[29] Doc. Hist. of Maine, i. 206.
[30] Mem. of Sebastian Cabot, 110-119.
[31] Vol. iii. p. 4, 1556.
[32] Divers Voyages, Hakluyt Soc., pp. 50, 51.
[33] Doc. Hist. of Maine, i. 208-210.
[34] Mr. Brevoort has submitted some notes to my attention, on this voyage. Rejecting the year 1516-17 as impracticable, he adopts an earlier date, before Cabot had left England, and finds some authority for it in a book of George Beste, London, 1578, on the three voyages of Frobisher, hereafter to be mentioned. The writer there gives 1508 as the year of Sebastian Cabot’s discovery of North America, probably never having heard of any previous voyages. Mr. Brevoort thinks he had authority for a voyage of Cabot about the year named. Thomas Pert, or Spert, against whom the charge of “faint heart” is alleged by Eden, is mentioned in vol. i. of Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII., 1512, C. 1514, as master of the “Mary Rose,” and of the “Great Harry.” In 1514 he is pensioned, and in 1517 is placed on shore duty. There is no report of him in 1516, but as he was a veteran in 1514 it is hardly probable that he would have been on a voyage of discovery in 1516. He is usually mentioned as Thomas Spert; only once is he called Pert. As evidence that an expedition left England on a voyage of discovery some time during the last years of Henry VII., or during the early years of his successor, the Interlude of the Four Elements, of uncertain date, but probably written before 1519, cited above, is adduced as showing that the incident related occurred “not long ago.” And certain verses which speak of the disobedience of the mariners, which put an end to the voyage, and to the hopes of the projector, afford the earliest reference to the mutiny story. Mr. Brevoort is of opinion that Eden’s vague reference to an event occurring in the reign of Henry VIII., “about the same year of his reign,” was intended to place it in the 8th year of the century. But that would bring it within the reign of Henry VII.
[35] Mem. of Sebastian Cabot, pp. 62-66.
[36] Dedication of the book, folios 1, 2; Biddle, pp. 64, 65.
[37] Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages, 1582.
[38] He printed it on folios 316, and 317 of his Decades. See the inscription in Latin in a work already cited, by Nathan Chytræus, pp. 779-781.