are misty and belong to the domain of legend.1 Whatever may be the truth with regard to Phoenicians or Norsemen, it is certain that for centuries the Atlantic had not been crossed by man at the time when Europe began to make more active inquiries with regard to India and the far eastern lands, whence came the spices and other commodities, in the commerce of which the Venetians had piled up immense wealth. From the earliest days, the produce of the East was familiar in the great marts of the Mediterranean. Now it came up the Red Sea and across Egypt to Alexandria; now up the Persian Gulf and across Asia Minor; now through Central Asia to the Black Sea and Constantinople. As the fortunes of war attended Roman or Arab, Greek or Venetian, so was the direction commerce took affected. In the fifteenth century the Venetians, as Sir Alfred Lyall has said, appeared to literally "hold the gorgeous East in fee;" Genoa being her most strenuous rival. During the greater part of that century, the Portuguese were on the qui vive to seize any opportunity for opening up direct trade relations with India. Prince Henry the navigator, a son, curiously enough, of an English princess, dreamed dreams of reaching India by sea, and handed on his dreams to inspire those who came after him. Whether they were the outcome of the restless spirit of the age, or whether they were chiefly responsible for the generation of that spirit, Prince Henry the Navigators studies and speculations imparted an impulse to maritime enterprise which had momentous results. The west coast of Africa was explored, and in the year 1484 the king of Benin-then an empire of some importance and pretensions to civilization, not the unmitigatedly barbarous country it now is visited, or sent envoys to, the court of Portugal. He told Dom Joan so much about India and Prester Johu, that the Portuguese monarch determined to send 1 Canada, by J. G. Bourinot, C.M.G., "Story of the Nations Series." T. Fisher Urwin. envoys viâ Venice, Alexandria, and Mecca, to discover India and all about it. Dom Joan did not live to see the realization of his hopes, but his successor, Dom Manoel, earnestly took up the task left unfinished. The end was advanced at a bound by the discovery of the Cape in 1486. Bartholomew Diaz, or Janifante, or both, probably quite by accident, rounded the southern extremity of Africa, and returned with the welcome news to Lisbon. It is not difficult to imagine the excitement. it occasioned; and the wonder is that for more than ten years it was not taken advantage of. Whilst Portugal was preparing for the despatch of the first expedition by sea to India, great things were taking place elsewhere. Columbus, a native of Genoa, had induced the king of Spain to listen to his plan for reaching the Indies by the west, and in 1492 embarked on the voyage which resulted in the discovery of the West Indies-a name significant of the belief that the Indies had been attained. A good many points are in doubt with regard to Columbus; but there are some concerning which little doubt is now possible. Among them is the claim that he was the first European to set foot on the American continent. That claim is inadmissible. In an ingenious article three years ago,2 Captain Gambier sought to prove that Jean Cousin, a Frenchman, discovered the Amazon in 1488, and that Columbus only followed in his footsteps and reaped his laurels. Captain Gambier is rather weak in his dates, and knows a great deal more about Cousin than about Columbus. Columbus endeavored for years to find some one of influence and wealth to support him in carrying out his plan for reaching the east by the west. It may be that Cousin was the first to discover the New World; and that the credit due to him has never been given. If his claim is not good, Columbus must still yield pride of place to another. Columbus did not touch the mainland of America till 1498. In May, 1497, 2 Fortnightly Review, Jan., 1894. John gra cious letters patentes under your grete seale in due forme to be made according to the tenour hereafter ensuying." The letters patent, which were granted on April 5th, according to Rymer, who is quoted by Mr. Harrisse, set forth that it was the Cabots' desire "Upon their own proper costs and charges to seek out, discover, and find whatsoever isles, countries, regions, or provinces of the heathen and infidels, whatsoever they be, and in what part of the world soever they be, which before this time have been unknown to all Christians." The first expedition-to summarize Mr. Harrisse's exhaustively argued conclusions-consisted of one small vessel with a crew of some eighteen men. Cabot set sail