John Cabot
John Cabot was an Italian navigator and explorer. His 1497 voyage to the coast of North America under the commission of Henry VII, King of England is the earliest known European exploration of coastal North America since the Norse visits to Vinland in the eleventh century.
To mark the celebration of the 500th anniversary of Cabot's expedition, both the Canadian and British governments declared Cape Bonavista, Newfoundland as representing Cabot's first landing site. However, alternative locations have also been proposed.
Name and origins
Cabot is known today as Giovanni Caboto in Italian, Zuan Caboto in Venetian, Jean Cabot in French, and John Cabot in English. This resulted from a once-ubiquitous European tradition of nativizing names in local documents, something often adhered to by the actual persons themselves. Cabot signed his name as "Zuan Chabotto" in Venice, Zuan being a form of John typical to Venice. He continued to use this form in England, at least among Italians. He was referred to by his Italian banker in London as "Giovanni", in the only known contemporaneous document to use this version of his first name.His surname, derived from the Latin caput, refers to a type of fish, and was perhaps a nickname which became hereditary.
Cabot was born in Italy, the son of Giulio Caboto and his wife; he had a brother Piero. Gaeta and Castiglione Chiavarese have both been proposed as his birthplace. The main evidence for Gaeta are records of a Caboto family residing there until the mid-15th century, but ceasing to be traceable after 1443.
Pedro de Ayala, the Spanish envoy and Cabot's contemporary in London, described him in a letter to the Spanish Crown in 1498 as "another Genoese like Columbus". John Cabot's son, Sebastian, said his father originally came from Genoa. Cabot was made a citizen of the Republic of Venice in 1476; as citizenship required a minimum of fifteen years' residency in the city, he must have lived in Venice from at least 1461.
Early life
Cabot may have been born slightly earlier than 1450, which is the approximate date most commonly given for his birth. In 1471 Cabot was accepted into the religious confraternity of the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista. Since this was one of the city's prestigious confraternities, his acceptance suggests that he was already a respected member of the community.Once he gained full Venetian citizenship in 1476, Cabot would have been eligible to engage in maritime trade, including the trade to the eastern Mediterranean that was the source of much of Venice's wealth. He presumably entered this trade shortly thereafter. A 1483 document refers to his selling a slave in Crete whom he had acquired while in the territories of the Sultan of Egypt, which then comprised most of what is now Israel, Syria and Lebanon.This is not sufficient to prove Cabot's later assertion that he had visited Mecca, which he said in 1497 to the Milanese ambassador in London. In this Mediterranean trade, he may have acquired better knowledge of the origins of the Eastern merchandise he would have been dealing in than most Europeans at that time.
"Zuan Cabotto" is mentioned in a variety of Venetian records of the late 1480s. These indicate that by 1484 he was married to Mattea and already had multiple sons. His sons were Ludovico, Sebastian and Sancto. The Venetian sources contain references to Cabot's being involved in house building in the city. He may have relied on this experience when seeking work later in Spain as a civil engineer.
Cabot appears to have got into financial trouble in the late 1480s and left Venice as an insolvent debtor by 5 November 1488. He moved to Valencia, Spain, where his creditors attempted to have him arrested by sending a lettera di raccomandazione a giustizia to the authorities. While in Valencia, "John Cabot Montecalunya" proposed plans for improvements to the harbour. These proposals were rejected, however. Early in 1494 he moved on to Seville, where he proposed the construction of a stone bridge over the Guadalquivir river. He was contracted to build it and worked on the project for five months, until the bridge was abandoned following a decision of the City Council on 24 December 1494. After this Cabot appears to have sought support in Seville and Lisbon for an Atlantic expedition, before moving to London to seek funding and political support. He probably reached England in mid-1495.
Sponsorship
Cabot sought financing and royal patronage in England. Cabot planned to depart to the west from a northerly latitude in search of a northern passage to Asia.Historians had thought that, on arrival in England, Cabot went to Bristol, a major maritime centre, to seek financial backers. This was the only English city to have had a history of undertaking exploratory expeditions into the Atlantic. Cabot's royal patent, issued by the Crown in 1496, stated that all expeditions should be undertaken from Bristol, so his primary financial supporters were probably based in that city. In any case, it also stipulated that the commerce resulting from any discoveries must be conducted with England alone, with goods being brought in only through Bristol. Although those goods would be free of other duties, the King was to receive one-fifth of the profit. This would have made Bristol into a monopoly port, with sole right to engage in colonial trade. In stating this, Henry VII of England was presumably influenced by Iberian practices: Portugal having made Lisbon into such a monopoly port, while Spain was in the process of doing the same thing with Seville.
