History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce, Volume 2 (of 4)

by W. S. Lindsay

Patent to the Cabots, 1496.

Among the earliest and most enterprising men engaged in the trade with the West Indies may be mentioned Mr. Robert Thorne, of Bristol, than whom the age produced no more shrewd and intelligent merchant. Having established agents in Cuba and placed others on board of the Spanish fleet, he expended large sums of money in procuring exact descriptions and charts of the newly-discovered seas, and, by his representations, the king was, in a great measure, induced to follow the example of Spain and Portugal, and to encourage voyages of discovery. Indeed before Vasco de Gama had doubled the Cape of Good Hope or Columbus discovered the West Indian Islands, the ship-owners of Bristol had found their way to Iceland, and had almost, if not quite, reached the coasts of Newfoundland. There is, however, no well-authenticated account of any of these voyages to the West till 1496, when Henry granted, March 5th, a patent to John Cabot, a Venetian by birth, who had settled at Bristol, and to his three sons, Lewis, Sebastian, and Sanctus, giving them authority to “sail to all parts, countries, and seas of the East, of the West, and of the North, under our banner and ensign, with four ships of what burden or quantity so ever they be, and as many mariners or men as they will have with them in the said ships, upon their own proper costs and charges.”[54] Cabot and his followers are therein authorised to set up the royal banner “in every village, town, castle, isle, or mainland by them newly found,” and to subdue, occupy, and possess all such regions, and to exercise jurisdiction over them in the name of the king of England. They were also to enjoy the privilege of exclusive resort and traffic to all places they might discover, reserving one-fifth of the clear profit of the enterprise to the crown.

Discovery of the north-west coast of America, 21 June, 1497.

The expedition proposed under this patent did not, however, actually set sail till the beginning of the year 1497. On the 21st of June of that year, Sebastian Cabot, in the ship Matthew, of Bristol, a vessel of two hundred tons burthen, first discovered, according to the common opinion, Newfoundland,[55] being the first Englishman (for he was born at Bristol) who had landed in America. How far he proceeded south has been a question of much controversy; it is, however, generally admitted that his voyage north and south was confined within the 67th and 38th degrees of north latitude, and that it did not occupy altogether more than six months. In the account of the privy purse expenses of Henry VII. there is the following entry: “10th of August, 1497. To hym that found the New Isle, 10l.,” and Hakluyt states, in the dedication of his second volume to Sir Robert Cecil, that “all that mighty tract of land from 67 degrees northward to the latitude almost of Florida was first discovered out of England by the commandment of Henry VII.” The same authority, quoting from Peter Martyr, further says, “He” (Cabot) “was thereby brought so far with the south, by reason of the land bending so much to the southward, that it was there almost equal in latitude with the sea Fretum Herculeum, having the North Pole elevated in manner in the same degree. He sailed likewise in this tract so far towards the west that he had the island of Cuba on his left hand in manner in the same degree of longitude.”[56]

Second patent, 3 Feb., 1498.

Rival claimants to the discovery of the North American continent.

That one of the Cabots discovered the northern continent of America, at the period named, is well authenticated, and in Biddle’s memoirs of him many other authorities are quoted in confirmation of this fact.[57] But if any doubt still remains, the second patent, granted on the 3rd of July, 1498, by Henry VII., the original of which was found by Mr. Biddle in the Rolls Chapel, sets this question finally at rest. That document indeed only named the father, “John,” but the previous patent was in the names of “John Cabot and his sons,” and it does not follow that the discovery of the “Lande and Isles” is intended to be attributed to the personal action of the elder Cabot. However, though the continent of America was first discovered by an expedition commissioned to “set up the banner” of England, this in no way detracts from the honour justly due to Christopher Columbus, who had five years previously made known, for the first time, the existence of a world in the West. Although his great discoveries were confined to the West Indian Islands and to a portion of the South American continent, they revealed the important fact that rich lands, hitherto unknown, lay in a certain quarter of the globe, and could be reached with no extraordinary difficulty or danger by intrepid and skilful mariners. Again, as Columbus did not sight the continent of America until August 1498, in the course of his third voyage, he could hardly then have been ignorant of the discoveries made by Cabot on the 24th of June, 1497, which created nearly as much noise in Europe as his own had done a few years before, and were considered of such vast importance that Henry VII., whose court was then filled with the agents of various foreign powers, fitted out the second expedition under the decree of 3rd July, 1498, which had for its object commercial intercourse with a continent the existence of which was unknown to Columbus, except, perhaps, by common report, until six months afterwards.

The discovery of a new world of vast extent is, however, too high an honour to be conferred on any one man. While the great Genoese navigator fully deserves the credit of having explored the mysteries of the Atlantic Ocean, and of having shown the existence of rich continental lands to the west, Sebastian Cabot is entitled to the honour of having been the first to discover that portion of those lands now constituting the United States of America; and to Great Britain more than to any other country is due the fame of the thorough exploration and first colonisation of a world destined to surpass in wealth and power the greatest of modern nations.

Sebastian Cabot, and his opinions.

Cabot, like Columbus and all of the navigators of the fifteenth century, was of opinion that Cathay (China or India) could be reached by sailing to the west, and more especially to the north-west, an opinion which has prevailed even to our own times. Consequently the vessels under his first patent sailed from Bristol to discover a north-west passage to that country; and it was only when Cabot found his voyage to the north and north-west impeded by ice and land respectively, that he turned to the south in the hope, no doubt, of finding either a western passage or reaching the countries which had been discovered by Columbus.