among them were a few Franciscan friars and missionaries, whose letters and personal reports to their friends at home, beginning about the middle of the thirteenth century, gave great incitement to the curiosity of other friars and travellers. "One day," says one them, Rubruquis, a Fleming, writing in 1255, "there sat with me a certain priest from Cathay, clothed in a crimson stuff of a splendid colour, so I asked him whence that colour was got. In reply he told me that in the eastern parts of Cathay there are lofty rocks inhabited by certain creatures which have the human form in every respect, except that they cannot bend their knees, but get along by some kind of a jumping motion. They are only a cubit high, and are hairy all over, and dwell in inaccessible holes in the rock. But the huntsmen bring beer with them, which they know how to brew very strong, and make holes in the rocks like cups, which they fill with beer. Then the huntsmen hide themselves, and the creatures come out of their holes and taste the drink that has been set for them, and call out 'Chin chin!'-and from this cry they get their name; for they are called Chinchin. Presently they gather in great numbers and drink up the beer, and get tipsy and fall asleep. So the huntsmen come and catch them sleeping, and bind them hand and foot, and open a vein in the neck of the creatures, and, after taking three or four drops of blood, let them go. And it is that blood, he assured me, that gives this most precious dye." That story, well fitted to arouse the interest of wonder-loving Europeans, the good friar evidently be

CHAP. II. Its Strange People and its Famous Riches. 27 lieved. Other tales, about which he himself was scep tical, found ready credence as they passed from mouth to ear among the people of the west. "They also used to tell as a fact, though I don't believe a word of it," he says, "that there is a certain province on the other side of Cathay, and, whatever a man's age be when he enters that province, he never gets any older."*

The friar's letter was written while Marco Polo was a young man, and it probably encouraged him to enter on his famous course of eastern travel. Marco Polo's reports about Cathay, the delight of medieval readers and listeners, are tolerably well known. Quite as alluring were the statements of Friar Odoric, a Franciscan from Friuli, who visited Cathay and its neighbourhood near the year 1325. He was especially eloquent about Pekin, its walls and gates, its artificial lakes and gorgeous palaces. "The khan's own palace," he wrote, "is of vast size and splendour. There are four-and-twenty columns of gold, and all the walls are hung with skins of red leather, said to be the finest in the world. In the midst of the palace is a certain great jar, more than two paces in height, entirely formed of a certain precious stone, so fine that I was told its price exceeded the value of four great towns. It is all hooped round with gold, and this jar hath also fringes of network of great pearls hanging therefrom. Into this

*Cathay and the Way Thither; being a Collection of Mediaval Notices of China, translated and edited by Colonel HENRY YULE, C.B., for the Hakluyt Society (1866, vol. i. Every student of geographical history must be grateful to Colonel Yule for this entertaining and very learned work.

vessel drink is conveyed by certain conduits from the court of the palace, and beside it are many golden goblets from which all drink who list." Among much else, Odoric told how, in the khan's menagerie, were six horses with six legs apiece, four double-headed ostriches, giants twenty feet high, and dwarfs not two spans long, "not to mention the wild men who were in the lord's garden, and women all hairy with long grey hair, though of human form."

The fabled marvels of Cathay were soon the talk of Europe, and many travellers were induced, as missionaries, or merchants, or pleasure-seekers, or all three combined, to follow in the steps of Marco Polo and Odoric. But these travellers went by land, until near the end of the fifteenth century, when Spain sent out its Christopher Columbus, and England its John Cabot.

Cabot, like Columbus, was an Italian by birth. He was a gold-spurred knight of Venice, who established himself, apparently while yet a young man, as a merchant in Bristol, then famous as the haunt of many of the most enterprising traders in England, with the venerable William Canynge at their head. At Bristol his youngest and most memorable son, Sebastian, was born in 1471 or 1472.† But early in 1476, John

* Cathay and the Way Thither, vol. i.

The younger Cabot is generally said to have been a native of Venice, but this contemporary testimony appears decisive :-" Sebastian Cabott tould me that he was borne in Bristowe, and that at iiii yeare owld he was carried with his father to Venice, and so returned agayne into England with his father after certeyne yeares."-EDEN, Decades of the New World (1555), folio 255.

1476-1490. Christopher Columbus and John Cabot.

29

Cabot returned to Venice, and then, having been expatriated by his long absence, he was reinstated by the Senate in the rights of citizenship for a term of fifteen years. It is probable that he spent the greater part of these fifteen years in Italy, carrying on his trading avocations, and entering heartily into the speculations which at that time were growing in the minds of bold and learned men as to the possibility of reaching the wonderful region of Cathay by sailing out into the western sea instead of travelling eastward by land. It is likely that he was personally acquainted with Columbus, who, through most of those years, was wandering about in Spain and Italy, seeking wearily for rich men's help towards fulfilment of the projects which were winning the approval of wise men too poor to give him substantial assistance.† Cabot, too, was a wanderer in the interests of science. We are told that he went to Seville and Lisbon, "asking assistance for his

* RAWDON BROWN, Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, relating to English Affairs, existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice and other Libraries of Northern Italy, vol. i. (1864), pp. 131, 136.

It would be interesting to think, if the story could be relied upon, that nothing but an accident prevented England from having the glory of Columbus's, as well as of Cabot's, discoveries. It is reported that in 1489, despairing of the assistance he sought in Portugal and Spain, Columbus sent his brother Bartholomew to plead his cause before Henry VII. Bartholomew came to England, was liberally received by the King, and departed with an assurance of support, if Christopher would himself visit London and make arrangements for the work. But on his way home he was seized and robbed by pirates, and thus reduced to such poverty, that, for some years, he could do nothing but keep himself alive by chart-making. When he got back to Spain, he found that the discovery had already been made, under the auspices of Queen Isabella, and that his brother had actually embarked on a second voyage.HAKLUYT, Voyages (1600), vol. iii., pp. 2, 3.

discoveries."* Failing in this, he returned to Bristol about the year 1490, and there his scheme for Atlantic voyaging found ready supporters. Throughout the remainder of Henry VII.'s reign Bristol was almost as famous a place of resort for English maritime adventurers as was Palos, under Ferdinand and Isabella, for Spanish seamen. "For the last seven years," wrote the Spanish ambassador in London to his sovereigns in 1498," the people of Bristol have sent out every year two, three, or four light ships in search of the island of Brazil and the Seven Cities, according to the fancy of this Genoese,”-Genoese being written in error for Venetian.t

About the first outcome of John Cabot's fancy, occurring at least one or two years before Columbus's earliest voyage to the Indies, our only information is contained in a contemporary statement, that in 1480-clearly a wrong date-" a ship of John Jay the younger, of eight hundred tons, and another, began their voyage from King's Road to the island of Brazil, to the west of Ireland, ploughing their way through the sea, and that Thlyde, the most scientific mariner in all England, was the pilot of the ships. News came to Bristol," it is added, "that the said ships sailed about the sea during nine

*BERGENROTH, Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers, relating to the Negotiations between England and Spain, preserved in the Archives of Simancas and elsewhere, vol. i. (1862), p. 177.

+ BERGENROTH, vol. i., p. 177. Brazil was one of the many names given to all or part of the vaguely-defined district generally known as Cathay, apparently from the red dye-afterwards found in the real Brazil-which, as we have seen, was one of the Cathayan marvels. island of the Seven Cities was another of these names.

The