56 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
Welsh) historians that it really couldn’t have been quite
like that.1
It was not long after the Enghsh discovery of America
that mariners began making sure that the folks at home
could see for themselves. Some Bristol seamen, organized
into a company with some Portuguese from the Azores,
sailed for the New World in the spring of 1501, and fished
there until their return home shortly before Christmas. The
Household Accounts Book of Henry VH records a payment
on January 7, 1502 (N.S.), of a hundred shillings “to men of
Bristoll that found Thisle.” The same men made another
voyage the following year, represented in the Household
Accounts by two further payments: one of 6s.8d. “to a
mariner that brought an Egle” on September 23, and on the
30th, one of £.20 “to the merchants of Bristoll that have
bene in the newe founde Launde.”2
If six-and-eightpence was the going price for an eagle
from the New World, it is possible that £20 was a fair value
for three Eskimos. For it was in this year that an anonymous
London chronicler entered, for the mayoral year running
from September 15, 1501, to September 14, 1502, under the
heading “III men were brought from the newe Ilond,” the
following note: “This yere three men were brought out of
an Hand founde by merchauntes of Bristowe ferre beyonde
Irelond, the which were clothid in Beestes skynnes and ete
raw fflessh, and rude in their demeanure as Beestes.”3 The
same facts, with some additional ones about the savages,
were printed by Hakluyt in 1582 from the MS. chronicle
(since lost) of Robert Fabyan, which was in the possession
of John Stow. After Fabyan’s paragraph about the 1498 ex-
pedition of John Cabot, which Hakluyt attributed to Sebas-
tien Cabot, he printed the one dealing with the savages,