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, a great clamor of men's
voices, confused and inarticulate, such as you may hear from the crowd
at a fair or market-place whereupon they well knew that the Isle of
Demons was not far off." And he adds, that he himself, when among the
Indians, had seen them so tormented by these infernal persecutors, that
they would fall into his arms for relief; on which, repeating a passage
of the Gospel of St. John, he had driven the imps of darkness to a
speedy exodus. They are comely to look upon, he further tells us; yet,
by reason of their malice, that island is of late abandoned, and all who
dwelt there have fled for refuge to the main.