Antonio Galvano, Discoveries of the World to 1550, Lisbon, 1563. Latest edition, Hakluyt Society, 1862. Hakluyt published this translation in 1601.
‘In the yeere 1496 there was a Venetian in England called John Cabota [the name is probably an interpolation of Hakluyt’s], who having knowledge of such a new discoverie as this was, and perceiving by the globe that the islands before spoken of stood about in the same latitude with his countrey, and much neerer to England than to Portugall or to the Castile, he acquainted King Henrie the seventh, then King of England, with the same, wherewith the saide King was greatly pleased, and furnished him out with two ships and three hundred men: which departed and set saile in the spring of the yeare, and they sailed westward til they came in sight of land, in 45 degrees of latitude towards the north, and then went straight northwards till they came into sixty degrees of latitude, where the day is 18 howers long, and the night is very cleere and bright. There they found the aire cold, and great islands of ice, but no ground in seventy, eighty or hundred fathoms sounding, but found much ice, which alarmed them: and so from thence, putting about, finding the land to turne eastward, they trended along by it, discovering all the bay and river named Deseado, to see if it passed on the other side; then they sailed back again till they came to 38 degrees towards the equinoctial line, and from thence returned into England. There be others which say that he went as far as the Cape of Florida, which standeth in 25 degrees.’
Alonzo de Santa Cruz, Islario General de todas las Islas del Mundo, a manuscript first printed by F. R. von Wieser, Innsbruck, 1908. Writing to Charles V, Santa Cruz says:
‘This land was called Labrador because a labrador (ploughman or landowner) from the Azores gave information and intelligence of it to the King of England at the time he sent to explore it by Antonio Gaboto the English pilot and the father of Sebastian Gaboto, your Majesty’s present Pilot Major.’
Further on he speaks of the Baccalaos ‘first explored by the English pilot Antonio Gaboto, by command of the King of England’.[[62]]
It will be seen that the principal detailed accounts are those of Peter Martyr, Gomara, Ramusio, and Galvano.
Peter Martyr’s account was the earliest published (1516) and has the best right to be considered as correctly reproducing Sebastian’s own claims, since it was written by a man who was personally known to him and who was in frequent friendly communication with him. Circumstances of both time and place thus point to Martyr as the most trustworthy witness of Sebastian Cabot’s statements during the first years of his residence in Spain. As will be seen from the analysis given below, practically all the important details common to more than one account are found in his work, and it may be safely assumed that every serious historian subsequent to him was acquainted with it, more especially as it was written in Latin and thus accessible to all men of education.
Gomara, writing a few years after Sebastian Cabot had left Spain, repeats the main features of Martyr’s account. He may have known Sebastian personally, but does not expressly say so. His attitude is critical and somewhat suspicious, and he shows that he is not a mere blind reproducer of all he is told by his reduction of the northern limit of the voyage claimed by Sebastian. It should be remarked that the latitude of 58° N. is Gomara’s own figure and not Cabot’s, because this has been advanced as proof that Cape Farewell in Greenland was the point reached. There is no real evidence that Sebastian’s northward wanderings took him far away from the Labrador coast; and the fact that in early maps, including that of 1544, Greenland and Labrador are confused with one another, or rather, represented as continuous, points the other way, since, if Sebastian had crossed Davis Strait, he would have known that they were distinct.
Ramusio’s two relations, (α) by the Mantuan gentleman, and (β) in the preface to volume iii, are not of nearly such high value. In particular, the Mantuan gentleman’s story is quite untrustworthy. It is a report by Ramusio of a discourse delivered some years before he wrote it down, and in which the narrator in his turn was speaking from memory after the lapse of several years. Ramusio himself admits that his recollection is confused on the matter, and the consequence is that he makes the Mantuan gentleman put statements into the mouth of Sebastian Cabot with which that individual would never have insulted the intelligence of his hearers. The assertion that Queen Isabella, who died in 1504, helped Sebastian to fit out the expedition with which he explored the River Plate in 1526, does not encourage much trust in the remainder of the account. Two of its implications also contradict one another. Cabot is first made to say that he believed the new land to be Cathay, and immediately afterwards he speaks of trying to find a passage through it, because it trended northwards. But if it trended northwards it must also have trended southwards if followed in the opposite direction, and, assuming it to be Cathay, he had only to go that way to arrive at the coast of India, his goal. Other obvious misstatements, as to the date of John Cabot’s death, and the reasons for the abandonment of the enterprise in England, which have caused so much damage to Sebastian’s reputation for truthfulness, occur in this story. Considering the third-hand and ‘hearsay’ character of the same, it is hardly fair to put its inaccuracies down to his account. It evidently suffered by the carelessness of one or both of the avenues by which it has been preserved.
Ramusio’s statement in the preface to volume iii has a slightly better life history, but here again he is quoting from memory, avowedly faulty, of a letter written several years before, and apparently not preserved by him. However, the details given are scanty, the only remarkable one being that Sebastian Cabot could have made the north-west passage, but was prevented by a mutiny. Such a plausible explanation of failure is quite consistent with Sebastian’s character. On the whole, Ramusio exhibits very little critical faculty, and has done Sebastian a great disservice by reproducing such nonsense as the Mantuan gentleman’s story.