There is a great contrast between the two letters of Soncino. The first, written soon after the arrival of Cabot in London, is evidently based on hearsay and rumour, and contains no fact of importance. The second dispatch of Soncino is a news-letter written several months after the return of the 1497 expedition, and shows that in the interim the writer has taken great pains to obtain full information on the subject. The letter is a model of clearness and businesslike arrangement. The writer gives authorities for his statements; he has talked with Cabot and with members of his crew; he has listened to the explorer’s demonstrations, probably in the presence of the king and the court; he gives some idea of Cabot’s character and personality, and the amount of credence which should be paid to him; and when he falls back on rumour he is careful to insert ‘it is said’. He has evidently displayed such an intelligent interest that Cabot has offered him a place in the next expedition. Full value may therefore be assigned to the facts in his letter. When Soncino speaks of sailing to the east, he means of course the west. He had in mind that the new land was thought to be the Far East although reached by a western route.
The letter from Ferdinand and Isabella is useful as showing the jealousy of Spain at the projected enterprise even before it had started. The same sentiment is again strongly expressed in Pedro de Ayala’s letter two years later, and, although it does not appear from the available documents that any official remonstrance was addressed to Henry VII, Spanish disapproval must, nevertheless, have had its share in causing the gradual abandonment of American enterprises in the early years of the sixteenth century.
Ayala’s letter, written after the sailing of the second expedition, is the only one of the series which contains any positive facts as to that expedition. It has an unsatisfying air of vagueness and, as regards the first voyage, is not nearly so precise as Soncino’s long account. This is partly due to the fact that the details of the matter were already known to the Spanish sovereigns, and there was thus no need to enter deeply into them. One point in the letter has been made the basis of a rather revolutionary theory as to the second expedition, namely, that John Cabot was in Seville and Lisbon during the winter of 1497–8, recruiting men for his second voyage. This theory is built upon the general statement that Cabot had sought assistance in those places. An interpretation which makes him do so in 1497–8 is hardly allowable. In the first place we know that he could get plenty of men in England, where also investors came forward readily and the greatest enthusiasm prevailed; secondly, it is not likely that he would have trusted himself in Seville at that time, having regard to the feelings of the Spanish Government on the subject; and thirdly, a winter voyage to the Peninsula was a risky undertaking if the traveller were pressed for time. In the then state of navigation he might easily be detained for weeks and months by bad weather;[[54]] and John Cabot could not afford to risk the postponement of his expedition for a year, with its possible abandonment, or the appointment of another to command it in his stead. On the contrary, the natural and probable interpretation of the statement is that Cabot had sought a hearing for his plans in Spain and Portugal before coming to England; and even at that, it is quite a ‘by the way’ remark and lacks corroboration. The same may be said as to the caravels annually sent out from Bristol; Ayala was not in England during the period referred to, and was probably repeating a piece of current gossip.
The few facts he relates of the 1498 voyage rest on surer ground, as having occurred under the writer’s more immediate attention. The five ships are mentioned elsewhere, and that number is thus probably correct. The ‘Friar Buil’ referred to was possibly a Spanish spy: it is singular that his name alone of all the adventurers is thought worthy of mention to the Spanish sovereigns. Unless such an obscure man was an agent of theirs, it is difficult to see what interest they could have had in hearing of him. The assertion that Cabot’s charts were falsified entirely lacks confirmation, and there is no ground for believing it. Ayala was suspicious and prejudiced, and ready to impute dishonest intentions to England. It is noticeable that in affairs quite separate from this one he took up a more hostile attitude towards Henry VII than did his superior, de Puebla. He had a great admiration for Scotland, in which country he had been ambassador, and this may have engendered a corresponding hatred of England.
The information, such as it is, afforded by the rewards to John Cabot and the loans to his associates in the second expedition is, of necessity, absolutely trustworthy. The documents in question were written for immediate business purposes, with no idea of their ever being used to elucidate the story of the discoveries.
