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CABOT AND
BRISTOL’S AGE
OF DISCOVERY

Evan T + Jones and Margaret M* Condon

Map figures: © Evan T. Jones 2016

This is a digitised version of the book being made freely available online by the
Bristol Record Society with permission of the authors and copyright holders,
Margaret M. Condon and Evan T. Jones (University of Bristol).

30 July 2020

For copyright reasons, some of the images in the digitised version of the book
have been removed

. None of these are important to the argument.

Copies of the printed book are available from the Cabot Project. Discounts are
available to libraries and educational institutions. See the book's webpage for
details:

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/history/research/cabot/cabot-and-bristols-age-of-discovery/

Published by Cabot Project Publications
Department of History, School of Humanities,

11 Woodland Rd, University of Bristol,

Bristol BS8 1TB, UK.

Paperback edition ISBN 978-0-9956193-0-2
Designed by Mick Toole and Jane Russ
Printed and bound by Banbury Litho Ltd

Cover illustration: William H. Bishop,

"The Matthew approaching the Coast of Newfoundland in 1497’ (1995).
Prints available from www.bishopmarineart.com

CABOT AND BRISTOL’S
AGE OF DISCOVERY

The Bristol Discovery Voyages 1480 -1508

Evan T. Jones and Margaret M. Condon

University of

QES BRISTOL

Acknowledgements

We thank Gretchen Bauta, a private Canadian benefactor, for her
generous support of the University of Bristol’s Cabot Project (2011-
2016). She made this book possible and we dedicate it to her. We
also thank Vicky Coules (Burning Gold Productions) for helping
to get the Project off the ground in 2007-8 and both the University
of Bristol, Arts Faculty Research Director’s Fund (2009) and the
British Academy (2010) for providing further seed-corn funding.
Lisa Shanley assisted us more than she will ever know in opening
a window for our work in Italy, while Professor Francesco Guidi
Bruscoli (University of Florence) deserves particular thanks in
relation to this book for his recent work in Italian archives.

For their comments on earlier drafts of this book, we thank
Royston Griffey, Rowan Mackenzie and Tony Dickens, at the
Matthew of Bristol; Peter Pope, Bill Gilbert and Susan Snelgrove,
in Newfoundland; Frank Deane, Emma Whittaker and Vicky
Coules in Bristol; and Ken and Shirley Jones in Wales.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION page 1

1 BRISTOL IN THE AGE OF DISCOVERY page 3

2 BRISTOL AND ATLANTIC EXPLORATION:

THE SEARCH FOR THE ISLAND OF BRASIL page 11

3 JOHN CABOT: BACKGROUND page 21

4 CABOT’S PLAN: LONDON AND BRISTOL page 29

5 1496 AND 1497 EXPEDITIONS page 39

6 THE MYSTERY OF THE 1498 VOYAGE page 49

7 BRISTOL AND THE NEW FOUND LAND’:

1499-1508 VOYAGES page 57

8 THE NAMING OF THE LAND page 71

9 SHIPS AND SAILORS OF THE
DISCOVERY VOYAGES page 79

10 AFTERMATH page 87

Endnotes page 91

Further reading page 100

Picture credits inside back cover

Plate l | Ernest
Board, 'Departure
of John Cabot on
his Voyage of 1497’
(Bristol Museum
6- Art Gallery)

INTRODUCTION

Europe’s discovery of the Americas in the 1490s was one of
the most important events in the history of the world. New crops,
animals and foodstuffs transferred across continents. Horses, pigs
and wheat transformed the economies and societies of the Americas,
while potatoes, maize and cassava did the same for Europe, Asia
and Africa. Meanwhile, the Old World diseases inadvertently
introduced to America decimated the indigenous population,
allowing the rapid conquest and colonisation of Central and South
America by the Spanish and Portuguese. Once there, they founded
plantations and silver mines that made them rich, establishing
forms of commercial exploitation that others, such as the English,
would copy in North America during the seventeenth century.