in the middle of May, 1497, steered north and west after leaving Ireland, struck land, according to general opinion, at the easternmost point of Cape Breton, according to Mr. Harrisse at Cape Chudleigh, and returned to England in August to receive from the king the munificent reward of £10, which was given "to hym that founde the new isle." Modern ideas of Cabot's landfall are based chiefly on the charts and assertions of Sebastian, and those who are organizing the celebrations in honor of the Cabots would do well to weigh the circumstantial evidence adduced by Mr. Harrisse. His reasons for locating the landfall in Labrador, and not in Nova Scotia, seem conclusive, and it is at least curious that the cartographical proof he adduces is supported by a legend which says that Labrador was so named because the new country was first sighted by a laborer of the Azores. Cabot sailed from Bristol, Henry VII. "to graunt your and in the August following he was back again, having planted the English flag on the shores of the continent which now bears the name of one who was assuredly late in the field -Amerigo Vespuccius. Only within the last few years has it been easy to understand who was who in the matter of the first voyages across the Atlantic. History, thanks to the indefatigable labors of Mr. Henry Harrisse, has now done justice to the man to whose enterprise England owes the right to say that her flag first floated over America. It has hitherto been widely accepted as a fact that Sebastian Cabot was the captain of the English ship which first touched the new continent. Even so usually admirable and trustworthy a referee as "Whitaker's Almanac" mentions Sebastian in that connection. Sebastian was the son of John Cabot, and the net result of Mr. Harrisse's splendid work-a work which will take weeks to digest, and is invaluable-is to show that the son was an impostor. He took credit for all his father did. Sebastian's reputation will hardly survive the searching analysis to which his character and career are subjected by Mr. Harrisse. John Cabot, like Columbus, was a Genoese-not a Venetian. He became a Venetian subject, just as later he became an English subject. His son Sebastian was probably Venetian born. John came to England full of the ideas animating Venice and Genoa, that the Spice Islands of the East might be reached by a new route. With this end in view, Columbus crossed the Atlantic on behalf of Spain, and Cabot crossed it on behalf of England. Cabot found an incentive in the Whilst Cabot was preparing for the reports which reached him of the tri- voyage west, Vasco da Gama was makumphs of Columbus, and the Bristol ing his arrangements for the initial men were ready to help him. For voyage to India. It is matter for regret years they had been sending out expe- that the same ample account of the ditions, futile in every sense, "in search former event has not been handed of the island of Brazil and the seven down to us, as may be found in the cities." On the 5th March, 1496, John works of Barros, Correa, and others of Cabot, with his three sons Louis, Sebastian, and Sanctus, filed a petition to 1 John and Sebastian Cabot, by Henry Harrisse. London: B. F. Stevens. 1896. 2 Mr. Harrisse mentions both March 5th and April 5th, but I take it April 5th, is correct because the petition seems to have been dated March 5th, the latter. With the aid of Gaspar Correa's "Lendas da India," translated and annotated for the Hakluyt Society nearly thirty years ago, by the present Lord Stanley of Alderley,' we are able to follow the movements of Vasco da Gama from the time of his appointment by Dom Manoel to his return from India. Vasco da Gama left Lisbon, after elaborate preparations, on July 8th, in charge of three vessels, Sam Miguel, Sam Gabriel, and Sam Rafael. He was equipped with powers to make peace or war; to be a mere merchant or a warrior, as circumstances rendered necessary; to be an ambassador or to send embassies to kings and rulers, and generally to be and do whatever was essential to safety and success. The ceremony and interest of the start on this momentous expedition, we can believe, were much more impressive than anything witnessed at the embarkation of the Cabots from Bristol a few weeks earlier. Correa assists us to observe king and people praying that the enterprise might prove of service to the Lord and to Portugal; he assists us to see Vasco da Gama on horseback, with his gaily liveried attendants, riding through admiring crowds down to the wharf, and to hear the boom of big guns-fit exponents of the excitement of that far-off summer day-as the beflagged vessels moved out into the mouth of