[78] In the year 1584 Richard Hakluyt, at the request of Sir Walter Raleigh, wrote a Discourse on Westerne Planting,—to which I have already made a brief reference,—supposed to embody the opinions of the statesmen of England at that period on the colonization of North America. It is a remarkable paper, intended for the eye of the Queen. After giving all the reasons why England should enter upon this work speedily, he presents, in chapter xviii. “the Queen of England’s title to all the West Indies, or at least to as much as is from Florida to the circle Arctic,” as being “more lawful and right than the Spaniards’, or any other Christian princes’;” and the claim is based mainly on the discovery by Sebastian Cabot, in the year 1496, as related in the first volume of Ramusio, which is cited. Hakluyt is anxious to make it appear that Cabot discovered North America before Columbus discovered the firm land of the Indies; yea, more than a year before, and he recurs more than once to this date as showing the fact. Indeed, he once goes so far as to cite the date on Clement Adams’s map, 1494, as carrying the claim yet farther back. [The history of this manuscript, published as vol. ii. of the Documentary History of Maine, is traced in an Editorial note to Dr. De Costa’s chapter.—Ed.]
[79] Memoir of S. Cabot, pp. 30, 178-180.
[80] Ibid. p. 31.
[81] This book of Mr. Biddle was published in London in two editions, 1831 and 1832, and in the United States, 1831, all without the name of the author, an eminent jurist and statesman of Pittsburg, Penn., who was born in 1795, and died in 1847. It is a work of great value for its authorities, and displays much critical talent; and though composed with little system and with a strong bias in favor of Sebastian Cabot, whom the author makes his hero, it may be regarded as the best review of the history of maritime discovery relating to the period of which he treats, that had appeared.
[The most important notice of Mr. Biddle’s book occurred in Tytler’s Historical View of the Progress of Discovery on the more Northern Coasts of America, Biddle’s reflections upon Hakluyt being the particular occasion of a vindication of that collector. George S. Hillard also reviewed Biddle in the North American Review, xxxiv. 405, and it elicited other essays in contemporary journals. It supplied largely the material for Hayward’s Life of Cabot in Sparks’s American Biography. The most recent treatment of the subject is in a condensed and somewhat enthusiastic Remarkable Life, Adventures and Discoveries of Sebastian Cabot, by J. F. Nicholls, the public librarian of Bristol, London, 1869. This writer ascribes the chief glory to Sebastian and not to the father, and rather grandly lauds his achievements. This provoked Henry Stevens to putting a note in his Bibliotheca Historica, 1870, no. 2519, in vindication of John Cabot’s greater claim,—a view he again emphasized in a little tract, with the expressive mathematical title, Sebastian Cabot-John Cabot = O: Boston, 1870. Some of the later information has been embodied by Bancroft in a paper on Cabot in the New American Cyclopædia, which he has used again in vol. i. of his Centenary Ed. History of the United States. A very good resumé of existing knowledge as it stood forty-five years ago, is given in Conway Robinson’s Discoveries in the West and Voyages along the Atlantic Coast, Richmond, 1848. A somewhat similar treatment is given in Peschel’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, book ii., ch. 6, and notice may also be taken of the same author’s Geschichte der Erdkunde, vol. iv. Fox Bourne, in his English Seamen under the Tudors, gives a summary of the Cabots’ career as explorers, and in his English Merchants he treats of their relation to British commerce and the enterprise of Bristol. Mr. Travers Twiss communicated some papers on the relative influence of Columbus and Cabot on American Discovery to the Nautical Magazine, July and August, 1876; and a review of a somewhat similar kind will be found in Admiral Jurien de la Gravière’s Les Marins du xve et xvie Siècles, composed of papers which had originally appeared in the Revue des deux Mondes, 1876, et seq. Among other views, reference may be made to F. von Hellward’s Sebastian Cabot, 43 pp.; Malte-Brun’s Annales des Voyages, xcix., p. 39.—Ed.]
[82] Page 126.
[83] Vol. iii. p. 807.
[84] See D’Avezac in the Bulletin de la Soc. Géog., Quar. Ser., xvi. 272, 273.
[85] [The titles of these works in full, with some further account of the instrumentality of Hakluyt in advancing discovery, are given in Dr. De Costa’s chapter on “Norumbega,” and in the notes accompanying it.—Ed.]
[86] M. D’Avezac, in the Bulletin de la Soc. Géog., Quar. Ser., xiv., 271, 272, 1857, and Dr. Asher in his Henry Hudson (Hakluyt Soc.), pp. lxviii, 261, 1860, both express the opinion that Clement Adams deliberately altered the date from 1494 to 1497, the latter being the date copied by Hakluyt into his extract from Adams’s map, as published in the third volume of his fol. of 1600; neither of these writers being aware of the fact that in Hakluyt’s first citation from Adams’s map, in his folio of 1589, the date 1494 was given. All we know of Adams’s map is derived from Hakluyt; and as an additional evidence that the extract cited from it bore the date 1494, we have Hakluyt’s previous statement, in his Discourse on Westerne Planting, cited above, where this fact is clearly affirmed.