Ask people today about the voyages of the late-fifteenth century
and many will recall that ‘In fourteen hundred and ninety two,
Columbus sailed the ocean blue’. 1 Yet Christopher Columbus never
ventured beyond the Caribbean. His early expeditions explored the
Bahamas, Hispaniola and Cuba, and when he reached the mainland
in 1498, his landing place was the coast of modern-day Venezuela,
in South America. Neither he, nor any of the other explorers from
Spain, visited North America before 1513. 2

Although the Spanish did not explore to the north in the decades
after 1492, they knew North America existed and even marked it on
their maps. In 1500, a Spanish cartographer and explorer, Juan de
la Cosa, created a world map that included the northern continent
and the identity of those who had been there. The map marks a long
section of coast with five English flags and the note that this was the
sea discovered by the English’. Those explorers were the men who
sailed from Bristol under the flag of Henry VII, King of England.
The most famous of them was the navigator John Cabot, known
in his native Venice as Zuan Chabotto. His 1497 voyage in the
Matthew of Bristol resulted in Europe’s discovery, or rediscovery,
of North America. Yet his expedition was not the first exploration

voyage launched from Bristol and it was not the last. Between 1480
and 1508 Bristol sent a series of expeditions into the Atlantic to
search for new lands and trade routes. This book is the story of
those endeavours: a tale that has Cabot at its heart, but which
began decades earlier. That is why we need to start, not with Cabot,
but with Bristol and the world from which the voyages sprang.

Fig 1 | 1500 ad : The North Atlantic in Juan de la Cosa’s Map with English
flags marking the coast‘discovered by the English’ in North America. The
Castilian flags record the Caribbean islands and the north coast of South
America explored by the Spanish. Portuguese and Spanish flags on the
Atlantic islands off Africa mark the recently-established colonies in the
Azores, the Canaries and the Cape Verde Islands

INTRODUCTION

1 BRISTOL IN THE
AGE OF DISCOVERY

Fifteenth-century Bristol was England’s leading provincial centre
and the second port of the realm. By modern standards it was
small, with a population of just eight thousand. Yet in a pre¬
industrial country of two million people, this was enough to make
Bristol the regional hub for Somerset, Gloucestershire, South
Wales and much of the West Midlands. The town itself was just
a mile across: a visitor entering from the east on the London
road could walk to the western shipyards in half-an-hour. In the
process they would pass the Norman castle, the High Cross, the
town's fine churches and the tall timber-framed houses of the
port’s great merchants. But what often impressed visitors most
were the ships, glimpsed first down side alleys leading off the

Plate 2 | Bristol's
High Cross and city
gates as depicted
in its late-fifteenth
century town
chronicle
(Bristol Record
Office, MS 04720)

Image deleted from digitised version of
the book for copyright reasons.

Plate 3 | Drawing
of 1746 looking
from Small Street
through St Giles’
Gate to the
upper Quay
(Bodleian Library
MS Gough Som z)

main commercial streets to Bristol’s quays. These great merchantmen
were the pride of the port and carried the maritime trade on which
Bristol’s economy was based.

Although all towns and cities depended to some extent on
commerce, Bristol was more committed to overseas trade than
anywhere else in England - the capital included. In part this was
because while London, the richest city in the realm, was the centre
for government, law and administration, Bristol had little to distract
it from foreign trade. The port was distinctive for the extent to
which local men dominated commerce and shipping. In England’s
other major ports, foreign merchants and ships were responsible
for much of the long-distance trade. In Bristol it was conducted
by native merchants, mariners and
ships. That gave the port the skills
and equipment needed to search
out new lands.

Bristol was well placed to conduct
trade between the western half
of the country and the ports of
Atlantic Europe. In principle its

Plate 4 | Bristol's
medieval town seal
emphasises its
connection to the

BRISTOL IN THE AGE OF DISCOVERY

Fig z | Bristol’s main
trading partners
during the first
half of the fifteenth
century

overseas commerce could include Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain
and Portugal. In practice, economics and politics had a big impact on
Bristol’s trade profile. Economics was important because merchants
only visited foreign ports if they could sell their goods for a profit,
or buy wares they could sell back home. Politics mattered because,
even if trade with a particular port might be profitable, merchants
only went to places when it was safe to do so. If there was a risk
that their ships and goods might be seized in a foreign port, they
were unlikely to go there. That limited England’s trade with France,
because the two countries were at war for much of the period, as
part of the long conflict known today as the 'Hundred Years War’
(1337-1453). And since Scotland and the Spanish Kingdom of
Castile backed France in this dispute, doing business with them
was also difficult . 2

Although Bristol merchants traded with many places at the start of
the fifteenth century, the bulk of their commerce was with southern
Ireland and Gascony in western France. Both were subject to the
English crown, which meant English merchants were well treated.
Both trades were lucrative in their own ways. From the Anglo-Irish

