Among its founders was Robert Thorne, and he in a letter of 1527
writes: "As some sicknesses are hereditarious and come from the
father to the son, so this inclination or desire of this discovery I
inherited of my father, which with another merchant of Bristol
named Hugh Eliot were the discoverers of the Newfoundlands."

Tradition, says the school historian C. P. Hill, History of Bristol
Grammar School, pp. 3-4, attributes the voyage of the father to
1494, and if this is so, it is pre-Cabot: three years before John Cabot
sailed on the Mathew from Bristol, May 2, 1497, to make his landfall
at Cape Bonavista on the eastern coast of Newfoundland on June 24,
1497. C. Bona Vista a Caboto Primum Reperta (English map of
1617). The ascription of the landfall to Cape North in the Island of
Cape Breton is ill-founded, and for sailing reasons highly improbable.

Between Bristol and the south coast of the West Country pro-
jected the county of Cornwall and its rocks were as much a grave-
yard on this side of the Atlantic, as was the Cape Race coast from
Cappahayden to Mistaken Point on the other. Therefore, this south
coast was not satellite to Bristol. In so far as its merchants did not
get their supplies locally, they drew them from London or abroad,
and yet they were not, as maritime adventurers, in the orb of
London. They built up their own system, in conjunction with the
Channel Islands, rich in uncustomed liquor, and with the south of
Ireland, rich in butter, bacon and (human) brawn. Waterford or
Cork would be the last port of call on the way to Newfoundland.

As the Victoria County History ( Dorset, Vol. II, 203) well says,
"The recovery [in Elizabeth's time] of Weymouth and Melcombe
and the continued progress of Poole were mainly due to their share
of the Newfoundland fishery, which for many of these western coast
towns was replacing medieval overseas trade soon to be engrossed by
London and other of the great ports. It would be impossible to over-
rate the national value of this new school for the production and
training of seamen, which with the previously existent North Sea
and Iceland fisheries largely created the marine which overwhelmed
Spain in the sixteenth century and the Dutch in the seventeenth
century, thus clearing the way for trans-oceanic expansion." But
Wessex must be prepared to hear the historians of the Coal Industry
make claims almost as large for the North Sea colliers.

Plymouth was, and is, the great naval dockyard of the West
Country, and it built many ships. But in former days shipbuilding
centres were numerous along the coast. Bridport, for example,
specialised in making war sloops in the late eighteenth century: as

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