The
Bull of

a candidate for the dominion of the world. To avoid an internecine struggle between Spain and Portugal, Pope Alexander VI, who was a Spaniard by birth, issued, in 1493, his famous Bull, whereby the world was divided by a line Partition. running from pole to pole a hundred leagues west of the Azores, and all newly discovered lands to east and west of this line assigned in absolute possession to the crowns of Portugal and Castile respectively. For the next halfcentury both Spain and Portugal were busy in consolidating and extending their domains, little disturbed by newer competitors.

Italian
Navi-

gators.

But the tale of the nations was not yet complete. Venice, Genoa, Portugal and Spain were to be followed by France and England in the race for the Far East. Each of these latter countries, like Spain, owed its earliest impulse to the genius of an Italian navigator. One land sent forth the masters of the Old World and the discoverers of the New; though they were never to enter into their inheritance, they saw it with their eyes; and the beginnings of modern science, art, and civilisation are the

Cabot.

debt of the world to Italy. In 1497, John John Cabot, a citizen of Venice who had settled as a trader at Bristol, having obtained letters patent from King Henry VII, sailed with two ships out of Bristol and discovered the northern end of the Island of Cape Breton. As his expedi-✓ tion was believed to be the first to reach the mainland of America, which Columbus never set eyes on till a year later, much has been made in controversy of the priority of the English claim. But indeed in these timid beginnings nothing was further from the purpose of England than to enter on a contest with other powers for the possession of America. The success of Columbus had set the court of King Henry aflame with the promise that it offered of a direct route to Cathay, 'insomuch that all men, with great admiration, affirmed it to be a thing more divine than human to sail by the West into the East, where the spices grow, by a way that was never known before.' Shortly after this it was ascertained that beyond America there lay a halcyon sea, yielding direct access to the promised land. In 1513 Vasco Nuñez de

The Pacific discovered.

The

French

Balboa, from a height above his colony at Darien, saw the Pacific Ocean; and in 1520 the Portuguese navigator, Magellan, rounded South America through the straits that bear his name, and sailed across the Pacific to the Philippines, where he met his death.

From this time forward, for many years, the aim of European navigators was not to explore or settle America, rather to discover a passage whereby America might be avoided, and a way opened to the lands beyond. But the progress of investigation revealed no break in that great barrier. The French voyagers, who, like the Voyagers. English, followed the lead of a native of Italy, were long buoyed up by the hope of finding a better route than the Straits of Magellan, which were far south, dangerous to navigate, and, moreover, were in the possession of Spain. In 1523, Giovanni Verazzano, a Florentine in the service of King Francis I, explored the coast of what is now the United States, from Georgia northward, and of great part of Canada. He was followed by the brothers Parmentier; by Jacques Cartier, who in 1535 sailed up the St.

barrier

Lawrence and discovered and named Montreal; by the Sieur de Roberval; and many others. To the earliest voyagers, as in the earliest maps, America was known as a chain of islands, and there was something inherently incredible in The the idea of a great continent stretching North continent. and South over the tropical and temperate zones. When that idea was accepted, there remained a last hope, the discovery of a passage through one of the innumerable inlets of the North, whereby the nations situated in colder seas than those of Spain might redeem their disadvantages, and claim a share in the spoils. of the world. It is at this point that the story of the English Voyages begins.

✓

The actions that move the world have been prompted and inspired by dreams and visions. The search for the philosopher's stone laid the foundations of modern chemistry; modern travel and geography owe their chief advances to the search for the fabled realm of Cathay. Cathay. Traditions and fantasies concerning the Golden Age and the Earthly Paradise are interwoven with all the practical designs of the early navi

The
Earthly
Paradise.

gators; and the poets of the ancient world are
the true fathers of later science. So early as
the sixth century the monk Cosmas, in his
Universal Christian Topography, states the
object of many a later quest. 'If Paradise,'
he says,
were really on the surface of this
world, is there not many a man among those
who are so keen to learn and search out every-

thing, that would

not let himself be deterred

from reaching it? When we see that there are men who will not be deterred from penetrating to the ends of the earth in search of silk, and all for the sake of filthy lucre, how can we believe that they would be deterred from going to get a sight of Paradise?' All through the Middle Ages the dream held sway, and Paradise was sought in the East. Columbus, seeking it by another route, believed that he was near it when, on his third voyage, he came to the mouths of the Orinoco, and found a mild climate, green hills, fresh foliage, and a people light in colour Columbus and graceful in form. The earth, he explains, on shape of the is probably not spherical but elongated like a Earth.

pear, and on the summit of the protuberance