According to Galvano they first “sighted land in 45° N. lat. and then sailed straight to the north until they came to 60° N. lat., where the day is eighteen hours long [sic], and the night is very clear and light. There they found the air cold and great islands of ice [icebergs ?] but no bottom with soundings of seventy, eighty, or one hundred fathoms,[332] but they found much ice which terrified them.”
When, according to Peter Martyr, their hopes of making their way to the west in these northern latitudes were thus annihilated by the ice, they sailed back to the south and south-west along the North American coast, as far as the latitude of Gibraltar, 36° (according to Peter Martyr), or to 38° (according to Gomara and Galvano), while according to Ramusio’s anonymous informant they sailed as far as Florida.[333] From thence the expedition returned to England.
With regard to the date of this voyage, we are told in the continuation of Peter Martyr’s Decades [Dec. vii], written in 1524 (published 1530), that “Bacchalaos [i.e., Newfoundland, or the northern east coast of America] was discovered from England by Cabot sixteen years ago.” According to this the voyage took place in 1508. In Contarini’s report of 1536 [cf. Winship, 1900, p. 36] it is said of Sebastian Cabot’s voyage that on his return he “found the King dead, and his son cared little for such an enterprise.” As Henry VII. died on April 21, 1509, it would be during the autumn of that year that Cabot returned; but then he must have sailed before April, which is unlikely, at any rate if it is a question of a voyage up into the ice to the north or north-west, such as is described. That he should have sailed in the previous year and not returned until after the King’s death is still more improbable.
These accounts contain so many improbabilities, and to some extent impossibilities, that it is on the whole extremely doubtful whether Sebastian Cabot ever made such a voyage to the north-west. That he did so is contradicted in the first place by the already quoted protest against Sebastian of the Wardens of the Drapers’ Company, which was issued in the name of the various Livery Companies of London, and which is of great significance, as it was written so soon after the events are supposed to have taken place that they must have been in the memory of most people; and it must have been easy for the King to inquire into the justification of the protest (cf. above, [p. 330]).
The map of 1544, which is attributed to the collaboration of Sebastian Cabot, may also point to his having never sailed along the northern part of the coast of America, since, according to the custom of that time, the coast of Labrador is made to run to the east and north-east. This agrees with the statement of Ramusio’s anonymous informant, that Sebastian had to turn back because in 56° N. lat. he found the land turning eastward (Galvano says the same). This is evidently derived from the study of maps. As such a delineation of the coast had not yet occurred on maps of Peter Martyr’s time, it is natural that this reason for turning back is also absent from his account.
In addition to all this, there are in the various accounts several statements which we must suppose to be really derived from Sebastian Cabot, but which are evidently untruthful. Thus Ramusio’s anonymous guest attributes to Sebastian the words that his father was dead when the news of the discovery of Columbus reached England, and that it was then Sebastian conceived the plan of his voyage which he submitted to the King. That, as stated by Peter Martyr, he should have fitted out two ships with crews of three hundred men at his own expense, is extremely improbable. He is also reported to have told Peter Martyr that he
“called these countries Baccallaos, because in the seas about there he found such great quantities of certain large fish—which might be compared to tunny [in size], and were thus called by the inhabitants—that sometimes they stopped his ships.”
These are nothing but impossibilities. In the first place, he never gave the name of Bacallaos; in the second, the inhabitants cannot have called the fish so, if by inhabitants is meant the native savages. These statements are, therefore, of the same kind as that of the masses of fish stopping the ships. Peter Martyr further relates that he said of these regions that
“he also found people in these parts, clad in skins of animals, yet not without the use of reason.” He says also that “there are a great number of bears in these parts, which are in the habit of eating fish; for, plunging into the water where they see quantities of these fish, they fasten their claws into their scales, and thus draw them to land and eat them, so that (as he says) the bears are not troublesome to men, when they have eaten their fill of fish. He declares also that in many places of these regions he saw great quantities of copper among the inhabitants.”
The statement about the bears may come from older literary sources, and resembles a similar statement in the Geographia Universalis (see above, [p. 191]). That the inhabitants have copper and are clad in skins may be derived from reports of the various voyages.