BRISTOL IN THE AGE OF DISCOVERY

ports of southern Ireland, such as Waterford and Cork, came cured
herring, hake, salmon and animal skins. In Bordeaux, the merchants
bought wine, which accounted for almost half of Bristol’s imports.
Exports consisted mostly of manufactured goods, in particular
the fine woollen broadcloth for which England was known across
Europe , 3

Whilst the bulk of Bristol’s overseas trade was with Ireland and
Bordeaux, two of Bristol’s lesser trading partners are more interesting
for the history of discovery: Portugal and Iceland, Portugal had
been an ally of England since 1386. So Bristol merchants could sail
there knowing that their ships and goods would be safe on arrival.
In Lisbon, Bristol’s merchants exchanged cloth for wine, olive oil
and dried fruits. Although the Portuguese trade was much smaller
than that to Bordeaux, at least during the first half of the fifteenth
century, it employed Bristol’s greatest ships, which could be in
excess of 400 tons burden. These were floating fortresses, heavily
armed to resist pirates from France, North Africa or Spain.

The passage to Lisbon took about three weeks: down past Cornwall,
across the Bay of Biscay, and then southwards along the Portuguese
coast. Once they arrived, the merchants typically spent two or three
months in port, selling their cloth and using the proceeds to buy a
return cargo . 4 The Lisbon run gave Bristol’s merchants, ship-owners
and mariners, experience of long voyages. It also gave them a quay¬
side’ seat to one of the most important developments in maritime
history. This was the start of the Age of Discovery, when European
sailors left the familiar shores around Europe to venture across the
oceans of the world in search of new lands and trade routes.

With its long Atlantic coast, Portugal was no stranger to the sea.
But, at the start of the fifteenth century, nobody guessed that within
a hundred years this small country would have established the most
extensive seaborne empire in history — stretching from the North
Atlantic to the China Sea. This owed much to the dreams of the
Portuguese prince, Henry the navigator’ (1394-1460), who began
to sponsor expeditions down the African coast from c.1420 in the
hope of establishing a maritime trade with the tropical kingdoms
that lay beyond the Sahara. This would cut out the need to get such
goods from Arab traders, who had long carried these wares across
the desert by camel. Over the next seventy years, the Portuguese
charted the whole west coast of Africa, as far as the Cape of Good

BRISTOL IN THE AGE OF DISCOVERY

Hope. They also established direct trade for gold, ivory and slaves,
with the sub-Saharan kingdoms, from colonies established at places
such as Arguin (1445) and Elmina (1482). At the same time, the
Portuguese discovered and colonised many Atlantic islands. Some

Fig 3 | Map of
Portuguese
exploration
and discovery,

C.I 420 -C.I 482

Madeira

1420

SAHARA DESERT

Arguin

1445

Camel caravan
routes for West
African gold

GOLD

1482

Cape Verde
Islands, 1456

Azores, 1435

Lisbon

Plate 5 | Chart of
the West African
coast depicting
the names given
to coastal features
by Portuguese
explorers and the
fortress of Sao Jorge
da Mina, a centre
for the trade in gold
and slaves: detail
from Cantino world
map, 1502
(Biblioteca Estense,
Modena)

BRISTOL IN THE AGE OF DISCOVERY

of these, such as the Cape Verde Islands (1456), had been unknown
before. Others, such as Madeira (colonised from 1420), and the
Azores islands (colonised from 1435), appear on earlier maps but
were then effectively forgotten until the early fifteenth century.
Once settled they soon became highly profitable colonies, producing
sugar, sweet wine, cork and woad, the last of which was an important
dye-stuff for the English and Flemish cloth industries.

Bristol merchants were well placed to witness Portugal’s success.
Many Bristol men lived in Lisbon, serving as agents for masters
based back in England and trading from Portugal in their own
right. These agents worked closely with Portuguese businessmen
and some even married into Lisbon families. So they had numerous
opportunities to learn what the locals were doing and to discuss the
new discoveries with the English merchants that stopped-over in
Lisbon on their regular voyages . 5

Bristol’s merchants were venture capitalists to the bone. Watching
the success of the Portuguese sailors, they must have asked
themselves: ‘If they can discover lost islands and trade routes, why
can’t we do the same?’ Competing with Portugal to the south would
be difficult: they would have to travel further and it would endanger
England’s good relations with the country. On the other hand, for
any searches to the west and north of the British Isles, Bristol had
the geographic advantage. And if the Portuguese could find lost
Atlantic islands, Bristol mariners also knew tales of lost lands in
the Atlantic. Indeed, within a few years of the start of Portugal’s
voyages of discovery, Bristol’s merchants were trading profitably
with a‘lost’ land of their own.

