CHAPTER I

EXPLORATIONS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COAST PREVIOUS
TO THE VOYAGE OF HENRY HUDSON

NE of the earliest Greek dreams, prominent in the classic
literature, was that of a beautiful island in the ocean at
the far West. Perhaps, nevertheless, we have been ac¬
customed to think of the conception too much as a
dream, a piece of pure imagination; for it is absolutely certain, as
Pliny and Strabo prove, that bold Phenician navigators passed far
beyond the Pillars of Hercules into the vast Atlantic, discovering and
naming the Canary Islands, pushing their observations far and wide.
Possibly, like Columbus, as on his first voyage, they sailed over tran¬
quil seas, smooth as the rivers in Spain, and through ambient air, soft
as the air of Andalusia in spring, until they reached the Edenic
Cuba, and thus furnished the foundation of that Greek conception of
an exquisitely fair isle, the home of the immortals, an Elysium on
whose happy, fragrant shores the shrilly-breathing Zephyrus was
ever piping for the refreshment of weary souls.

In the fifteenth century the islands in the west formed the object
of many a voyage, but even in 1306 Marino Sanuto laid down the
Canaries anew, while Bethencourt found them in 1402. The Azores
and the Madeira Islands appear in the chart of Pizigani in 1367, and
the sailors of Prince Henry the Navigator went to the Azores, the
Isles of the Hawks, in 1431, as preparatory to those voyages which,
beginning with the rediscovery of the Cape Verde Islands in 1460,
were destined to prepare the way for the circumnavigation of Africa,
and thus open the way to the Indies by the Cape of Good Hope.
Long before this, however, the Spaniards were credited with the
establishment of colonies in the western ocean, and on the globe of
Martin Behaim, 1482, may be seen the legend crediting Spanish bish¬
ops with the founding of seven cities in a distant island in the year
734. In 1498 De Ayala, the Spanish ambassador in England, reported
to his sovereign that the city of Bristol had for seven years sent out

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