island, the words "_prima tierra vista_," and
the legends which are around the map identify beyond question that as
the landfall of the first voyage. Dr. Deane, in _Winter's Narrative and
Critical History,_ supports this view. Markham, in his introduction to
the volume of the Hakluyt Society for 1893, also accepts it; and our
own honorary secretary (the late Sir John Bourinot), in his learned and
exhaustive monograph on Cape Breton, inclines to the same theory.

I do not propose here to discuss the difficult problems of this map.
For many years, under the influence of current traditions and cursory
reading, I believe the landfall of John Cabot to have been in
Newfoundland; but a closer study of the original authorities has led me
to concur in the view which places it somewhere on the island of Cape
Breton.

At the threshold of an inquiry into the "_prima tierra vista_" or
landfall of 1497, it is before all things necessary to distinguish
sharply, in every recorded detail, between the first and second voyages.
I venture to think that, if this had always been done, much confusion
and controversy would have been avoided. It was not done by the older
writers, and the writers of later years have followed them without
sufficiently observing that the authorities they were building upon were
referring almost solely to the second voyage. Even when some occasional
detail of the first voyage was introduced, the circumstances of the
second voyage were interwoven and became dominant in the narrative, so
that the impression of one voyage only remains upon the mind. We must
therefore always remember the antithesis which exists between them. Thus,
the first voyage was made in one small vessel with a crew of eighteen
men, the second with five ships and three hundred men. The first voyage
was undertaken with John Cabot's own resources, the second with the royal
authority to take six ships and their outfit on the same conditions as
if for the King's service. The first voyage was a private venture, the
second an official expedition. The first voyage extended over three
months and was provisioned for that period only; the second was
victualled for twelve months and extended over six months at least, for
how much longer is not known. The course of the first voyage was south of
Ireland, then for a while north and afterward west, with the pole star on
the right hand. The course of the second, until land was seen, was north,
into northern sea