"
He dropped some gold pieces into the hand of John Cabot. In the accounts
of his treasurer for that year may be seen this item:
"10th August, donation of L10 to him that found the new isle."
In May of the next year another voyage was undertaken by Sebastian, John
Cabot having died. This time there was a small fleet from Bristol with
some three hundred men. Sebastian sailed so far north as to be stopped
by seas full of icebergs, then turning southward discovered the island
of Newfoundland, landed further south on the mainland, and went as far
toward the Spanish possessions as the great bay called Chesapeake.
Meanwhile shoals of little fishing boats, from Bristol, Brittany,
Lisbon, Rye, and the Vizcayan ports on the north of Spain, crept across
the gray seas to fish for cod. They held no patent and carried no guns,
but they made a floating city off the Grand Banks for a brief season,
settling their own disputes. The people at home found salt fish good
cheap and wholesome. When Sebastian told the Bristol folk that the fish
were so thick in these new seas that he could hardly get his ships
through, they would not believe it. But when Robert Thorne and a dozen
others had seen the little caplin, the fish which the cod feeds upon,
swimming inshore by the acre, crowded by the cod behind them, and by
seal, shark and dogfish hunting the cod, when cod were caught and salted
down and shown in Bristol, four and five feet long, then Bristol
swallowed both story and cargo and blessed the name of Cabot.
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