The history of American exploration is a story of delusion and mistake. The New World was discovered because it lay between Europe and the East Indian Spice Islands by the westward route. Columbus, seeking the less, found the greater by stumbling on it in the dark. Zuan Caboto--in English, John Cabot--who is described by a contemporary as "a Venetian fellow with a fine mind, greatly skilled in navigation," discovered North America in 1497. But he did not exult that he was the finder of a vast and fertile continent in which great nations might germinate, for he believed that his landfall at Cape Breton was within the dominions of the Grand Cham of China, and he sailed down the coast again the next year, "ever with the intent to find said passage to India." It was announced on his return from his first voyage that Henry VII had "won a part of Asia without a stroke of the sword." [Sidenote: Note 2.] The discovery of the Pacific by Balboa in 1513, and the voyage of Magellan's ship across that ocean in 1520, were not sufficient to remove the illusion that America was connected with Asia. The notion that the New World was an Asiatic peninsula died lingeringly about the middle of the sixteenth century; but to reach Asia was still the main purpose of western exploration, and America was for a long time regarded mainly as an obstruction. The belief in a passage to the Pacific by means of some yet-to-be-discovered strait severing the continent of America, survived far into the seventeenth century, and the hope of coming by some short cut into a rich commerce with the Orient led to a prying exploration of all the inlets, bays, and estuaries on the American coast and so promoted discovery, but it retarded settlement by blinding men to the value of the New World. II. [Sidenote: Frobisher.] [Sidenote: Frobisher's Voyages, Hakl. Soc., _passim_.] Adventure by sea became a favorite road to renown for ambitious Englishmen in the time of Elizabeth, and the belief in a passage through or round North America grew into a superstition. The discovery of this strait seemed, in the phrase of George Beste, a writer of the time, "the onely thing of the world that was left undone whereby a notable mind might be made famous and fortunate." Sir Martin Frobisher, who is reckoned by Camden "among the famousest men of our age for counsell and glory gotten at sea," made three voyages in 1576 and the following years to that part of the American coast almost under the arctic circle. He desisted from the attempt to get to China by an arctic channel only when he had involved the "venturers" or stockholders associated with him in heavy debts, and spent the fortune of his wife and stepchildren, to whom "glory gotten at sea" must have been insufficient compensation. "Sir Martin Frobisher whome God forgive" is the phrase in which he is spoken of by his wife. [Sidenote: Gilbert.] [Sidenote: Haies in Hakl. Voy., 184-227.]