gold-hunting, it was from France that those barbarous shores first
learned to serve the ends of peaceful commercial industry.

A French writer, however, advances a more ambitious claim. In the year
1488, four years before the first voyage of Columbus, America, he
maintains, was found by Frenchmen. Cousin, a navigator of Dieppe, being
at sea off the African coast, was forced westward, it is said, by winds
and currents to within sight of an unknown shore, where he presently
descried the mouth of a great river. On board his ship was one Pinzon,
whose conduct became so 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.