In the year 1500 the Portuguese sailed in a different direction to seek a short route to Cathay. The Portuguese historian, Galvano refers to the expedition, saying: “In this same year 1500 it is said that Gaspar Cortereal[273] begged permission of King Emmanuel to discover the New Land (Terra Nova). He departed from the island Terceira with two ships equipped at his own expense, and he sailed to that region which is in the north in fifty degrees of latitude, which is a land now called after his name. He returned home in safety to the city of Lisbon. Sailing a second time on this voyage the ship was lost in which he went, and the other vessel came back to Portugal. His brother Miguel went to seek him with three ships at his own cost, and when they came to that coast, and found so many entrances of rivers and havens, each ship entered a different river, with this regulation and command, that they all three should meet again on the twentieth of August. The other two ships did as commanded, and they, seeing that Miguel Cortereal came not on the appointed day nor afterward in a certain time, returned to this realm and never heard any thing more concerning him.... But that country is called Terra dos Cortereals unto this day.”[274] Damião de Góes, the Portuguese historian, says Cortereal called this region Terra Verde (Greenland), on account of its remarkable verdure, and the vast forests stretching all along the coast.[275] Ramusio, speaking of the exploration of the coast of North America says: “In the part of the New World, which runs toward the north and northwest, opposite our habitable part of Europe, many captains have navigated, and the first (by that which one knows), was Gaspar Cortereale, a Portuguese, who, in 1500, went with two caravels intending to find some strait of the sea whence by a shorter voyage than that taken around Africa he would be able to go to the Spice Islands. He sailed so far forward that he came to a place where it was extremely cold, and he found, in the latitude of sixty degrees, a river closed with snow, to which he gave the name, calling it Rio Nevado. But he had not sufficient courage to pass much beyond it. The whole of this coast, which runs two hundred leagues from Rio Nevado as far as to the port of Malvas, in fifty-six degrees, he saw full of people and along it many dwellings.”[276] The earliest account of Gaspar Cortereal’s voyage of 1501, from which he never returned, is contained in a letter written by Pietro Pasqualigo, the Venetian ambassador at the court of Portugal, to his brothers in Italy, dated October 19, 1501. The writer says: “On the eighth of the present month, one of the two caravels which his most serene majesty sent the past year under the command of Gaspar Corterat, arrived here, and reports the finding of a country distant west and northwest, two thousand miles, heretofore quite unknown.