Most people up to then believed that the earth was flat; but some knew it must be round, and one of these was the Italian named Christopher Columbus. He persuaded the King and Queen of Spain in 1492 to lend him three little ships, and with these he sailed away westward to find a shorter and cheaper trade route to India. He discovered a number of islands, and thinking they were close to India he called them the West Indies and their people Indians,—a mistaken name which has stuck to the native tribes of America ever since. More Spaniards followed; some of them landed on the American mainland, in Mexico; and it was their runaway horses which found their way up to our Western plains. The English, years before Columbus, had sent ships exploring far out into the Atlantic, in search of a new land; but they did not find it. Five years after Columbus had found the West Indies, however, the King of England sent out ships under another Italian, Cabot, who took a more northerly route. That expedition came in 1497 to Labrador, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia; so the English were the first white men to discover the mainland of America in modern times. We know now that five hundred years earlier the Norsemen, after settling in Iceland and Greenland, visited Nova Scotia or New England; but they probably sailed away again very soon. Some of them may have been captured and “adopted” into Indian tribes. At any rate they vanished, and their adventure was forgotten. European fishermen, too, had been gathering harvests of cod from the Newfoundland banks long before Columbus was born, and they probably landed; but they wrote no accounts of what they had seen, and their stories attracted little notice. The French explorers came soon after the English; one of them, Jacques Cartier, of St. Malo, in Brittany, sailed up the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1534, and got as far as Montreal on his next voyage in 1535. Another great Frenchman, Champlain, founded at Quebec, in 1608, the first Canadian settlement which has had an unbroken history to our own time. For a long while, however, the towns of “New France” on the St. Lawrence were little more than fur-trading posts, as fur was the only Canadian product that any one in Europe thought of much value. The real object of the first French explorers was the same as that of Columbus, to find a short cut to Asia. Even the fur trade, rich as it might be, was nothing compared to the trade they hoped to carry on with India and China. Jacques Cartier, when he first sailed into the mouth of the St. Lawrence, hoped he had discovered the “North-west Passage” through America, never dreaming that the western ocean was three thousand miles away across a whole wide continent.