In spite, however, of the disappointing results of Gilbert’s attempt to found a colony in Newfoundland, the importance of the cod fishery and the ivory tusks and oil of the walruses drew ever more and more ships from Bristol and Devonshire to the coasts of that great island and to the Gulf of St. Lawrence beyond.  In 1592 the English adventurers got as far west as Anticosti Island (in a ship from Bristol), and in 1597 there is the first record of English ships (from London—­the Hopewell and the Chancewell) sailing up the St. Lawrence River, perhaps as far west as Quebec.

In 1602, stimulated by Sir Walter Raleigh,[4] Bartholomew Gosnold sailed direct to the coast of North America south of the Newfoundland latitudes, and anchored his bark off the coast of Massachusetts on the 26th of March, 1602.  Failing to find a good harbour here, he stood out for the south and definitely discovered and named Cape Cod, not far from the modern city of Boston.  From Cape Cod he made his way to the Elizabeth Islands in Buzzard’s Bay, and here he built a storehouse and fort, and may be said to have laid the foundations of the future colony of New England.  He brought back with him a cargo of sassafras root, which was then much esteemed as a valuable medicine and a remedy for almost all diseases.

[Footnote 4:  In 1584, Sir Walter Raleigh, the half-brother of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, financed an expedition to sail to the coast of North America in a more southerly direction.  In this way was founded the (afterwards abandoned) colony of Roanoke, in North Carolina.  It was to this region that Queen Elizabeth applied the title of Virginia, which some years afterwards was transferred to the first English colony on the James River.]

Subsequent expeditions of English ships explored and mapped the coast of Maine, and took on board Amerindians for exhibition in England.  Their adventures, together with those of the colonists farther south, led to the creation of chartered companies, and to the great British colonies of New England, New York, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, which were to become in time the United States of America—­a vast field of adventure which we cannot follow farther in this book.

As regards Newfoundland, James I, in 1610, granted a patent to a Bristol merchant for the foundation there of a colony, and although this attempt, and another under Sir George Calvert (Lord Baltimore) in 1616, came almost to nothing through the attacks of the French and the dislike of the crews of the fishing vessels to permanent settlers who might interfere with the fishing industry, the English colonization of Newfoundland to some extent caught hold, so that in 1650 there were about two thousand colonists of English descent along the east and south-east coasts of the island.  But settlement was prohibited within six miles of the shore, to please the fishermen, and this regulation checked for more than two hundred years the colonization of Newfoundland.