Greenland, like the eastern coast of the continent, was duly colonised, its two chief settlements being one just round Cape Farewell, the other further north on the same coast. In those days the island, or chain of islands beneath an ice-cap, as many think it is, would appear to have had a milder climate than it has now. The colonies throve, their population becoming numerous enough to require a series of seventeen bishops, the last one dying about 1540, to superintend their spiritual welfare. But the Eskimos, in their migration from Asia across the Arctic islands, arrived in the country before the middle of the fourteenth century and gradually drove the Norsemen downwards, the northern colony coming to an end in 1342 owing to the enemy attacking during a visitation of the Black Death. Meanwhile Iceland, which touches the Arctic Circle in its northernmost point, and extends but half as far south of it as Greenland, increased in prosperity as a sort of aristocratic republic, and produced more vernacular literature than any country in Europe, in which, as might be expected, the story of Greenland and the American colonies was kept so well to the fore that it became as familiar among the people as a nursery tale. Thither, from Bristol, in February, 1477, went Columbus; and thence it was he returned to seek a patron for his western voyage across the Atlantic. The first voyage of Columbus in 1492 gave a great stimulus to maritime discovery, and many were the projects for searching the seas for a new route to the east. Of these the most important was that submitted to Henry VII by John Cabot, of Bristol. Much has been written, on slender and confusing evidence, as to the share in its success due to him and to his son, the more famous Sebastian; and, to be brief, we cannot do better than follow Anderson, who, in his _Origin of Commerce_, ingeniously evades the difficulty by speaking, commercially, of "Cabot and Sons." The Bristol firm, then, in 1497 despatched their ship _Matthew_ to the westward and discovered and took possession of Labrador and the islands and peninsulas in the mouth of the St. Lawrence, the district being at first known as the New Found Land, a name afterwards restricted to the largest island. And they had their reward, as shown in the Privy Purse accounts of Henry VII, where an entry of the 10th August, 1497, appears—"To hym that found the new isle, £10." Surely not an excessive honorarium for the finding of a continent.