Stow — we get a few glimpses of what was going on. Richard Eden gives us a little light; but even Hakluyt, with all his devoted energy and perseverance, was able to preserve only portions of the early part of the glorious history of our maritime enterprises. He could not find a single scrap of the writings of John Cabot. Yet during a long life he "waded on still further and further in the sweet studie of the historie of cosmographie," and strove "to incorporate into one bodie the torn and scattered limnes of our ancient and later navigations by sea." To no writer does England owe so deep a debt of gratitude as to Richard Hakluyt.
In the fifteenth century William Botoner, better known as William of Worcester — the accomplished secretary of that doughty old warrior, Sir John Fastolf, of Caistor — gives us some insight into the activity and enterprise of one of our great seaports. He tells us of William Canyng, the merchant prince of Bristol, who, for many years, employed eight hundred seamen and one hundred artificers, and possessed ten ships which, as mentioned in an earlier chapter, traded to the Mediterranean, to the Baltic, and even to Iceland, where one of his vessels of 160 tons was lost. We hear also how Robert Sturmy, Mayor of Bristol, sent a ship to the Mediterranean in 1457, which was "spoilt by the Genoese," for which wrong the Genoese in London were arrested and imprisoned until they made good the loss.
A book of sailing directions for the coasts from Scotland to Gibraltar was written in the fifteenth century, and has been preserved. At the time when the Portuguese vessels, under the auspices of Prince Henry, were slowly and cautiously creeping along the coast of Africa, dreading to be out of sight of land, English sailors had no such fears, but habitually faced the storms of the North Atlantic and made voyages to Iceland. They may have gone farther. A map of the coasts from the British Isles nearly to Cape Verde in Africa, was drawn in London in 1448, including the Azores and other islands in the Atlantic. It has recently been brought to the notice of geographers by Mr. Yule Oldham. Its author was a Venetian galley captain named Andrea Biancho, who is also well known as an accomplished cosmographer. In the margin of his map the outline of a coast is added, with the inscription — "An authentic island distant to the west 1500 miles" ("Ixola otinticha x longa a ponente 1500 mia"). As the map was drawn in London, this new information was probably received there.
