[69] Biddle, p. 28.
[70] [See Carter-Brown Catalogue, pt. i. p. 292, which shows there were two editions the same year. The book is rare, and was priced by Leclerc in 1878 at 650 francs. Stevens, Hist. Coll. i. 135, says he has seen but two copies of the map which should accompany the book. This is a folded woodcut, which in the main is a reduced copy of the map in Ortelius’s first edition. The map is in the Harvard College copy. The Huth Catalogue, iv. 1169, shows the map.—Ed.]
[71] Hakluyt, in a Discourse on Westerne Planting, written in 1584, which was printed for the first time by the Maine Hist. Soc. in 1877, cites this book of Popellinière, and gives an English version from it of the conversation in Ramusio. Hakluyt is here asserting the Queen of England’s title to all the territory “from Florida to the Circle Arctic,” and he enlarges upon the exploits of Sebastian Cabot, on which the claim of England is based.
[72] Memoir of Sebastian Cabot, pp. 42-47.
[73] [They were subsequently reprinted in Rymer’s Fœdera, in Chalmers’s and Hazard’s Hist. Coll. and in the Hakluyt Society’s ed. of the Divers Voyages.—Ed.]
[74] In the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society for October, 1881, Mr. George Dexter has traced the publication of this alleged extract from Fabian to an earlier date than had usually been assigned to it. It was published by Stow, in his Annals, in 1580, together with the paragraph relating to the savage men said to have been brought home by Sebastian Cabot, and also printed by Hakluyt in 1582. They were also printed in the second edition of Holinshed, 1586-87. The Cotton manuscript, Vitellius, A. xvi., has been re-examined, and proves not to be a Fabian. Mr. Dexter has printed the two extracts from it, the latter, relating to the “savage men,” for the first time. In the Cotton collection, Nero, C. xi., is a genuine Fabian, but it contains nothing about Cabot. The conclusion to which I have arrived from this examination by Mr. Dexter is, that the Vitellius manuscript was not the original used by Stow and Hakluyt. They give facts and details not to be found in that manuscript; and this remark will particularly apply to the extract relating to the three savage men, which in the Vitellius is brief and meagre. Both Stow and Hakluyt must have used a genuine Fabian manuscript yet to be discovered. For though neither would probably hesitate to add or change a name or a date, if he thought he had sufficient authority for so doing, they would not manufacture a narrative.
As regards the savage men referred to, Stow, under the date of 1502, says they were that year presented to the King, yet that they were brought over by Sebastian Cabot in 1498, giving Fabian as his authority. Hakluyt, in his quarto of 1582, repeats the same story, on the same authority; yet in his folio of 1589 he changes the date in his heading as to the year of their presentation to the King, making it conform to the year in which they were brought over. Mr. Biddle (Memoir of Sebastian Cabot, pp. 230, 231) has a labored argument to show that the men were not brought over by Cabot, but by some one else, in the year they were presented to the King, 1502, reflecting severely on Hakluyt for changing this last date. It is not at all probable that the name of either John Cabot or Sebastian Cabot was given in the original manuscript used by Stow and Hakluyt. I will add that George Beste, in his work on the voyages of Frobisher, cited above, says that Sebastian Cabot brought home “sundry of the people” of the country he visited, “and many other things, in token of possession taken,” very oddly assigning the voyage, which he regarded as the voyage of discovery, to the year 1508.
[75] I had called attention to this fact in some notes on Cabot’s map in the Proceedings of the Am. Antiq. Soc. for April, 1867, and Dr. Kohl, p. 371, says that Locke is supposed to have copied the inscription from a map of Cabot in England. The fact must have been inscribed on some other map of Cabot than the recently recovered one in Paris, for that certainly does not bear out the conjecture.
[76] Hakluyt, 1589, p. 680.
[77] Hakluyt, iii. 173.