Italian navigator and explorer John Cabot (a.k.a. Giovanni Caboto, Zuan Chabotto c. 1450 – 1498?) is widely regarded as the modern European' discoverer' of North America.
Norse settlers from Iceland had established settlements in Greenland some four hundred years earlier. They ventured from there to Cabot's same area on his 1497 expedition.
Activity in the same area by fishers from the Basque country, Brittany and elsewhere along Europe's Atlantic seaboard almost certainly predates Cabot's voyage. The Italian may well have been aware of it.
We know little of Cabot's early life, but he is believed to have been born in or around Genoa. In a letter to the Spanish crown in 1498, Pedro de Ayala, the Spanish envoy in London, described him as "another Genoese like Columbus".
Cabot's son, Sebastian also refers to his father's Genoese origin.
However, he must have settled in Venice before 1461. He had fulfilled the fifteen-year residency requirement to become a Venetian citizen in 1476. Records in Venice indicate that he was accepted into the prestigious religious confraternity of St John the Evangelist in 1471.
As a Venetian citizen, he may have traded in the Eastern Mediterranean, and claimed to have visited Mecca. By the late 1480s, he was married with three sons (Ludovico, Sebastian, and Sancto) and may have been working as a builder in his adopted home when he ran into financial difficulties,
Cabot had left Venice by 5 November 1488. His subsequent movements are unclear, but he was in Valencia long enough for his creditors to track him down and send a letter di raccomandazione a giustizia (letter of recommendation to justice) to the local authorities.
By 1494 he was in Seville, working on a stone bridge across the Guadalquivir river. When the city council abandoned that project in December 1494, Cabot shifted his attention to exploration in the Atlantic.
The plan seems to have been to find a shorter alternative route to the East by crossing the Atlantic at a higher latitude than his Genoese compatriot Columbus.
Attempts to gain sponsorship for his voyage in Seville and Lisbon were unsuccessful, and by mid-1495 he was in London chasing funding and political support.
He seems to have received some financial backing from London's Italian community. An Augustinian friar named Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis, deputy to the papal tax collector seems to have secured Cabot an introduction to Henry VII. Cabot's interview with the English king resulted in letters patent granted on 5 April 1496.
Cabot and his three sons were authorised "to seek out, discover, and find whatsoever isles, countries, regions, or provinces of the heathen and infidels, whatsoever they be, and in what part of the world soever they be, which before this time have been unknown to all Christians."
The Florentine Bardi family had already provided fifty nobles (£16 13s. 4d.) to support Cabot's expedition to "go and find the new land", but that was not enough to entirely finance the expedition.
Cabot's royal patent directed him to depart from Bristol, with any commerce resulting from his discoveries passing through the city, which enjoyed the sole right to engage in colonial trade. Bristol would rank alongside Lisbon and Seville as a monopoly port, which enjoyed exclusive access to Portuguese and Spanish colonial trade. On that basis, Bristol merchants could be expected to provide the rest of the funding. England's second-largest seaport in England had already funded several expeditions to search for Hy-Brasil, reputed to lie somewhere in the Atlantic. The legendary island was believed to be a source of a red dyewood (brazilwood). Earlier expeditions had allegedly discovered the island but could not find their way back there.
Cabot's initial expedition in 1496 seems to have been a hastily-arranged single-ship affair. Disagreements aboard the vessel, a shortage of food and bad weather seem to have forced him to turn back to Bristol before they had encountered anything significant.
So, on 2 May 1497, Cabot sailed from Bristol in the 50-ton Matthew, with supplies for "seven or eight months" and a crew numbering eighteen or twenty. That number reputedly included Cabot's three sons, a Genoese barber-surgeon and Bristol merchant William Weston.
The little we know of Cabot's voyage comes from a letter discovered in the 1950s but written during the winter of 1497–98 to the 'Grand Admiral' of Spain (probably Christopher Columbus). John Day, alias Hugh Say, was a well-educated London man from an influential family who worked in Bristol, under an alias following a business failure.
After leaving Bristol, Cabot's expedition westabout around Ireland and across the Atlantic, making landfall on 24 June after fifty-two days at sea. The exact location of Cabot's landfall has been the subject of long-standing debate.
However, it seems certain that Cabot explored part of Canada's Atlantic coastline between Cape Breton Island and the Strait of Belle Isle, so his landfall was somewhere on or near this coast.
