revealed to the civilized world of western Europe the coasts of
Newfoundland, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, and
Delaware. They must have got as far south as the State of Delaware
(according to Sebastian Cabot, their southern limit was lat. 38 deg.),
because in 1505 they were able to bring back parrots ("popyngays"), as
well as hawks and lynxes ("catts of the mountaigne"), for the
delectation of King Henry; and parrots even at that period could not
have been obtained from farther north than the latitude of New
York.[8]

[Footnote 8: Almost certainly this was _Conurus carolinensis_, a green
and orange parrakeet still found in the south-eastern States of North
America, but formerly met with as far north as New York and Boston.]

But after 1505 English interest in "the Newe founde launde" and the
"Newe Isle" languished; the exploration of North America was taken up
and carried farther by Portuguese, Bretons and Normans of France,
Italians, and Spaniards.[9] It revived again under Henry VIII, owing
to the irresistible attraction of the Newfoundland fisheries and the
knowledge that the ships from France were returning every autumn with
great supplies of fish cured and salted; for an adequate supply of
salt fish was becoming a matter of great importance to the markets of
western Europe. In 1527 Henry VIII sent two ships under the command of
John Rut to explore the North-American coast, and Captain Rut seems
to have reached the Straits of Belle Isle between Newfoundland
and Labrador (then blocked with ice so that he took them for
a bay), and afterwards to have passed along the east coast of
Newfoundland--already much frequented by the Bretons, Normans, and
Portuguese--and to have stopped at the harbour of St. John's, thence
sailing as far south as Massachusetts.

[Footnote 9: The name _America_ probably appears for the first time in
English print in the old play or masque the _Four Elements_, which was
published about 1518. In a review of the geography of the Earth, as
known at that period, a description is given of this vast New World
across the Ocean: "But these new landys found lately, been called
America, because only Americus did find them first". Americus was a
Florentine bank clerk--Amerigo Vespucci--at Seville who gave up the
counting-house for adventure, sailed with a Spanish captain to the
West Indies and the mainland of Venezuela (off which he notes that he
met an English sailing vessel, and th