In the late 20th century, British historian Alwyn Ruddock found documentation that Cabot went first to London, where he received some financial backing from its Italian community. She suggested one patron was Father Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis, an Augustinian friar who was also the deputy to Adriano Castellesi, the papal tax collector. Ruddock also suggested that Carbonariis accompanied Cabot's 1498 expedition. She further suggested that the friar, on good terms with the King, introduced the explorer to King Henry VII. Beyond this, Ruddock stated that Cabot received a loan from an Italian banking house in London. As Ruddock ordered the destruction of all her research notes on her death in 2005, scholars have had to duplicate her research and rediscover documents. The Cabot Project was formed at the University of Bristol in 2009 to research Cabot and the Bristol expeditions. Francesco Guidi Bruscoli, of the University of Florence, found some of Ruddock's documentation, confirming that Cabot received money in March 1496 from the Bardi family banking firm of Florence. The bankers located in London provided fifty nobles to support Cabot's expedition to "go and find the new land". This payment from the Florentine merchants would have represented a substantial contribution, although it was not enough to finance the expedition completely.
On 5 March 1496 Henry VII gave Cabot and his three sons letters patent with the following charge for exploration:
Those who received such patents had the right to assign them to third parties for execution. His sons are believed to have still been minors at that time.
Expeditions
Cabot went to Bristol to arrange preparations for his voyage. Bristol was the second-largest seaport in England. From 1480 onward it had supplied several expeditions to look for the mythical Hy-Brasil. According to Celtic legend, this island lay somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.There was a widespread belief among merchants in the port that Bristol men had discovered the island at an earlier date but had then lost track of it. In a private letter to a colleague, Ruddock maintained that she had found evidence in Italian archives that Bristol men had discovered North America before 1470. As the island was believed to be a source of brazilwood, merchants had economic incentive to find it.
First voyage
Little was recorded of Cabot's first voyage. What is known as the "John Day letter", written by John Day, alias Hugh Say, a Bristol merchant originally of London, was sent during the winter of 1497–98 to an addressee believed to be Christopher Columbus. The letter refers briefly to this voyage but writes mostly about the second, 1497 expedition. Day noted: "Since your Lordship wants information relating to the first voyage, here is what happened: he went with one ship, his crew confused him, he was short of supplies and ran into bad weather, and he decided to turn back." Since Cabot received his royal patent in March 1496, it is believed that he made his first voyage that summer.Second voyage
Details of the voyage
The known sources do not concur on all aspects of the events, and none can be assumed to be entirely reliable. Cabot was described as having one "little ship", of 50 tons' burden, called Matthew of Bristol. It was said to be laden with sufficient supplies for "seven or eight months". The ship departed in May with a crew of 18 to 20 men. They included an unnamed Burgundian and a Genoese barber surgeon, who presumably accompanied the expedition as the ship's surgeon.It is likely that two ranking Bristol merchants were part of the expedition. One was William Weston, who had not been identified as part of Cabot's expedition before the discovery of a new document in the late 20th century by historian Margaret Condon. In 2009, historian Evan Jones published this document: a letter from Henry VII ordering the suspension of legal proceedings against Weston because it was the King's intent that Weston would shortly undertake a voyage for the King to the "new founde land". This was probably the voyage under Cabot's patent, making William Weston the first Englishman to lead an expedition to North America. In 2018, Condon and Jones published a further article that showed that Weston and Cabot had been jointly rewarded by the king in January 1498, suggesting that the explorers were working together before the start of the second voyage. The same article revealed that Weston received a £30 reward after he returned from his successful 1499 voyage.
File:Halifay - NS - Giovanni Caboto Gedenktafel.jpg|thumb|Quincentennial commemorative sculpture showing the Lion of St Mark, a symbol of Venice, given to Halifax, Nova Scotia by the regional government of Veneto in memory of John Cabot's 1497 voyage
Leaving Bristol, the expedition sailed past Ireland and across the Atlantic, making landfall somewhere on the coast of North America on 24 June 1497. The exact location of the landfall has long been disputed, with different communities vying for the honor. Historians have proposed Cape Bonavista and St. John's, Newfoundland; Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia; Labrador; and Maine as possibilities. Since the discovery of the John Day letter in the 1950s, it seems most likely that the initial landfall was either on Newfoundland or nearby Cape Breton Island. This is because Day's letter implies that the coastline explored in 1497 lay between the latitudes of Bordeaux, France and Dursey Head in southern Ireland. The initial landfall seems to have taken place close to the southern latitude, with the expedition returning home after reaching the northern one.