However, the John Day letter suggests that the coastline explored lay between the latitudes of Bordeaux and Dursey Head in southern Ireland. The initial landfall was close to the southern latitude, with the expedition turning for home after reaching the northern one.
Their only venture ashore saw Cabot's party keep within crossbow range of their landing spot. While they failed to encounter any local inhabitants, they did find the remains of a fire, nets a wooden tool and a trail leading inland. They remained long enough to take on freshwater, raise Venetian and Papal banners, claim the land for the King of England and recognise the Catholic Church's authority.
The expedition was back in Bristol on 6 August. Four days later, Cabot delivered his report to the king in London. He received a hero's welcome and a reward of £10 – around two years' pay for a labourer or craftsman.
Further rewards had to wait while Henry dealt with an uprising in Cornwall. However, Cabot received another £2 on 26 September and an annual pension or salary of £20 payable from Bristol's customs receipts on 13 December. The pension was backdated to March, although Bristol's customs officials initially refused to pay it.
Cabot received letters patent for a new voyage on 3 February 1498 and returned to Bristol to prepare for his second expedition. Meanwhile, Henry advanced loans to individuals who were to accompany Cabot's new expedition, including Lancelot Thirkill, Thomas Bradley, and John Cair. The king also had a direct financial interest in the voyage and outfitted one of the vessels.
According to The Great Chronicle of London (1189–1512), Cabot's five-ship expedition departed from Bristol at the beginning of May 1498. Cabot intended to trade along the way since some ships were carrying cloth, caps, lace points and other "trifles".
In July, the Spanish envoy in London reported one of the ships had been damaged in a great storm and had made land in Ireland. Cabot and the other four ships had carried on.
From there, the standard narrative turns blank. Since no official records referring to Cabot's return have been found or published, he was presumed lost at sea.
On the other hand, Lancelot Thirkill is recorded as living in London in 1501. So it is possible that Cabot returned safely, died shortly after that or quietly disappeared from the official record.
There is also the intriguing possibility that Cabot made his way back to Bristol. Perhaps historians have failed to find or overlooked the evidence to support the hypothesis.
That seems to have been the basis for a projected work by the economic historian Dr Alwyn Ruddock. A 1992 book proposal to the University of Exeter Press and her later correspondence with the published suggested she had unearthed extraordinary new evidence that would transform the "entire conception of the scale, nature and importance of John Cabot's achievement." (Evan T. Jones, Alwyn Ruddock: 'John Cabot and the Discovery of America'")
Ruddock proposed a significant revision of the Cabot story's details and posited an entirely different ending. In the new version of the narrative, Cabot returned to England in the spring of 1500 after a two-year exploration of North America'seast coast, possibly as far as the Spanish Caribbean.
Furthermore, she suggested that Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis and other friars who had accompanied the expedition remained in Newfoundland and founded the first Christian settlement in North America.
Subsequent archaeological work at the site Dr Ruddock identified it as the religious community's location found evidence of European presence from the seventeenth century, nothing earlier than that.
Ruddock's book was slated to appear in time for Cabot's first voyage's five hundredth anniversary. However, declining health delayed work on the final version. Ruddock died on 21 December 2005. Her obituary in The Guardian revealed that she had 'left strict orders that all research papers were to be destroyed at her death'.
As a result, seventy-eight bags of notes, letters, photographs and microfilms were shredded and disposed of. While the source material should still exist, Ruddock had a reputation for pursuing complex chains of evidence through difficult sources. On that basis, that source material may take some finding.
Sources
Pedro de Ayala, the Spanish envoy in London, to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in Spain, 25 July, 1498
Simon Berthon and Andrew Robinson, The Shape of the World
John Cannon and Robert Crowcroft, A Dictionary of British History
Chambers Biographical Dictionary
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (ed.) The Times Atlas of World Exploration, London, Harper Collins, 1991
Keisha Hackett, John Cabot : Explorer of the North American Mainland, New Your, Rosen Publishing Group, 2016.
Henry Harrisse, John Cabot, the discoverer of North America and Sebastian, his son: A Chapter of the Maritime History of England under the Tudors 1496–1557
Evan T. Jones , Alwyn Ruddock: ‘John Cabot and the Discovery of America’
Peter E. Pope, The Many Landfalls of John Cabot
David B. Quinn, John Cabot and the 1497 voyage to Newfoundland (work through PDF)
University of Bristol History Department, The Cabot Project (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/history/research/cabot/)
Wikipedia