ABSTRACT
The period of the pre-Cabotian voyages from Bristol is therefore approximately from 1480 to 1494 or 1495. It has long been known that there was a voyage of exploration in 1480. The authority for it is a passage in the Itinerary of William Worcestre, a Latin MS preserved at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The Brasil in the minds of the Bristol merchants was a land worth expensive efforts in discovery, lying a long way out westwards in the Atlantic. The Portuguese mariners may themselves have gone to Iceland and there have heard of American lands south-west of Greenland, or they may have had such information from English merchants of Bristol. The Bristol men received a good deal of sea-lore from the Portuguese and Spaniards, as they almost certainly did from the men of Iceland. The sea air of the late fifteenth century was laden with stories of lost or unknown lands across the ocean.