The unfinished account of the 1498 voyage, given in the anonymous British Museum chronicle, has evidently some near relationship to that contained in the lost Fabyan manuscript copied by Hakluyt and Stowe. It is probable that Fabyan based his account on the former chronicle, adding the note on the savages from his own knowledge, but not troubling to relate the fate of the 1498 voyage. This in itself gives ground for presuming that the expedition in question returned in safety without achieving any striking results. If none of the vessels ever came back, a possibility that has been suggested, Fabyan would hardly have refrained from commenting on such a sensational occurrence. As it is, he merely records the fact that they had not returned by the end of October 1498, and there leaves the matter. Existing editions of Fabyan contain no reference to the Cabots.
The famous map of 1544, of which the only copy now known to exist is in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, is generally agreed to be the work of Sebastian Cabot, or at least, based on information supplied by him. The inscriptions upon it, descriptive of various countries, are in Latin or Spanish, the majority in both. Typographical considerations indicate that it was not printed in Spain—the printer does not use the Spanish tilde over the n—and Antwerp has been suggested as the most likely place of origin. The inscription given above, relating to the Cabot discovery, was translated by Hakluyt from a similar map which he saw at Westminster, and Hakluyt’s translation agrees very closely with a modern translation from the Paris map, showing that they are from one and the same source. The voyage described is obviously the first one, but the local colour as to the natives and their habits must have been supplied from later experiences, as the contemporary letters expressly assert that John Cabot saw no inhabitants on the first expedition. The date of the discovery is given on the Paris map as MCCCCXCIIII (1494), but this may be explained as a careless error for MCCCCXCVII, due to bad writing. It should be noted that this inscription is the earliest authority for the statement that land was sighted on June 24 at 5 a.m., and that the island of St. John was discovered and named on the same day. There seems to be no good reason why the statements on the map should not be believed, other than that they proceed from a tainted source. Sebastian Cabot’s reputation for veracity is certainly under a cloud, even when he is acquitted of giving false information about his explorations. In other matters he undoubtedly lied freely and frequently.[[55]]
The ground being now cleared by a necessary, if tedious, appraisement of values, it is possible to relate what is known of John Cabot’s voyages.
It had been owing to a mere accident that Christopher Columbus had not sailed under the English flag on his first epoch-making voyage to the west. In 1485, after vainly attempting to interest the sovereigns of Portugal and Spain in his ideas, he had dispatched his brother Bartholomew to England, to lay his plans before Henry VII. But Bartholomew Columbus had suffered disaster on his journey. After being robbed by pirates in the narrow seas, he was further delayed by sickness and poverty before being able to lay his brother’s case before the king. When he was at length successful in doing so, Henry listened with sympathy and promised assistance, but, being preoccupied with other matters, he postponed the adventure until too late. When he did finally make up his mind to take the affair in hand, it was only to hear that Christopher Columbus had already sailed from Palos in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella.
Henry had missed a great chance, partly through his own fault, and must have realized his mistake when news began to spread through Europe of the discovery of rich islands on the western route to Cathay, as all men supposed the new land to be. It was considered at the English court a thing ‘more divine than human’ to have reached the Far East by way of the west, and the anticipations of the advantages of the new discovery must have exceeded even the reality. Throughout the Middle Ages the imagination of all who were capable of thought had been stimulated by glowing accounts of the riches and wonders of the East. The experiences of Marco Polo and many another wanderer of lesser fame had been spread broadcast through Europe; such adventures lose nothing in the telling, and indeed the material civilization of Asia compared not unfavourably with that of mediaeval Christendom; hence to reach Cathay became the ambition of many a restless mind. The Venetians and the Genoese were content to trade with the Asiatic merchants who brought their goods overland to the ports of the Levant. The Portuguese navigators, excluded from the Mediterranean, pushed successively further and further down the coast of Africa in the hope of finding a way round it into the Indian Ocean. They had not yet succeeded when, in 1495, Columbus returned with his report of rich islands to the west, and it was universally believed that he had solved the problem in the simplest possible way.