found their way to Newfoundland before Cabot, see the note to p. 189 of Mr. Parkman's Pioneers of France in the New World. The reasons for thinking that these fishermen forestalled Cabot seem to be—(1) the argument of probability; (2) assertions of old writers to that effect; (3) the application of the Basque name 'Baccalaos' to Newfoundland, and the statement of Peter Martyr that Cabot found that word in use for codfish among the natives; (4) the claim advanced by the Spanish Government to right of fishing at Newfoundland on the ground of prior discovery by Biscayan fishermen. As to this last point, see Papers relative to the rupture with Spain, 1762. One source of friction at this time between Great Britain and Spain was what Pitt styles in a dispatch (p. 3) 'the stale and inadmissible pretensions of the Biscayans and Guipuscoans to fish at Newfoundland.' As to this claim, the Earl of Bristol, British minister at Madrid, writes (p. 53), 'With regard to the Newfoundland fishery, Mr. Wall urged, what I have also conveyed in some former despatches, that the Spaniards indeed pleaded, in favour of their claim to a share of the Bacallao trade, the first discovery of that island.'

²² European Settlements in America, pt. 6, chap. xxviii, 'Newfoundland.' The author (? Burke) says, 'The French and Spaniards, especially the former, have a large share (in the fishery).'

Hayes, who has just been quoted, tells us that more than thirty years before he wrote, i.e. about 1550, the Portuguese had touched at Sable Island and left there 'both neat and swine to breed.' In the same way they left live stock at Mauritius on their way to and from the East; and in like manner the Spaniards landed pigs at the Bermudas²³ on their early voyages to the West Indies.

²³ See vol. i of this series, p. 163, and vol. ii, p. 6 and note. Lescarbot states that the French Baron de Léry, who attempted to found a colony in North America in 1518, left cattle on Sable Island. See Parkman's Pioneers of France, p. 193, and Doyle's History of the English in America, vol. i, chap. v, p. 111.

If evidence were wanted that, in the oldest days of movement from Europe to the West, southern sailors did not go only to tropical America, it would be found in the naming of the North American coasts and islands. The first point on the coast of North America, sighted by the first discoverer—the Italian Cabot—was spoken of under the Italian name of Prima Terra Vista. The name Baccalaos²⁴ tells of voyages of the Basques, as Cape Breton of visitors from Brittany; and, after Corte Real's voyages, the east coast of Newfoundland was, as old maps testify, christened for a while Terra de Corte Reall.²⁵ Soon, however, the Spaniards found Mexico, Peru, and Central America enough and more than enough to absorb their whole attention; the Portuguese were over-weighted by their eastern empire and Brazil: and North America was given over, first to be explored and then to be settled, by the peoples of the north of Europe; who gathered strength as their southern rivals declined, and whose work was more lasting because more slow.

²⁴ 'Baccalaos' is the Spanish name for codfish. It is of Basque origin. Cabot, it is stated, gave the name generally to the lands which he found. The name was subsequently applied more especially to Newfoundland. Thus Edward Hayes in his account of Sir Humphrey Gilbert's last voyage, under the heading 'a brief relation of the Newfoundland and the commodities thereof' (Hakluyt, iii, 193), speaks of 'that which we do call the Newfoundland and the Frenchmen Bacalaos.' Various small islands, however, in these parts were also given this name by different writers. At the present day, on the maps of Newfoundland, an islet off the east coast, at the extreme north of the peninsula of Avalon, bears the name of Baccalieu. See Parkman, p. 189 note as above, and the chapter on the voyages of the Cabots in Justin Winsor's history, vol. iii.

²⁵ The name 'Labrador' is supposed to have been derived from the fact that some North American natives, brought back in one of