The Cabots and the Discovery of America / With a Brief Description and History of Brandon Hill, the Site of the Cabot Memorial Tower

CONTENTS

CHIEF among the attractions of Bristol has been for centuries past the church of St. Mary Redcliffe; while few names on her roll of fame are more widely known than that of the ancient citizen to whom the stately fabric owes so much of its grace and beauty.

And we grudge not the mead of praise. He who gives of his best to the service of God and his fellow men deserves high honour. But, when all is said, the work of William Canynge was as a drop in the ocean compared with that accomplished by the merchant-pilot, his contemporary and probable neighbour. Canynge helped to re-build a church; John Cabot discovered a continent, and secured it for all time to the English-speaking race. Yet the one has been remembered and revered; the other neglected and forgotten. An anomaly, perhaps accounted for by the fact that Bristol has ever been slow to recognise merit outside her borders, and John Cabot was an alien, while the claims of Sebastian, his son, to citizenship are still hotly contested; which is not surprising, as the evidence so far obtainable rests mainly upon the contradictory accounts of Sebastian himself.
To an unprejudiced mind, however, the assertion made by him to his friend Eden in old age, when he had no purpose in view and nothing to gain by it, that he was borne in Bristowe, and at iiii. yeare ould he was carried with his father to Venice, and so returned agayne to England with his father after certayne years, whereby he was thought to have been borne in Venice, appears far more likely to be true than his statement in middle life to Contarini, the Venetian Ambassador, by which he sought to obtain wealth and honour, I was borne in Venice, but was bred in England.

Practically, the birthplace of either father or son is of little moment, even to Bristolians; nor the question of earlier voyages, so long as the great fact remains—That it was from Bristol port, in a Bristol ship, manned by Bristol sailors, on the initiative of Bristol merchants, that John Cabot sailed on that memorable May morning four hundred years ago; and that to Bristol port he returned in the following August, after having planted the flag of St. George on the eastern-most point of Cape Breton, in the Dominion of Canada, and taken possession of that great northern continent for the King of England!—An achievement, be it remembered, preceding by more than a year the landing of Columbus on the Southern continent.