But on this voyage they found locked harbors not closed by the order of any King but by natural causes,—­harbors without inhabitants or means of supporting life, and so far north as to be blocked by ice for half the year.  They sailed seven hundred leagues west and came at last to a rocky wooded coast.  Now in all the books of travel in Asia, mention had been made of an immense territory ruled by the Grand Cham of Tartary, whose hordes had nearly overrun Eastern Europe in times not so very long ago.  The adventures of Marco Polo the Venetian, in a great book sent to Cabot by his wife’s father, had been the fairy-tale of Sebastian and his brothers from the time they were old enough to understand a story.  In this book it was written how Marco Polo and his companions passed through utterly uninhabited wilds in the Great Khan’s empire, and afterward came to a region of barbarians, who robbed and killed travelers.  These fierce people lived on the fruits and game of the forest, cultivating no fields; they dressed in the skins of wild animals and used salt for money.  Could this be the place?  If so it behooved the little party of explorers to be careful.  As yet, nobody dreamed that any mainland discovered by sailing westward from northern Europe could be anything but Asia.

Cautiously they sailed along the rugged shore, but not a human being was to be seen.  It was the twenty-fourth of June, when by all accounts the people of any civilized country should be coasting along from port to port fishing or engaged in traffic.  The sun blazed hot and clear, but the inquisitive noses of the crew scented no cinnamon, cloves or ginger in the air.  All of these, according to Marco Polo, were in the wilderness he crossed, and also great rivers.  On crossing one of these rivers he had found himself in a populous country with castles and cities.  Were there no people on this desolate shore—­or were they lying in wait for the voyagers to land, that they might seize and kill them and plunder the ship?

One thing was certain, the air of this strange place made them all more thirsty than they ever had been in England, and their water-supply had given out.  Sebastian and a crew of the younger men tumbled into a boat, cross-bow and cutlass at hand, and went ashore to fill the barrels, while John Cabot kept an anxious eye on the land.  Sebastian himself rather relished the adventure.

They found a stream of delicious water,—­pure, cold and clear as a fountain of Eden.  Among the rocks they found creeping vines with rather tasteless, bright red berries, in the woods little evergreen herbs with leaves like laurel and scarlet spicy berries, dark green mossy vines with white berries—­but no spice-trees.  The forest in fact was rather like Norway, according to Ralph Erlandsson, who was a native of Stavanger.  Sebastian, who was ahead, presently came upon signs of human life.  A sapling, bent down and held by a rude contrivance of deerhide