Leaving this domain of legend, we come to the last years of the fifteenth century, when Columbus landed on the islands now often known as the Antilles--a memorial of that mysterious Antillia, or Isle of the Seven Cities, which was long supposed to exist in the mid-Atlantic, and found a place in all the maps before, and even some time after, the voyages of the illustrious Genoese. A part of the veil was at last lifted from that mysterious western ocean--that Sea of Darkness, which had perplexed philosophers, geographers, and sailors, from the days of Aristotle, Plato, Strabo, and Ptolemy. As in the case of Scandinavia, several countries have endeavoured to establish a claim for the priority of discovery in America. Some sailors of that Biscayan coast, which has given so many bold pilots and mariners to the world of adventure and exploration--that Basque country to which belonged Juan de la Cosa, the pilot who accompanied Columbus in his voyages--may have found their way to the North Atlantic coast in search of cod or whales at a very early time; and it is certainly an argument for such a claim that John Cabot is said in 1497 to have heard the Indians of northeastern America speak of Baccalaos, or Basque for cod--a name afterwards applied for a century and longer to the islands and countries around the Gulf. It is certainly not improbable that the Normans, Bretons, or Basques, whose lives from times immemorial have been passed on the sea, should have been driven by the winds or by some accident to the shores of Newfoundland or Labrador or even Cape Breton, but such theories are not {22} based upon sufficiently authentic data to bring them under the consideration of the serious historian.