As the first discoverer, Cabot, set sail to find the passage to Cathay, 'having great desire to traffic for the spices as the Portingals did,'[8] so all who came after during the century of exploration kept the same end firmly in view. Francis I of France dispatched Verrazano to find the passage to the East; Cartier, the Breton sailor, came back from the St. Lawrence with tales which savoured of the Indies, of 'a river that goeth south-west, from whence there is a whole {13} month's sailing to go to a certain land where there is neither ice nor snow seen'[9]--of a 'country of Saguenay, in which are infinite rubies, gold and other riches'[10]--of 'a land where cinnamon and cloves are gathered';[11] and his third voyage was, in his King's words, 'to the lands of Canada and Hochelaga, which form the extremity of Asia towards the west.'[12] Frobisher's voyage in 1576 led to the formation of a company of Cathay. As early as 1527, Master Robert Thorne wrote 'an information of the parts of the world' discovered by the Spaniards and Portuguese, and 'of the way to the Moluccas by the north.' Sir Humphrey Gilbert published 'a discourse' 'to prove a passage by the north-west to Cathaia and the East Indies'; and Richard Hakluyt himself, in the 'epistle dedicatory' to Philip Sydney, which forms the preface to his collection of _Divers Voyages touching the discovery of America_,[13] sums up the arguments for the existence of 'that short and easy passage by the north-west which we have hitherto so long desired.' In short, the record of the sixteenth century in North America was, in the main, a record of successive voyagers seeking after a way to the East, supplemented by the fishing trade which was attracted to the shores of Newfoundland. [Footnote 8: Gomara, quoted by Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 30 (1810 ed.).] [Footnote 9: Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 278.] [Footnote 10: Ibid. p. 281.] [Footnote 11: Ibid. p. 285.] [Footnote 12: See Parkman's _Pioneers of France in the New World_ (25th ed., 1888), p. 217.] [Footnote 13: Published in 1582; edited by the Hakluyt Society in 1850.] [Sidenote: _The early voyagers to North America were of various nationalities._] The two men who opened America to Europe were of Italian parentage--Columbus the Genoese, and Cabot, born at Genoa, domiciled at Venice.[14] The two great trading republics of the Middle Ages at once crowned their work in the world, and signed their own death warrant, in providing Spain and England with the sailors whose discoveries transferred the centre of life and movement from the Mediterranean {14} to the Atlantic. The King of France too turned to Italy for a discoverer to rival Columbus and Cabot, and sent Verrazano the Florentine, at the end of 1523, to search out the coasts of North America. [Footnote 14: As to Cabot's parentage see below, p. 18. If the voyages of the Zeni were genuine, the Venetians could have claimed a yet older share in the record of European connexion with America.]