Just as the Portuguese were aware of the Azores before 1435, the
English knew about Iceland. Trade between Scandinavia, Britain,
Ireland, Iceland and Greenland had flourished during the Viking
era and only died out after 1262, when Iceland became subject to
Norway. The Icelanders were then ordered to trade solely through
Bergen in Norway. Other nations were forbidden from sailing to
the island and since the Icelanders lacked the timber needed for
building large ships, they became entirely dependent on Norway.
To Englishmen, Iceland thus became a ‘lost’ land in the fourteenth
century. It was marked on sea charts and referred to in geographical
works, but few, if any, Englishmen went there for several generations . 6
The fourteenth century was a bad time for Norway. Wracked by the

BRISTOL IN THE AGE OF DISCOVERY

Black Death from 1348, it went into decline, becoming subject to
Denmark in 1376 as part of the Kalmar Union. Iceland was of little
interest to the Danes, to the extent that some years no ships went
there at all. So when some adventurous English fishermen arrived
in c.1409, they discovered a people who were keen to exchange
their air-dried cod, known as stockfish! for the many goods the
Icelanders could not produce themselves. Bristol’s merchants were
soon playing a major part in this business, helping to turn the 1400s
into Iceland’s'English century’.

Plate 6 | Stockfish
drying in the winter
cold. Seen here
in the Norwegian
Lofoten islands, this
method of drying
is common to both
Norway and Iceland
(Photo: Felix Lipov
/ Shutterstock)

The voyage from Bristol to Iceland was a long one: 1,200 miles,
west around Ireland and then northwest across the Atlantic. But it
was not much further than the Lisbon run. Moreover, the Iceland
voyage was complementary to the southern ones. That was because
the voyages to western France and Portugal mostly took place
during the autumn and winter months, when the new wine, olive
oil and dried fruit became available. By contrast, the expeditions to
Iceland always took place during the spring and early summer, when
the weather was milder and the midnight sun made navigation less
hazardous. The same great ships used in the wine trade to Lisbon
and Bordeaux were used for bringing home stockfish that had
been caught and dried in the frost’ by the Icelanders the previous
winter. Iceland and Portugal became the two extreme poles of

BRISTOL IN THE AGE OF DISCOVERY

Bristol’s trade, turning the port’s mariners into some of the most
experienced and versatile seamen of Northern Europe, navigating
sea-lanes from the Arctic Circle to the Straits of Gibraltar.

The Iceland voyages prepared Bristol for further Atlantic ventures.
Its mariners gained wider experience of navigating the waters of
the North Atlantic, at a time when most sailors stuck to the coasts
wherever possible. The ‘rediscovery’ of Iceland demonstrated that
old stories about lost Atlantic islands were worth listening to. And
from contact with the Icelanders, some of whom even settled as
servants in Bristol households, Bristol merchants must have learnt
that there were lands further west. The Greenland colony, which had
been settled from Iceland, had only recently died out, while Bristol’s
merchants may also have heard older stories - of lands visited five
hundred years earlier by the Icelanders’ ancestors. These were the
parts of North America that Leif Erikson had called Markland and
Vinland, during voyages that took place around the year 1000.

BRISTOL IN THE AGE OF DISCOVERY

2 BRISTOL AND ATLANTIC
EXPLORATION: THE SEARCH
FOR THE ISLAND OF BRASIL

If some lost lands proved real during the fifteenth century, not all
were. Yet the search for them still proved worthwhile. Christopher
Columbus is a case in point: he only discovered the Caribbean
islands in 1492 because he was convinced that China and Japan lay
just a few thousand miles west of Europe, But Bristol’s merchants
went one better. The land they sought did not exist. Yet their hunt
for it led them to a new continent.

