Elizabethan Sea Dogs | Page 3

Breton, the
easternmost point of Nova Scotia, on the 24th of June, the anniversary
of St. John the Baptist, now the racial fête-day of the French Canadians.
Not a single human inhabitant was to be seen in this wild new land,
shaggy with forests primeval, fronted with bold, scarped shores, and
beautiful with romantic deep bays leading inland, league upon league,

past rugged forelands and rocky battlements keeping guard at the
frontiers of the continent. Over these mysterious wilds Cabot raised St.
George's Cross for England and the banner of St. Mark in souvenir of
Venice. Had he now reached the fabled islands of the West or
discovered other islands off the eastern coast of Tartary? He did not
know. But he hurried back to Bristol with the news and was welcomed
by the King and people. A Venetian in London wrote home to say that
'this fellow-citizen of ours, who went from Bristol in quest of new
islands, is Zuan Caboto, whom the English now call a great admiral. He
dresses in silk; they pay him great honour; and everyone runs after him
like mad.' The Spanish ambassador was full of suspicion, in spite of the
fact that Cabot had not gone south. Had not His Holiness divided all
Heathendom between the crowns of Spain and Portugal, to Spain the
West and to Portugal the East; and was not this landfall within what the
modern world would call the Spanish sphere of influence? The
ambassador protested to Henry VII and reported home to Ferdinand
and Isabella.
Henry VII meanwhile sent a little present 'To Hym that founde the new
Isle--£10.' It was not very much. But it was about as much as nearly a
thousand dollars now; and it meant full recognition and approval. This
was a good start for a man who couldn't pay the King any royalty of
twenty per cent. because he hadn't made a penny on the way. Besides, it
was followed up by a royal annuity of twice the amount and by
renewed letters-patent for further voyages and discoveries in the west.
So Cabot took good fortune at the flood and went again.
This time there was the full authorized flotilla of five sail, of which one
turned back and four sailed on. Somewhere on the way John Cabot
disappeared from history and his second son, Sebastian, reigned in his
stead. Sebastian, like John, apparently wrote nothing whatever. But he
talked a great deal; and in after years he seems to have remembered a
good many things that never happened at all. Nevertheless he was a
very able man in several capacities and could teach a courtier or a
demagogue, as well as a geographer or exploiter of new claims, the art
of climbing over other people's backs, his father's and his brothers'
backs included. He had his troubles; for King Henry had pressed upon

him recruits from the gaols, which just then were full of rebels. But he
had enough seamen to manage the ships and plenty of cargo for trade
with the undiscovered natives.
Sebastian perhaps left some of his three hundred men to explore
Newfoundland. He knew they couldn't starve because, as he often used
to tell his gaping listeners, the waters thereabouts were so thick with
codfish that he had hard work to force his vessels through. This first of
American fish stories, wildly improbable as it may seem, may yet have
been founded on fact. When acres upon acres of the countless little
capelin swim inshore to feed, and they themselves are preyed on by
leaping acres of voracious cod, whose own rear ranks are being preyed
on by hungry seals, sharks, herring-hogs, or dogfish, then indeed the
troubled surface of a narrowing bay is literally thick with the silvery
flash of capelin, the dark tumultuous backs of cod, and the swirling
rushes of the greater beasts of prey behind. Nor were certain other fish
stories, told by Sebastian and his successors about the land of cod,
without some strange truths to build on. Cod have been caught as long
as a man and weighing over a hundred pounds. A whole hare, a big
guillemot with his beak and claws, a brace of duck so fresh that they
must have been swallowed alive, a rubber wading boot, and a very
learned treatise complete in three volumes--these are a few of the
curiosities actually found in sundry stomachs of the all-devouring cod.
The new-found cod banks were a mine of wealth for western Europe at
a time when everyone ate fish on fast days. They have remained so ever
since because the enormous increase of population has kept up a
constantly increasing demand for natural supplies of food. Basques and
English, Spaniards, French, and Portuguese, were presently fishing for
cod all round