1497. June 24. Cabot sees land.
Date of the voyage, 1494 or 1497?
When Cabot had ventured westerly 700 leagues, he found land, June 24, 1497. There has been some confidence at different times, early and late, that the date of this first Cabot voyage was in reality three years before this. The belief arose from the date of 1494 being given in what seem to have been early copies of a map ascribed to Sebastian Cabot, whence the date 1494 was copied by Hakluyt in 1589, though eleven years later he changed it to 1497. It is sufficient to say that few of the critics of our day, except D'Avezac, hold to this date of 1494. Major supposes that the map of 1544, now in the Paris library and ascribed to Cabot, was a re-drawn draft from the lost Spanish original, in which the date in Roman letters, VII, may have been so carelessly made in joining the arms of the V that it was read IIII; and some such inference was apparently in the mind of Henry Stevens when he published his little tract on Sebastian Cabot in 1870.
The country which Cabot thus first saw was supposed by him to be a part of Asia, and to be occupied, though no inhabitants were seen.
Cabot's landfall.
Cabot was for over three hundred years considered as having made his landfall on the coast of Labrador, or at least we find no record that the legend of the map of 1544, placing it at Cape Breton, had impressed itself authoritatively upon the minds of Cabot's contemporaries and successors. Biddle and Humboldt, in the early part of the present century, accepted the Labrador landfall with little question. So it happened that when, in 1843, the Cabot mappemonde of 1544 was discovered, and it was found to place the landfall at the island of Cape Breton, a certain definiteness, where there had been so much vagueness, afforded the student some relief; but as the novelty of the sensation wore off, confidence was again lost, inasmuch as the various uncertainties of the document give much ground for the rejection of all parts of its testimony at variance with better vouched beliefs. It is quite possible that more satisfactory proofs can be adduced of another region for the landfall, but none such have yet been presented to scholars.
It is commonly held now that, sighting land at Cape Breton, Cabot coursed northerly, passed the present Prince Edward Island, and then sailed out of the Strait of Belle Isle,—or at least this is as reasonable a route to make out of the scant record as any, though there is nothing like a commonly received opinion on his track. There is some ground for thinking that he could not have entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence at all. He landed nowhere and saw no inhabitants. If he struck the mainland, it was probably the coasts of New Brunswick or Labrador bordering on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The two islands which he observed on his right may have been headlands of Newfoundland, seeming to be isolated.
1497. August. Cabot returns.
He reached Bristol in August, having been absent about three months. Raimondo de Soncino, under date of the 24th of that month, wrote to Italy of Cabot's return, and a fortnight earlier (August 10) we find record of a gratuity of ten pounds given to Cabot in recognition of this service. It proved to be an expedition which was to create a greater sensation of its kind than the English had before known. Bristol had nurtured for some years a race of hardy seamen. They had risked the dangers of the great unknown ocean in efforts to find the fabulous island of Brazil, and they had pushed adventurously westward at times, but always to return without success. The intercourse of England with the northern nations and with Iceland may have given them tidings of Greenland; but there is no reason to believe that they ever supposed that country to be other than an extended peninsula of Europe, enfolding the North Atlantic.