This evidence comprised the letters-patent of King Henry the seventh issued to John Cabot and his three sons, Lewis, Sebastian, and Santius, authorizing the exploration of new and unknown regions, under date of the fifth of March, 1495/6, distinguished in American history as “the most ancient American state paper of England”; a “Note of Sebastian Gabotes voyage of Discouerie taken out of an old Chronicle written by Robert Fabian, sometime alderman of London”; a memorandum of “three sauage men which hee brought home and presented vnto the King”; and another reference to the Cabot voyages made by the Venetian historian, Giovanni Battista Ramusio, in the preface to one of his volumes of voyages and travels published in 1550–1563. Next followed, in the order named, a “Declaration” by Robert Thorne, a London merchant long resident in Seville, Spain, setting forth the discoveries made in the Indies for Portugal, and demonstrating to Henry the eighth of England that the northern parts of America remained for him to “take in hande,” which he failed to do; a “Booke” by Thorne, still in Seville, later prepared, in 1527, at the request of the British ambassador in Spain, being an “Information” on the same subject; the “Relation” of John Verazzano, the Florentine corsair, in the service of France, describing his voyage of discovery, made in 1524, along the eastern coast of America from about the present South Carolina to Newfoundland; an account of the discovery of Greenland and various phantom islands, with the coast of North America, by the brothers Zeno, Venetian navigators, in the late fourteenth century; and a report of the “true and last” discovery of Florida made by Captain John Ribault for France, in 1562. The pamphlet closed with a chapter of practical instructions for intending colonists and an inviting list of commodities growing “in part of America not presently inhabited by any Christian from Florida northward.”