| The Cabots. |
On March 5, 1496, King Henry VII of England granted a patent to 'John Cabot, citizen of Venice,' and to his three sons—Lewis, Sebastian, and Sancius—empowering them 'to discover unknown lands under the king's banner.'26 Under this patent—'the earliest surviving document which connects England with the New World'27—North America was discovered.
26 Quoted from the marginal note to the patent. See Hakluyt's Divers Voyages touching the discovery of America, published by the Hakluyt Society, 1850, p. 21.
27 From Doyle's History of the English in America, vol. i, chap. iv.
Almost every point connected with the voyages of the Cabots is dark and doubtful. What the father did and what the son, whence they came, and whither they went, is all uncertain. The tale of Columbus and his voyages is known to all the world; but readers are left to grope after the Cabots, as the latter groped after the strange wild regions of the north-west.
John Cabot, it would seem, was a Genoese who settled in Venice. There he was admitted to the rights of citizenship. He married a Venetian lady, and in Venice probably his three sons were born and passed their childhood. He travelled on the sea, visiting the coasts of Arabia, and forming, it may be, schemes to discover a new route to the far East. He came to England, having previously attempted to gain support for his projected voyages in Spain and Portugal, and he took up his residence in either London or Bristol. The exact date of his arrival in this country is unknown; but, either shortly before or shortly after he came, Columbus crossed the Atlantic for the first time in 1492. The news gave a stimulus to other would-be discoverers, and encouraged the Kings of Europe to further their plans. Hence Cabot and his sons obtained their patent in 1496. It was little that King Henry VII gave to the Italian sailors. Their voyages were to be made 'upon their own proper costs and charges,' and in return for his licence, the King was to receive a fifth of the profits. The enterprise was countenanced but not supported by the state, and the English Government in these early days, as in the times which came after, left the work of discovery and colonization in the hands of private adventurers. Bristol was the port of departure, and a Bristol book contains the following notice of the voyage:—'In the year 1497, the 24th of June, on St. John's day, was Newfoundland found by Bristol men in a ship called the Matthew.'28 John Cabot and Sebastian his son probably both sailed in the Matthew, and they commanded a crew of English sailors. The voyage was a short summer venture, beginning in May and ending with the close of July or the beginning of August. America was seen and touched, the land-fall being either the northern end of Cape Breton island, or the coast of Labrador, or Cape Bonavista in Newfoundland. The English flag was planted on American soil, but no exploration took place; nothing was achieved but the one great fact of discovery. In the following February, new letters patent were issued—on this occasion to John Cabot alone; and a second time, in the summer of 1498, the ships started from Bristol. Again, it is conjectured, both father and son were on board; and this time the North American coast seems to have been skirted from the region of icebergs and the banks of Newfoundland as far south as the Carolinas. In reference to this second voyage, Sebastian Cabot wrote that he sailed 'unto the latitude of sixty-seven degrees and a half under the North Pole,' and 'finding still the open sea without any manner of impediment, he thought verily by that way to have passed on still the way to Cathaio which is in the East.'29 The way to the East, however, was left unopened, to tantalize after-comers, and to be a kind of 'will o' the wisp,' leading men on to barren shores and Arctic seas, though the continent which they had already found was worth all the riches of the Indies.
28 Barrett's History and Antiquities of Bristol (Bristol, 1789), p. 172.
29 From Ramusio, quoted in 'a note of Sebastian Cabot's voyage of discovery' (Hakluyt's Divers Voyages, p. 25). For the much-vexed question of the Cabots and their voyages, reference should be made to John Cabot the Discoverer of North America and Sebastian his son, by Henry Harrisse, London, 1896; to the Journal of Columbus, Cabot, and Corte Real, edited for the Hakluyt Society by Sir Clements Markham, 1893; to Doyle's History of the English in America, vol. i, Appendix B, 'The Cabots and their Voyages'; and to Mr. Raymond Beazley's John and Sebastian Cabot ('Builders of Greater Britain' series, 1898). The result of a great deal of learning is after all little but conjecture.
| Corte Real. |
The next great voyager to North America was Gaspar Corte Real, a Portuguese. Twice he sailed to the north-west, in 1500 and 1501, on the earlier voyage sighting Greenland and the east coast of Newfoundland, and on the later working north from Chesapeake Bay. He was lost on the second voyage; and his brother Miguel, who went in search of him in 1502, after finding 'many entrances of rivers and havens,' was lost also.30