class="c3">Effect of
finding
mineral
wealth in
Central
America.

The discovery of minerals in a district brings about dense population and a hurried settlement. Men come to fisheries or hunting-grounds at stated times, and leave to come again. The progress of agricultural colonization, if steady and continuous, is usually very slow. Thus, where Central America gave gold and silver, there adventurers from Europe hurried in and stayed. The fisheries of Newfoundland saw men come and go; the sea was there the attraction, not the land. The agricultural resources of Virginia and New England were left undeveloped by Europeans, until the time came when business-like companies were formed by men who could afford to wait, and when enthusiasts went over the Atlantic not so much to make money as to live patiently and in the fear of God.

But, though the sixteenth century passed away before men's eyes, which were dazzled with the splendour of the tropics, had given more than passing glances to the sober landscape of North America, discoverers from Cabot onwards were not idle; and from the first, the ever powerful hope of finding a new road to the Indies took adventurers to the north-west in spite of cold and wind and tide. Because North America was unattractive in itself, therefore men seem to have imagined that it must be on the way to something better; and also, because it was unattractive in itself, they did not wait to see what could be made out of it, but kept perpetually pushing on to a further goal. They argued, as Bacon shows in the passage already quoted, and argued rightly, that in the north the Old and New Worlds were nearest together, and that here therefore was the point at which to cross from one to the other. They found sea channels evidently leading towards the west; they saw the great river of Canada⁷ come widening down from the same quarter; and thus, long after the quest of the Indies had in Central America been swallowed up in the riches found on the way, in North America it remained the one great object of the men who went out from Europe, and of the Kings who sent them out.

⁷ The idea that there was a way to the Indies by the St. Lawrence long continued. Thus Lescarbot writes (Nova Francia, Erondelle's translation, 1609, chap. xiii, p. 87) of the great river of Canada as 'taking her beginning from one of the lakes which do meet at the stream of her course (and so I think), so that it hath two courses, the one from the east towards France, the other from the west towards the south sea.'

As the first discoverer, Cabot, set sail to find the passage to Cathay, 'having great desire to traffic for the spices as the Portingals did,'⁸ so all who came after during the century of exploration kept the same end firmly in view. Francis I of France dispatched Verrazano to find the passage to the East; Cartier, the Breton sailor, came back from the St. Lawrence with tales which savoured of the Indies, of 'a river that goeth south-west, from whence there is a whole month's sailing to go to a certain land where there is neither ice nor snow seen'⁹—of a 'country of Saguenay, in which are infinite rubies, gold and other riches'¹⁰—of 'a land where cinnamon and cloves are gathered';¹¹ and his third voyage was, in his King's words, 'to the lands of Canada and Hochelaga, which form the extremity of Asia towards the west.'¹² Frobisher's voyage in 1576 led to the formation of a company of Cathay. As early as 1527, Master Robert Thorne wrote 'an information of the parts of the world' discovered by the Spaniards and Portuguese, and 'of the way to the Moluccas by the north.' Sir Humphrey Gilbert published 'a discourse' 'to prove a passage by the north-west to Cathaia and the East Indies'; and Richard Hakluyt himself, in the 'epistle dedicatory' to Philip Sydney, which forms the preface to his collection of Divers Voyages touching the discovery of America,¹³ sums up the arguments for the existence of 'that short and easy passage by the north-west which we have hitherto so long desired.' In short, the record of the sixteenth century in North America was, in the main, a record of successive voyagers seeking after a way to the East, supplemented by the fishing trade which was attracted to the shores of Newfoundland.

⁸ Gomara, quoted by Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 30 (1810 ed.).

⁹ Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 278.

¹⁰ Ibid. p. 281.

¹¹ Ibid. p. 285.

¹² See Parkman's Pioneers of France in the New World (25th ed., 1888), p. 217.

¹³ Published in 1582; edited by the Hakluyt Society in 1850.

The two men who opened America to Europe were of Italian parentage—Columbus the Genoese, and Cabot, born at Genoa, domiciled at Venice.¹⁴ The two great trading republics of the Middle Ages at once crowned their work in the world, and signed their own death warrant, in providing Spain and England with the sailors whose discoveries transferred the centre of life and movement from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. The King of France too turned to Italy for a discoverer to rival Columbus and Cabot, and sent Verrazano the Florentine, at the end of 1523, to search out the coasts of North America.

¹⁴ As to Cabot's parentage see below. If the voyages of the Zeni were genuine, the Venetians could have claimed a yet older share in the record of European connexion with America.

At the first dawn of discovery those coasts were not wholly given over to French or English adventurers. Though Florida was the northern limit of Spanish conquest and settlement, Spanish claims extended indefinitely over the whole continent; and the French King's scheme for the colonization of Canada, in 1541, under the leadership of Cartier and Roberval, roused the suspicion of the Spanish court as an attempt to infringe an acknowledged monopoly. The Portuguese at the very first took part in north-western discovery, and with good reason; for it was their own Indies which were the final goal, and they could not afford to leave to other nations to find a shorter way thither than their own route round the Cape. Thus it was that Corte Real set out from Lisbon for the north-west in the year 1500, having 'craved a general license of the King Emmanuel to discover the Newfoundland,' and 'sailed unto that climate which standeth under the north in 50 degrees of latitude.'¹⁵ We find, too, records of Portuguese working in the same direction under foreign flags. In 1501 two patents were granted by Henry VII of England to English and Portuguese conjointly to