the Tagus. And then the voyage. The superstitions of the sailors, the hesitation and the reassurances, the almost rebellious desire of the men to turn back, and the masterful confidence and courage of the commander. None but a born leader of men could have carried that voyage to a successful issue. Vasco da Gama persuaded and threatened, used soft words and grand old sea-dog oaths, as he had now to win his followers to his way of thinking, now to dare them to take matters into their own hands. As the expedition slowly moved round the mighty continent which lay be 1 "Three Voyages of Vasco de Gama," from the "Lendas da India" of Gaspar Correa, translated from the Portuguese by the Hon. H. E, J. Stanley. Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1869. tween Portuguese ambition and its fulfilment, even the most enlightened minds aboard must have felt that the enterprise was a temptation to Providence. Unaccustomed storms and unfamiliar seas made the sailors wonder what evil genius had induced them to leave wives and children on so mad an enterprise. They went forward, as the chronicler quaintly puts it, with their souls in their mouths, and before the voyage was half over they began to evince so active a desire to face the anger of the king rather than the further terrors of the unknown ocean that Vasco da Gama had to place many of them in irons. Camoens describes the crew as heroes, but Correa takes the view that they were poltroons. Probably, being human, some were heroes and some cowards. The essential fact is that the leader himself was a hero of the first water, determined, at all costs, to execute the high commission entrusted to him by his sovereign. Had Vasco da Gama failed to reach India or to return to Portugal, the opening up of this route to the East would have been indefinitely postponed; how easily failure might have been his portion, Correa's minute narrative of events after the Cape was rounded makes quite clear. Da Gama arrived at Mozambique in March, 1498, and had an interview with the sheik. He said he wanted to find his way to India for purposes of trade, and when the sheik understood that the Portuguese were specially anxious to obtain a supply of spices he laughed and promised to provide a pilot who would help them to fill their ships. A little later the sheik appears to have changed his mind, and Vasco da Gama and his enterprise were saved from the sheik's treachery by the loyalty of the Moor who played the part of go-between. The high-mettled Vasco must have longed to read the sheik a lesson, but as it was of supreme importance that he and his companions should not be heralded as pirates throughout the Indian seas, he ignored the treachery and dissembled. The Moor, whose timely re warning saved him, in due time followed the sheik's example and also resorted to treachery. But the Portuguese enjoyed miraculous escapes. Arrived at Melinde a soothsayer proved their friend. He predicted that they were destined to be the future lords of India, and that peace with them forever was in consequence to be desired by the king of Melinde. Vasco da Gama sponded with antique courtesy to the king's overtures, and presented him with a sword as a sign and symbol of the friendship and brotherhood of Dom Manoel. Unfortunately for themselves the Portuguese were better at promises than in performance. Leaving Melinde, Vasco da Gama proceeded across the Indian Ocean-he was, of course, now in seas frequented by the Moors-and in three weeks arrived off either Calicut or Cananor. India at last! The sense of triumphant joy at da Gama's heart, as he gazed upon the land, is expressed by Camoens (translated by Mickle) in these forceful words sailed so far, would be able to do what so many had failed to accomplish. The soothsayers' arguments prevailed, and the new-comers were welcomed in the belief that to resist them would be useless. Vasco da Gama did not display undue precipitancy in establishing relations with the natives. He was anxious to know with whom he had to deal. He went very cautiously to work and was careful to let it be known that his ships only formed part of a larger fleet, from which they were separated in a storm. With what histrionic art he must have swept the horizon for sight of that phantom fleet! Soothsayers and fibs were not, however, the only forces on which Vasco da Gama relied. He and his companions refuted the slanders, which represented them as pirates, by paying for everything they needed and making presents to would-be vendors with whom they did no business. Such generosity roused the cupidity and admiration of the natives, and assured them that peace and trade were