The discovery in Germany by von Martius in 1843 of an engraved _mappemonde_ bearing date of 1544, and purporting to be issued under the authority of Sebastian Cabot, soon caused a general current of opinion in favor of a landfall in Cape Breton. The map is unique and is now in the National Library at Paris. It bears no name of publisher nor place of publication. Around it for forty years controversy has waxed warm. Kohl does not accept the map as authentic; D'Avezac, on the contrary, gives it full credence. The tide of opinion has set of late in favor of it, and in consequence in favor of the Cape Breton landfall, because it bears, plainly inscribed upon that island, the words "_prima tierra vista_," and the legends which are around the map identify beyond question that as the landfall of the first voyage. Dr. Deane, in _Winter's Narrative and Critical History,_ supports this view. Markham, in his introduction to the volume of the Hakluyt Society for 1893, also accepts it; and our own honorary secretary (the late Sir John Bourinot), in his learned and exhaustive monograph on Cape Breton, inclines to the same theory. I do not propose here to discuss the difficult problems of this map. For many years, under the influence of current traditions and cursory reading, I believe the landfall of John Cabot to have been in Newfoundland; but a closer study of the original authorities has led me to concur in the view which places it somewhere on the island of Cape Breton. At the threshold of an inquiry into the "_prima tierra vista_" or landfall of 1497, it is before all things necessary to distinguish sharply, in every recorded detail, between the first and second voyages. I venture to think that, if this had always been done, much confusion and controversy would have been avoided. It was not done by the older writers, and the writers of later years have followed them without sufficiently observing that the authorities they were building upon were referring almost solely to the second voyage. Even when some occasional detail of the first voyage was introduced, the circumstances of the second voyage were interwoven and became dominant in the narrative, so that the impression of one voyage only remains upon the mind. We must therefore always remember the antithesis which exists between them. Thus, the first voyage was made in one small vessel with a crew of eighteen men, the second with five ships and three hundred men. The first voyage was undertaken with John Cabot's own resources, the second with the royal authority to take six ships and their outfit on the same conditions as if for the King's service. The first voyage was a private venture, the second an official expedition. The first voyage extended over three months and was provisioned for that period only; the second was victualled for twelve months and extended over six months at least, for how much longer is not known. The course of the first voyage was south of