Great Gulf and the Chinese nations were within the Castilian limits. They asserted also that it was absolutely certain, that the islands called the Moluccas, in which all sorts of spices grow, and from which they were brought to Malacca, were contained in the western, or Castilian division, and that it would be possible to sail to them, and to bring the spices at less trouble and expense from their native soil to Castille. The plan of the voyage was to sail west, and then coasting the Southern Hemisphere round the south of America to the east. Yet it appeared to be a difficult undertaking, and one of which the practicability was doubtful. Not that it was impossible, prima facie, to sail from the west round the Southern Hemisphere to the east; but that it was uncertain, whether ingenious Nature, all whose works are wisely conceived, had so arranged the sea and the land that it might be possible to arrive by this course at the Eastern Seas. For it had not been ascertained whether that extensive region, which is called Terra Firma, separated the Western Ocean [the Atlantic] from the Eastern [the Pacific]; but it was plain that that continent extended in a southerly direction, and afterwards inclined to the west. Moreover two regions had been discovered in the north, one called Baccalearum from a new kind of fish,[1] the other called Florida; and if these were connected with Terra Firma, it would not be possible to pass
- ↑ The name Bacallaos (according to early French writers a Basque appellation of the codfish) was also applied, by a natural extension, to the region afterward known as Canada. According to Peter Martyr, the name Bacallaos was given to those lands by Sebastian Cabot, "because of the great multitudes of fishes found in the seas thereabout." See Jesuit Relations (Cleveland reissue), i, p. 308, and ii, p. 295.