the Gama's great soul confest the rushing objects kept in view by the Portu swell, Prone on his manly knees the hero fell; Oh bounteous heaven, he cries, and spreads his hands guese. With the natives, therefore, the Portuguese were soon on good terms, but the natives had not alone to be To bounteous heaven, while boundless joy reckoned with. The traders of the Mal commands No further word to flow. abar coast, who had from time immemorial enjoyed a monopoly as intermediaries between the Eastern producer Da Gama was received in India with and the Western merchant, were the very mixed feelings. The natives are Moors. Calicut had developed into a said to have regarded his coming with- first-rate commercial city in their out surprise and as the fulfilment of a hands. Its inhabitants were among, prophecy made by certain wise men if they were not actually, the richest in among them. According to this predic- India. "There were," says Correa, tion "the whole of India would be "Moors of Grand Cairo, who brought taken and ruled over by a very distant large fleets of many ships, with much king, who had white people." The trade of valuable goods, which they soothsayers assured the king that brought from Mecca, and they took Portuguese were the representatives of back in return pepper and drugs, and the nation which would in future con- all the other richest merchandise in Introl the fortunes of India. Apparently dia, with which they acquired great the natives did not share that view. wealth." For these people, the appearHad not people come from China and ance of the Portuguese in the very the Far East, they asked, hundreds of heart of their preserves was a serious years before in great numbers, and matter. They foresaw that their mofailed to overrun India, or even to nopoly would be challenged, and they maintain communications? Was it spared no effort to rouse native fears likely that a few, who had, moreover, that the Portuguese, who came in the the guise of men of commerce, were spies seems to grasp the full significance of and forerunners of conquerors, who Portuguese enterprise when he says, would claim India for their own. By "It may be thought fortunate that even means of bribes to state functionaries"it is notorious that officers take more pleasure in bribes than in the appointment of their offices"-the Moors laid the foundation of much future trouble for the Portuguese. But the first tiny stream had trickled over the dam which shut the West off from the East. The flow was destined to increase apace until in the centuries to come, India was surmerged by the enterprise, the commerce, and the arms of Europe. Vasco da Gama made other voyages; the Portuguese enjoyed a century's monopoly of business in the Eastern seas; then the Dutch, and the English, and the French began to follow in their footsteps, and the magnificent struggle for world-empire, for which the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, made England a fully qualified candidate, was inaugurated in grim earnest, though half unconsciously. at The Portuguese arrived in India what, in Bismarckian phrase, we may call the psychological moment. At the end of the fifteenth century the Turks were strengthening their empire with appalling rapidity, and by 1520 Solyman was on the throne ready to carry the crescent far and wide in Europe and Asia. "It was at this epoch of advancing Muhammadanism," says Mr. H. Morse Stephens,' "that the Portuguese struck a great blow at Moslem influence in Asia, which tended to check its progress in Europe." That was, as Mr. Stephens says, "a great service to the cause of humanity." It was a service rendered at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, which we, at the end of the nineteenth, with its shameful record of the degenerate Turk's atroci ties, can appreciate. Sir Alfred Lyall, in his brilliant little work on the rise of British Dominion in India, hardly Solyman the magnificent, in the height In the West Indies and Guiana, we may look for the cradle of British seapower and empire. The discoveries of the Cabots, after a second or third voyage-it is impossible to say whichwere not followed up by the English people, and North America was, in the explored next hundred years, chiefly by the French. Nevertheless England was wide awake during the sixteenth 1 Albuquerque, by H. Morse Stephens. "Rulers century. She was busy, with the aid of India Series." Clarendon Press, Oxford. 1892. London: John 2 The Rise of British Dominion in India, by Sir Alfred Lyall, K.C.B., D.C.L. Murray. 1893. "singeing the of her buccaneers, Spaniard's beard," in the West Indies, a north-east and attempting to find |