16 
HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES 
was England. When the news of the successful voyage of 
Columbus reached the little island nation, Henry VII, its king, 
like the other rulers of his 
time, began to think of 
the riches that miglıt come 
to him from the new- 
found lands. So when 
John Cabot, a native of 
Venice, in 1496 applied to 
King Henry for permis- 
sion to fit out a ship for a 
voyage to the New World. 
the permission was cheer- 
fully given. Cabot set 
out from Bristol, and “in 
the year of our Lord 1497 
discovered that land which 
no man before that time’ 
had attempted, on the 
24th of June, about five 
o’clock in the morning.” 
“That land” may have 
— A been Newfoundland or 
The discoveries of Cabot and Cartier. Cape Breton, or it may 
have been some point on the mainland of North America. The 
region discovered by Cabot was cold and barren., and was with- 
1 For a long time it was believed that the North American coast was 
discovered centuries before this voyage of Cabot. According to the 
sagas, or Scandinavian legends, a sea-rover named Leif Ericson sailed 
from Iceland about the year 1000, and steering in a southwesterly direc- 
tion, explored the American coast as far south as New England, Leif is 
said to have landed somewhere on the coast of what is now Massachu- 
setts or Rhode Island, where he made a settlement called Vinland, but 
historians are unable to decide where this Vinland really was. Indeed. 
many historians no longer believe the story of Leif Ericson and the set- 
tlement of Vinland at all, for they doubt the truth of the sagas upon 
which the story rests. Even if the voyage of Leif was actually made, it 
is likely that all memory of it had faded from men’s minds by the time 
of Columbus,