All these documents relative to the Cabot voyages were reprinted by Hakluyt in the third volume of his larger work—bearing a similar general title to that of 1589—published in 1600.[85] In the extract from Cabot’s map, cut by Clement Adams, there reproduced, he changed the date of the year of the discovery from 1494 to 1497. This latter is no doubt the true date, but on what authority did Hakluyt make the change? M. D’Avezac, who contended that 1494 was the true date of the discovery, that being the date on Cabot’s map, believed that the change was the result of a typographical error.[86] That it was deliberate and that the change was not made by an error of the printer, is shown by the fact that the altered date appears both in the Latin extract and the English version of it; and that the index or general catalogue at the beginning of the third volume, in noticing the authorities for Sebastian Cabot’s voyage, gives “1497” as the year. Again, a copy of Emeric Molyneaux’s map, prepared about this time, and inserted in some copies of this volume of Hakluyt, has on the delineation of Labrador, which some suppose to have been the prima vista of Cabot, the following inscription: “This land was discovered by John and Sebastian Cabot for King Henry VII., 1497.”[87] I have already referred to the earliest use of this date as the year of the discovery, inscribed on a map of Locke in Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages of 1582. But the true source of the date is not here revealed.[88]
Clement Adams’s map is yet a mystery. I have already called attention to two editions of Cabot’s map, one of which is in the National Library at Paris, and another from which the legends in Chytræus were copied. The extract from Adams’s edition, first made by Hakluyt in 1589,[89] was in Latin, but from a text quite different from that of Chytræus, or from the Paris map. It is Legend No. 8 of the inscriptions, and was the “Chapiter of Gabot’s mapp De terra nova,” as set out by Adams, which Hakluyt tells us of in his Discourse.[90] This heading is the same as that in Chytræus. Here we have two different translations from a Spanish original. Did Adams transcribe from another copy of Cabot’s map yet to be discovered—for we can hardly suppose he would make a new Latin version of the legends, with one already before him—or did he translate from a map with the Spanish legends only?—neither of which precious documents is to be found in our bureaus of cartography, and they are yet to be added to Dr. Kohl’s list of lost maps!
Following Hakluyt’s extract from Adams’s map is an English version by him, beginning thus:—
“In the year of our Lord 1494, John Cabot, a Venetian, and his son Sebastian (with an English fleet set out from Bristol), discovered that land which no man before that time had attempted, on the 24th of June, about five of o’clock early in the morning. This land he called Prima vista, that is to say, First seen, because, as I suppose, it was that part whereof they had the first sight from sea. That island which lyeth out before the land he called the Island of S. John, upon this occasion, as I think, because it was discovered upon the day of St. John the Baptist.”
It is scarcely necessary to say that the passage in parenthesis is not in the original, but is introduced by Hakluyt. But the words which I have italicized are represented in the extract by “credo” and “opinor,” and are not authorized by the language of the Paris map, nor by the same legend in Chytræus. In the concluding part of this extract, not here quoted, Hakluyt speaks of a certain kind of fish seen by the Cabots, “which the Savages call Baccalaos.” The Latin of Adams’s map and of the Paris map is vulgus, which may mean the common people of Europe, or the fishermen. In the Spanish of the Paris map, it is said that the fish are called Baccalaos, but it does not say by whom. The “white bears” of the Spanish crept into the Latin of Adams, and of course into Hakluyt’s English, as “white lions.”
An interesting discussion as to the authenticity of this map of Cabot in the Paris Library, in connection with the genuineness of the date 1494, as expressing the true year of the discovery of North America, may be seen in the letter of M. D’Avezac to President Woods, already referred to. M. D’Avezac accepts the map and the date as genuine and authentic, while Dr. Kohl rejects both. Mr. Richard Henry Major, in his paper on “The True Date of the English Discovery,” etc., ably reviews the whole question discussed by those distinguished savans, and adopts a somewhat modified view. He believes that Sebastian Cabot originally drew a map with legends or inscriptions upon it in Spanish only, but that he had no hand in publishing it, or in correcting it for the press, and that the errors in the engraved map arose from the ignorance or inadvertence of transcribers; that the date of the discovery, 1497, was expressed in Roman numerals in the manuscript; that the letter V. in the numerals VII. was carelessly drawn, and not well joined at the base, so that a reader might well take it for a II.; and that such an error might more easily occur in a manuscript, especially on parchment, than on an engraved map on paper. As evidence that the Paris map, which Dr. Kohl thinks was made in Germany or Belgium, was copied from a Spanish manuscript, Mr. Major cites the instance of the name Laguna de Nicaragua being rendered into “Laguna de Nicaxagoe.” The Spanish manuscript r being in the form of our northern x, the transcriber showed his ignorance by substituting the one letter for the other. So also as regards the copy made by Clement Adams from the Spanish original. He made an independent translation of the inscriptions into Latin, which accounts for the two Latin versions, and also made the same error for the same reason, in giving the date 1494, instead of 1497.
Mr. Major believes that Hakluyt had good reason for making the change of date from 1494 to 1497 as the true date of discovery, as in the same volume in which the change was made he introduced the remarkable map of Molyneaux, referred to above, on which that date was inscribed as the year of the discovery; and furthermore that he may have consulted the papers of Cabot in the possession of William Worthington.[91]
To return again from this long digression to the volumes of Hakluyt in which he has brought together his various authorities relating to the voyages of the Cabots, one is impressed with a feeling of disappointment that he makes no attempt to reconcile their apparent glaring discrepancies,—that is to say, as to the different dates given in them to the voyage of discovery, and the variation in the different degrees of latitude reached; while no opinion is expressed as to the comparative agency of John or Sebastian Cabot, or the question as to whether there was more than one voyage,—I mean a second immediately following the first which was of discovery. In the general catalogue prefixed in 1600 to the third volume of his larger work, he refers to these several “testimonies” as proving a voyage of discovery in 1497, while in reality no one of them proves that date, bearing in mind that the date in the extract from Adams’s map was in this later reprint inserted by him on some evidence not found in his volumes,—the truth being that all these testimonies, taken as a whole, refer probably to two if not three voyages, as we have already seen.[92]
I do not forget that these volumes of Hakluyt contain other interesting documents relating to Cabot,—namely, the record of the pension granted by Edward VI., dated Jan. 6, 1548-49, of £165 13s. 6d., to date from the preceding Michaelmas Day (September 29); the Ordinances and Instructions compiled by Cabot for the intended voyage for Cathay, May 9, 1553; his appointment in the charter of the Muscovy Company, Feb. 6, 1555-56, as its governor; the story of his presence on board the “Serchthrift” at Gravesend on the 13th of April, 1556, about to sail on a voyage of discovery to the northeast, where the venerable man “entered into the dance himself.”[93]
I have already referred to a volume of Chytræus, containing the Latin legends on Sebastian Cabot’s map, which was published about this time,—the first edition in 1594, a second in 1599, and a third edition in 1606. We can hardly suppose that Hakluyt ever saw this book, at least in the earlier editions, as he could hardly have failed to incorporate the inscriptions into his larger work. The date 1494 given in the 8th Legend as the year of the discovery of the new lands, and the same date incorporated in Hakluyt’s folio of 1589 from Adams’s map, gave currency to its use to a limited extent.[94] But Hakluyt’s larger work of 1598-1600 quite superseded in use his previous books, and Chytræus was probably rarely seen or consulted; yet Mr. Biddle, who never could have seen Chytræus or Hakluyt’s folio of 1589, could never understand why later writers, like Harris and Pinkerton, adopted that date.