Plate 7 | World
map from the
1482 edition of
Claudius Ptolemy,
Geographia 1

Contrary to popular myth, the mariners and geographers of
fifteenth-century Europe did not believe the world was flat.
Seamen and the educated knew that the world was round. So they
understood that it should be possible to reach the Orient by sailing
west from Europe. Centuries before the birth of Christ, Greek
geographers had calculated the size of the Earth — with a fair degree
of accuracy. That meant most sensible fifteenth-century scholars
believed, correctly, that China must lie at least 12,000 miles west of

Europe, on the far side of the globe. So, the objection to Columbus'
famous ‘Enterprise of the Indies’ was not that mariners sailing west
from Europe might fall off the edge of the world; it was that a voyage
of this distance would be impossible with the ships then available.

To the people of fifteenth-century Europe, the Atlantic was a
dangerous ocean of unknown size. But contemporary charts show
that they did not think that the Ocean was empty, at least in the
waters close to Europe and Africa. In part such beliefs were rooted
in reports of genuine landings or sightings. Yet the Ocean was also
a place of fairy tales and monsters, populated with isles and peoples
that had no basis in fact. One of these came to be the chief target for
Bristol’s fifteenth-century Atlantic exploration: the Island of Brasil.

Stories about Brasil, or Hy Brasil, appear to have originated in an
Irish myth about an isle that lay somewhere to the west of Ireland.
It was not the only mythical island the Irish imagined — they had
hundreds. 2 Brasil, however, was the one that other nations believed
in. By the fourteenth century both Italians and Catalans recorded it
on their maps. They were the leading cartographers of the day and
their charts included some genuine lost islands, such as Madeira
and the Azores. So it is unsurprising that, following the success
of the Portuguese in rediscovering and colonising those islands.

Image deleted from digitised version of the book for copyright
reasons.

Plate 8 | The Island
of Brasil depicted
to the west of
Ireland as a round
disk: World map
of the Majorcan
cartographer, Jacobo
Bertran, 1482
(Archivio di Stato,
Florence, CN 07 :
su concessione del
Ministero del Beni
e delle Attivitd
Culturali e del
Turismo ) 3

BRISTOL AND ATLANTIC EXPLORATION: THE SEARCH FOR THE ISLAND OF BRASIL

Bristol mariners wanted to locate Brasil. After all, most of the
charts suggested that the island lay no further from Ireland than the
six hundred miles that separated Lisbon from Madeira. 4 Moreover,
once the Iceland voyages got underway, Bristol’s mariners must have
realised that their regular journeys to the north, which ran west of
Ireland, were taking them close to the supposed location of Brasil.
This in itself may have made them interested in finding it. Yet what
really made them keen to locate Brasil was not old charts. Rather
it was their conviction that mariners from their port had not only
landed on the island in the past, but had made good money as a
result.

Sometime between 1471 and his death in 1476, the renowned
Basque chronicler, Lope Garcia de Salazar, wrote about the Isle of
Brasil. His main interest was that he supposed it to be the burial
place of King Arthur. But what is distinctive about his account is
that he added a further detail, noting that the English claimed that:

a vessel from Bristol found it one dawn and, not knowing that it
was it, took on there much wood for firewood, which was all of
hrazil, took it to their owner and, recognising it, he became very
rich. He and others went in search of it and they could not find
it. And sometimes ships saw it but due to a storm could not reach
it. And it is round and small and flat. 5

The reference to 'brazil’ in this passage is to brasilwood. This was
an Asiatic timber that was imported to Europe along with the
silks and spices of the Orient. Brasilwood was valued because its
shavings could be used to dye cloth a deep red. This is why the ship¬
owner in the account supposedly became rich by selling gathered
‘firewood’. It also explains why Bristol's merchants, with their eyes
firmly on the‘bottom line’, wanted to find the isle. It appeared that,
just a few hundred miles west of their regular trading routes, lay an
island that could make them fantastically wealthy. 6

Quite how the Irish myth of the Isle of Brasil or ‘Breasil’ (blessed)
became associated with brasilwood is unknown. It was probably
just the coincidence that the two names were almost identical. In
reality the island did not exist and there is nowhere in the North
Atlantic that produced the dyewood. But at some point the two
became associated in people’s minds and they began to believe that
the Isle of Brasil was a source of the wood. Indeed, once that story

BRISTOL AND ATLANTIC EXPLORATION: THE SEARCH FOR THE ISLAND OF BRASIL 13

was accepted, most probably assumed that the island was called
‘Brasil’ because brasilwood could be found there.

