[95] Among the many works whose publication was inspired by Hakluyt, was the issue in 1612 of an English version of the eight Decades of Peter Martyr, translated by Michael Locke, thus laying before the English reader whatever that industrious chronicler had written concerning Sebastian Cabot. The first three Decades, as we have already seen, had been translated by Richard Eden, many years before, and those were now adopted by Locke into his completed version; the work was entitled De Novo Orbe, or the History of the West Indies, etc., London, 1612. It contained a Latin dedication to Sir Julius Cæsar, and an address in English to the reader. The same sheets were also issued with another titlepage without date, and omitting the Latin dedication, and also again in 1628 with a new title, calling the book a second edition. [Copies of either issue are worth from £5 to £10, and even more. Fifty years ago Rich (1832, no. 130) priced one at £1 16s. The text was reprinted in the supplement to the 1809 edition of Hakluyt.—Ed.]
Purchas has several notices of the Cabots taken from Hakluyt principally, hereafter the great authority cited, and from Ramusio. His is the earliest mention made, within my knowledge, of Sebastian Cabot’s picture in Whitehall gallery, but he speaks of it as though it were displayed on Clement Adams’s map hanging there. He probably never took the trouble to visit the gallery himself, but wrote from wrong information.
[Purchas’s Pilgrimage gave his own form and language to the accounts of the voyages which he collected, and those in his eighth and ninth book concern America. It was published in 1613, when he was thirty-six years old. There was a second edition in 1614, and a third with additions in 1617, the year after Purchas inherited Hakluyt’s manuscripts. He now set about his greater work,—Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas, his Pilgrimes,—in which he changed his method, and preserved the language of the narratives, which he brought together. This was published in four volumes (part of the third and all of the fourth volume pertaining to America), in 1625; and the next year a new edition of his first work was brought out, which has ever since constituted the fifth volume of the entire work. The set has nearly or quite quadrupled in value during the last fifty and sixty years, and superior copies are now worth £100; such a copy however must contain the original engraved frontispiece with its little map of the world, which is seldom found, and “Hondius his Map of the World,” which is rarer still, on page 95, where ordinary copies show a reduplication merely of the map properly belonging on page 115. Mr. Deane owns Thomas Prince’s copy of the American portions, which are enriched with Prince’s notes. Samuel Sewall’s copy is in Harvard College Library. Purchas survived the publication but two years, and died in 1628. His service to the cause in which he and Hakluyt were so conspicuous workers, was great, but is not generally accounted as equal to that of the elder chronicler. See Clarke’s Maritime Discovery, i. xiii., and the references in Allibone’s Dictionary. Bohn’s Lowndes p. 2010, is useful in determining the collation, which is confused.—Ed.]
Bacon, in his Life of Henry VII. published in 1622, notices the voyage of Sebastian Cabot, in which North America was discovered; but mentioning no year implies that it took place in 1498. His principal authority seems to have been Stowe’s Chronicle.
A valuable work was published at Madrid in 1629, by Pinello D. Ant. de Leon, entitled an Epitome de la bibliotheca oriental i occidental, nautica i geographica, etc. of which a second edition, edited by De Barcia, was published in 1737-38. Particular mention is made in it of the several editions of the writings of Peter Martyr, though the information is not always correct. He says that Juan Pablo Martyr Rizo, a descendant of Peter Martyr, had a manuscript translation in Spanish of the Decades for printing, which we may well believe never appeared.
[96] In the Foreign and Domestic Calendars of Henry VIII., ii. pt. ii. p. 1576, Sebastian Talbot (Cabot) is named as receiving twenty shillings, in May, 1512, “for making a card of Gascoigne and Guyon.” He left soon after for Spain.
[97] Dec. i. p. 254, Madrid, 1730; Biddle, p. 98.
[98] Navarrete, Historica Nautica, p. 138.
[99] Page 119.
[100] D’Avezac, in Revue Critique, v. 265.