“Nevertheless,” he went on meditatively, “we will not be neglectful of you.  In another year, if it is still your desire to engage in this work, you may have—­” a pause—­“ten ships armed as you see fit, and manned with whatever prisoners are not confined for—­high treason.  Fish, I think you said, abound in those waters?  Bacalao—­er—­that is cod, is it not?  Now it seems to me that our men of Bristol can go a-fishing on those banks without interference from the Hanse merchants, and we shall be less dependent on—­foreign aid, for the victualing of our tables.  And there may be some way to Asia through these Northern seas—­in which case our brother of Spain may not be so nice in his scruples about trespass.  The Spice Islands are not his but Portugal’s.  And for your present reward,—­” the King reached for his lean purse and waggled his gaunt foot in its loose worn red shoe “this, and the title of Admiral of your new-found land.”

He dropped some gold pieces into the hand of John Cabot.  In the accounts of his treasurer for that year may be seen this item: 

“10th August, donation of L10 to him that found the new isle.”

In May of the next year another voyage was undertaken by Sebastian, John Cabot having died.  This time there was a small fleet from Bristol with some three hundred men.  Sebastian sailed so far north as to be stopped by seas full of icebergs, then turning southward discovered the island of Newfoundland, landed further south on the mainland, and went as far toward the Spanish possessions as the great bay called Chesapeake.  Meanwhile shoals of little fishing boats, from Bristol, Brittany, Lisbon, Rye, and the Vizcayan ports on the north of Spain, crept across the gray seas to fish for cod.  They held no patent and carried no guns, but they made a floating city off the Grand Banks for a brief season, settling their own disputes.  The people at home found salt fish good cheap and wholesome.  When Sebastian told the Bristol folk that the fish were so thick in these new seas that he could hardly get his ships through, they would not believe it.  But when Robert Thorne and a dozen others had seen the little caplin, the fish which the cod feeds upon, swimming inshore by the acre, crowded by the cod behind them, and by seal, shark and dogfish hunting the cod, when cod were caught and salted down and shown in Bristol, four and five feet long, then Bristol swallowed both story and cargo and blessed the name of Cabot.

Sebastian Cabot shook the dust of Bristol off his restless feet more than once in the years that followed.  Within five years after his voyage to the Arctic regions he was cruising about the Caribbean.  In 1517 he was at the entrance of the great bay on the north coast of Labrador.  In 1524 he was in the service of Spain, and coasting along the eastern shores of South America ascended the great river which De Solis had named Rio de la Plata, came within sight of the mountains of Peru.  But for orders from Spain, where Pizarro