to us,
with his remarkable autograph, and a sketch that is attributed to him.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] As he himself complains: "The very tailors turned explorers."

IV.

MAKING GEOGRAPHY.

While Columbus was sailing back and forth between the Old World and the
new one which he had found, was building towns and naming what were to
be nations, England seemed almost ready to take a hand. All Europe was
interested in the strange news which came from Spain. England moved
through the instrumentality of a Venetian, whom we know as Sebastian
Cabot. On the 5th of March, 1496,--four years after Columbus's
discovery,--Henry VII. of England granted a patent to "John Gabote, a
citizen of Venice," and his three sons, allowing them to sail westward
on a voyage of discovery. John, and Sebastian his son, sailed from
Bristol in 1497, and saw the mainland of America at daybreak, June 24,
of the same year,--probably the coast of Nova Scotia,--but did nothing.
After their return to England, the elder Cabot died. In May, 1498,
Sebastian sailed on his second voyage, which probably took him into
Hudson's Bay and a few hundred miles down the coast. There is little
probability in the theory that he ever saw any part of what is now the
United States. He was a northern rover,--so thoroughly so, that the
three hundred colonists whom he brought out perished with cold in July.

England did not treat her one early explorer well; and in 1512 Cabot
entered the more grateful service of Spain. In 1517 he sailed to the
Spanish possessions in the West Indies, on which voyage he was
accompanied by an Englishman named Thomas Pert. In August, 1526, Cabot
sailed with another Spanish expedition bound for the Pacific, which had
already been discovered by a heroic Spaniard; but his officers mutinied,
and he was obliged to abandon his purpose. He explored the Rio de la
Plata (the "Silver River") for a thousand miles, built a fort at one of
the mouths of the Parana, and explored part of that river and of the
Paraguay,--for South America had been for nearly a generation a Spanish
possession. Thence he returned to Spain, and later to England, where he
died about 1557.

Of the rude maps which Cabot made of the New World, all are lost save
one which is preserved in France; and there are no documents left of
him. Cabot was a genuine explorer, and must be included in the list of
the pioneers of America, but as one whose work was fruitless of
consequences, and wh