mutinous that, on his return to Dieppe, Cousin
made complaint to the magistracy, who thereupon dismissed the offender
from the maritime service of the town. Pinzon went to Spain, became
known to Columbus, told him the discovery, and joined him on his voyage
of 1492.

To leave this cloudland of tradition, and approach the confines
of recorded history. The Normans, offspring of an ancestry of
conquerors,--the Bretons, that stubborn, hardy, unchanging race, who,
among Druid monuments changeless as themselves, still cling with Celtic
obstinacy to the thoughts and habits of the past,--the Basques, that
primeval people, older than history,--all frequented from a very early
date the cod-banks of Newfoundland. There is some reason to believe
that this fishery existed before the voyage of Cabot, in 1497; there is
strong evidence that it began as early as the year 1504; and it is
well established that, in 1517, fifty Castilian, French, and Portuguese
vessels were engaged in it at once; while in 1527, on the third of
August, eleven sail of Norman, one of Breton, and two of Portuguese
fishermen were to be found in the Bay of St. John.

From this time forth, the Newfoundland fishery was never abandoned.
French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese made resort to the Banks,
always jealous, often quarrelling, but still drawing up treasure from
those exhaustless mines, and bearing home bountiful provision against
the season of Lent.

On this dim verge of the known world there were other perils than those
of the waves. The rocks and shores of those sequestered seas had, so
thought the voyagers, other tenants than the seal, the walrus, and the
screaming sea-fowl, the bears which stole away their fish before their
eyes, and the wild natives dressed in seal-skins. Griffius--so ran
the story--infested the mountains of Labrador. Two islands, north of
Newfoundland, were given over to the fiends from whom they derived
their name, the Isles of Demons. An old map pictures their occupants
at length,--devils rampant, with wings, horns, and tail. The passing
voyager heard the din of their infernal orgies, and woe to the sailor or
the fisherman who ventured alone into the haunted woods. "True it is,"
writes the old cosmographer Thevet, "and I myself have heard it, not
from one, but from a great number of the sailors and pilots with whom I
have made many voyages, that, when they passed this way, they heard
in the air, on the tops and about the masts,