In 1527 Henry VIII sent two ships under the command of
John Rut to explore the North-American coast, and Captain Rut seems
to have reached the Straits of Belle Isle between Newfoundland
and Labrador (then blocked with ice so that he took them for
a bay), and afterwards to have passed along the east coast of
Newfoundland--already much frequented by the Bretons, Normans, and
Portuguese--and to have stopped at the harbour of St. John's, thence
sailing as far south as Massachusetts.
[Footnote 9: The name _America_ probably appears for the first time in
English print in the old play or masque the _Four Elements_, which was
published about 1518. In a review of the geography of the Earth, as
known at that period, a description is given of this vast New World
across the Ocean: "But these new landys found lately, been called
America, because only Americus did find them first". Americus was a
Florentine bank clerk--Amerigo Vespucci--at Seville who gave up the
counting-house for adventure, sailed with a Spanish captain to the
West Indies and the mainland of Venezuela (off which he notes that he
met an English sailing vessel, and this as early as 1499!), and then
joined the first exploring voyage of the Portuguese to Brazil. He
returned to Europe, and in a letter to a fellow countryman at Paris,
written in the late autumn of 1502, he claimed to have discovered a
New World across the Ocean.
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