back to San Domingo, ruefully pondered on the fruits of a year’s delay.  Even then he was trying to make excuses for himself, such as he made afterwards to the Sovereigns when he tried to explain that this shameful capitulation was invalid.  That he signed under compulsion; that he was on board a ship, and so was not on his viceregal territory; that the rebels had already been tried, and that he had not the power to revoke a sentence which bore the authority of the Crown; that he had not the power to dispose of the Crown property —­desperate, agonised shuffling of pride and self-esteem in the coils of trial and difficulty.  Enough of it.

CHAPTER VI

AN INTERLUDE

A breath of salt air again will do us no harm as a relief from these perilous balancings of Columbus on the see-saw at Espanola.  His true work in this world had indeed already been accomplished.  When he smote the rock of western discovery many springs flowed from it, and some were destined to run in mightier channels than that which he himself followed.  Among other men stirred by the news of Columbus’s first voyage there was one walking the streets of Bristol in 1496 who was fired to a similar enterprise—­a man of Venice, in boyhood named Zuan Caboto, but now known in England, where he has some time been settled, as Captain John Cabot.  A sailor and trader who has travelled much through the known sea-roads of this world, and has a desire to travel upon others not so well known.  He has been in the East, has seen the caravans of Mecca and the goods they carried, and, like Columbus, has conceived in his mind the roundness of the world as a practical fact rather than a mere mathematical theory.  Hearing of Columbus’s success Cabot sets what machinery in England he has access to in motion to secure for him patents from King Henry VII.; which patents he receives on March 5, 1496.  After spending a long time in preparation, and being perhaps a little delayed by diplomatic protests from the Spanish Ambassador in London, he sails from Bristol in May 1497.

After sailing west two thousand leagues Cabot found land in the neighbourhood of Cape Breton, and was thus in all probability the first discoverer, since the Icelanders, of the mainland of the New World.  He turned northward, sailed through the strait of Belle Isle, and came home again, having accomplished his task in three months.  Cabot, like Columbus, believed he had seen the territory of the Great Khan, of whom he told the interested population of Bristol some strange things.  He further told them of the probable riches of this new land if it were followed in a southerly direction; told them some lies also, it appears, since he said that the waters there were so dense with fish that his vessels could hardly move in them.  He received a gratuity of L10 and a pension, and made a great sensation in Bristol by walking about the city dressed in fine silk garments.