cut, in Malabar, he reached on the 22nd of May, 1498. Gania returned to Lisbon in September, 1499. Finally, in the following year, 1500, the coast of Brazil was accidentally discovered, by the Portuguese admiral, Pedro Alvarez de Cabral, being driven upon it by a storm, while following the course of Gama to Calicut, at the head of a fleet of thirteen ships, carrying a force to effect a settlement in Malabar—a circumstance, as has been remarked, which shows that America, even if Columbus had never existed, could not possibly have long remained concealed after the Portuguese began to navigate the southern part of the Atlantic Ocean.
Bacon states that, besides the patent to the Cabots, Henry, "again, in the sixteenth year of his reign (1500), and likewise in the eighteenth (1502), granted forth new commissions for the discovery and investing of unknown lands." The commission of 1500 has not been preserved; but that of 1502 is in Rymer, and it refers to the former as having been granted to Hugh Elliot and Thomas Ashurst, merchants of Bristol; to John Gunsalus and Francis Fernandus, natives of Portugal; and also to Richard Ward, John Thomas, and John Fernandus. In the second licence the three last names are left out. In other respects the licence is nearly of the same tenor with that granted some years before to the Cabots, except that it forbids the adventurers to concern themselves with or to offer to molest such heathen and infidel countries as were already discovered and reduced to the obedience of the King of Portugal, or of any other prince the friend or ally of the king. This was all the respect that Henry chose to pay to the famous award of Pope Alexander VI. in 1493, by which, drawing a line from pole to pole through the middle of the Atlantic and the southern continent of the new world, he bestowed all the countries that should be discovered to the west of that boundary on the King of Spain, and all those to the east of it on the King of Portugal. None of these expeditions of discovery, however, patronised (if that term can be used) by Henry, were attended with any success—the natural consequence of the parsimony which made
