vessel arrived three days later with its expected cargo; but the third, with Gaspar Cortereal, was never heard from. Her fate remained a mystery, although several efforts were made to ascertain it. The next year, 1502, Miguel Cortereal started with three ships (one account says two) well equipped and found, having agreed with the King to make a search for the missing Gaspar. The expedition sailed May 10. Arriving on the American coast, they found so many entrances of rivers and havens, that it was agreed to divide the fleet, the better to search for the missing vessel. A rendezvous was arranged for the 20th of August. Two ships met at the appointed time and place; but Miguel Cortereal’s did not appear, and the others, after waiting some time, returned to Portugal. [Illustration: EARLY FISHING STAGES. [This cut is a fac-simile of one in the corner of _A New and Correct Map of America_, 1738, which belongs to Sir William Keith’s _History of the British Plantations in America_: Part I., Virginia, London, 1738. It presumably represents the fashion of these appliances of the fishermen which had prevailed perhaps for centuries. It was suggested by Forster, _Northern Voyages_, book iii. chaps. iii. and iv., that Breton fishermen may have been on the Newfoundland coast before Columbus. Scholars are coming more and more to believe the possibility and even probability of it. Every third day in the calendar was then a fast-day, and the incentive to seeking fish on distant seas was great. That Cabot should find the natives of this region calling the cod _baccalaos_, a name applied by the seamen of the Bay of Biscay to that fish, has also been suggestive; but this story, deducible apparently from no earlier writer than Peter Martyr in 1516, is not altogether trustworthy, since there is doubt if the folk who called the fish by that name were the natives, as Martyr seems to think, or simply the common people, as would seem to be implied in other forms of the statement (see Vol. III. p. 45). Greenland, as we know from the pre-Columbian maps (Ptolemy of 1482, etc.), was considered a part of Europe. Its adjacent shores were in the common mind but further outposts of the same continent; so that the returned sailors’ reports of the distant parts—islands they thought them—might cause no awakening of the idea of a new world. Cf. Navarrete, _Viages_, iii. 41, 46, 176; Eusebius, _Chronicon_ (1512), p. 172; Wytfliet, _Histoire des Indes_, p. 131; Lescarbot, _Nouvelle France_ (1618), p. 228; Biard, _Relation_ (1616), chap. i.; Champlain (1632), p. 9; Charlevoix, _Nouvelle France_, i. 4, 14, or Shea’s edition, i. 106; Estancelin, _Navigateurs Normands_; Kunstmann, _Entdeckung Amerikas_, pp. 69, 125; Peschel, _Geschichte des Zeitalters_, etc., p. 332; Vitet, _Histoire de la Dieppe_, p. 51; Harrisse, _Cabots_, p. 271; Kohl, _Discovery of Maine_, pp. 188, 201, 203, 205, 280; Parkman, _Pioneers_, p. 171; _Mag. of Amer. Hist._, 1882, April; _N. E. Hist. and Geneal.