Note Back to Main Text — Chapter VI · THE FINDING OF STRANGE COASTS.

At the same time with his letter to Santangel, the Admiral had despatched another account, substantially the same,[532] to Gabriel The letter to Sanchez. Sanchez,[533] another officer of the royal treasury. Several copies of a Latin translation of this letter were published at Rome, at Paris, and elsewhere, in the course of the year 1493.[534] The story which it contained was at once paraphrased in Italian verse by Giuliano Dati, one of the most popular poets of the age, and perhaps in the autumn of 1493 the amazing news that the Indies had been found by sailing west[535] was sung by street urchins in Florence. We are also informed, in an ill-vouched but not improbable clause in Ramusio, that not far from that same time the news was heard with admiration in London, where it was pronounced "a thing more divine than human to sail by the West unto the East, where spices grow, by a way that was never known before;"[536] and it seems altogether likely that it was this news that prompted the expedition of John Cabot hereafter to be mentioned.[537]