Mention is made on page 31 of a portrait of Sebastian Cabot, till recently attributed to Holbein, painted in England when Cabot was a very old man, of which a copy taken in 1763 now hangs in the Ducal Palace in Venice. At a meeting of the French Geographical Society, April 16, 1869, M. D’Avezac stated that M. Valentinelli, of Venice, had recently sent to him a photograph copy of a portrait of John Cabot, and one of his son Sebastian Cabot, at the age of twenty years, after the picture of Grizellini, belonging to the gallery of the Ducal Palace. He proceeded to say that some guarantee for the authenticity of the picture of Sebastian was afforded by some traces of resemblance between it and the well-known portrait of him by Holbein at the age of eighty-five years (Bulletin de la Soc. de Géographie, 5 ser. to. 17, p. 406). The existence of a portrait of Sebastian Cabot taken at so early an age, before he left Venice to live in England, would be an interesting fact if authentic. An authentic picture of John Cabot, the real discoverer of North America, would have even higher claims to our regard. Prefixed to a Memoir of “Giovanni Cabotto,” by Carlo Barrera Pezzi, published at Venice in 1881, which has just come under my notice, is a medallion portrait, inscribed “Giovanni Cabotto Veneziano.” It is not referred to by the author in the book in which it is inserted.
[135] [See Editorial Note, A, at end of chapter vi. of the present volume.—Ed.]
[136] In this narrative is an account of tobacco twenty years before that luxury was introduced into England by Ralph Lane. The account is in these words (the grammar is defective, but the copy is accurate): “The Floridians, when they travel, have a kinde of herbe dryed, which with a cane and an earthen cup in the end, with fire, and the dried herbs put together, do sucke thoro the cane the smoke thereof, which smoke satisfieth their hunger, and therewith they live foure or five days without meat or drinke, and this all the Frenchmen vsed for this purpose: yet do they holde opinion withall that it causeth water and fleame to void from their stomacks.” It is a little curious that he should thus connect tobacco with Florida, as if he had not observed its use in the West Indies. It had, indeed, been used in Southern Europe before this time.
[137] A recently discovered letter of Winthrop shows that the Massachusetts colonists made wine of their grapes in the first summer. The appetite for such wine does not seem perilous.
[138] [The story of this French colony is told in Vol. II.—Ed.]
“Thy name is hasty pudding: how I blush
To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee mush!”
—Barlow: Hasty Pudding.
[140] One hundred and forty years later, Daniel De Foe, a devoted Christian man, wrote his celebrated biography of Robinson Crusoe, who, when he had been long living in Brazil as a planter, met his critical shipwreck in a voyage to the African coast for slaves. The romance is intended by its author to be what we call a religious novel. The religious experiences of the hero are those to which De Foe attached most importance. In the relation of these experiences he enumerates and repents his “manifold sins and wickedness.” But among these, although he regrets his own folly in risking so much in the pursuit of wealth, it is never intimated that there is anything wrong in dragging these wretched negroes unwilling from their homes: so slow had been the development of the spirit of humanity in the sixteenth and even the seventeenth century, and so ill defined were the rights of man!
[141] [See the note on Ingram’s and Hortop’s narratives in the critical part of chap. vi. Since hat chapter was in type, Dr. De Costa has examined anew the story of Ingram’s journey, and has printed Ingram’s relation, from a manuscript in the Bodleian, in the Magazine of American History, March, 1883.—Ed.]