It would not have been hard for Salazar to find out about Bristol’s
search for the Isle of Brasil. Following the loss of Bordeaux to
the French in 1453, Anglo-Spanish relations improved, leading
to a ten-fold growth of trade between the two countries over the
following decades . 8 No English port benefitted more than Bristol,
whose merchants became regular visitors to the Basque ports of
San Sebastian and Bilbao, close to where the chronicler lived. At
the same time the Basques became regular suppliers of shipping
services to Bristol . 9 Salazar could have heard of the search for Brasil

Plate 9 | Shaving
brasilwood logs for
use as a dye-stuff 7

Plate 10 | Shavings
of Sappanwood
(Asiatic brasilwood)

(Shutterstock)

Plate 11 | Wool dyed
with brasilwood:
modern examples
illustrating the
vibrancy of the red
colour and some of
the ways in which the
hue can be altered by
adjustments to the
dyeing process
(Photo: Mike Roberts
© Wild Colours
Natural Dyes)

14 BRISTOL AND ATLANTIC EXPLORATION: THE SEARCH FOR THE ISLAND OF BRASIL

Plate 12 | Lope
Garcia de Salazar
reading from his
famous 'history',
Istoria de las
Bienandanzas e
Fortunas. This
modern statue
(2001) by Lourdes
Umerez watches
over Salazar’s house
in Portugalete, now
a museum
(Photo: Jose
Valderrey)

either by talking to Bristol’s merchants directly or by speaking to
the Basque shipowners, merchants and mariners who did business
with them.

Salazar died in 1476, so Bristol must have commenced the search
for Brasil before then. The earliest known expedition, however,
took place in 1480. The voyage is mentioned in the writings of the
antiquarian William Worcester, penned during a visit to Bristol. 10
Among his detailed descriptions of the town, which included him
counting the length of each street in pigeon steps, Worcester noted
that an 8o-ton ship that was part-owned by his nephew, John Jay
junior of Bristol, had been employed to search the seas to the west

BRISTOL AND ATLANTIC EXPLORATION: THE SEARCH FOR THE ISLAND OF BRASIL 15

of Ireland for ‘the Island of Brasylle’. This voyage took place from
July to September 1480, the expedition being led by one ‘Thloyde’
(most probably John Lloyd), who Worcester says was the most
knowledgeable seaman in the country. Having‘ploughed’ the seas in
vain for nine weeks, Lloyd gave up. Yet Bristol’s merchants were not
deterred; the next summer two more Bristol ships, the Trinity and
the George, went on another expedition to search for the isle.

What makes the 1480 and 1481 voyages unusual is not that they
were the first, or the last, English expeditions to search for Brasil.
What is unusual is that there is a record of them. Today the Bristol
expeditions are famous because they resulted in Europe’s discovery,
or rediscovery, of North America. But since nobody realised how
important this would be, very few people wrote about the voyages at
the time. So we only know about Bristol’s 1480 expedition because
an eccentric topographer made a note of it in his private records.
In a different vein, we are only aware of the 1481 voyage because it
is mentioned in an enquiry into malpractice in Bristol’s customs
service.

The customs duties collected on imports and exports were an
important source of revenue to England’s kings. But they were open
to fraud. Merchants smuggled goods to avoid paying their duties,
and corrupt customs officials could be bribed to help them. So,
when a royal commission was set-up to investigate malpractice in
Bristol, it expected to learn of deceit, corruption and other offences.
In September 1481, forty-four of the city’s leading merchants were
summoned to give evidence to the commission, which led to several
allegations being laid against Bristol’s customs officers and their
deputies. One of the charges examined was that Thomas Croft,
one of the two collectors of customs in the port, had loaded 40
bushels of salt on the Trinity and the George, two vessels in which
he owned a one-eighth part. While it was not illegal for a customs
officer to be a ship-owner, officers were not allowed to engage in
overseas commerce. So if Croft had been trading, it would have
been an offence. Yet in this case the merchants assisting the enquiry
concluded that no fraud had been committed. That was because
the salt was for the‘reparation and sustentacion of the said shippes’
when they set forth ‘to serch & fynde a certain Isle called the Isle of
Brasile’. Moreover, they maintained, the King’s customs had been
paid. Soon after, Croft was pardoned by the King, 11

BRISTOL AND ATLANTIC EXPLORATION: THE SEARCH FOR THE ISLAND OF BRASIL

Before the advent of refrigeration, fishermen needed salt to preserve
their catch when operating far from home. This has led some to
wonder whether the ‘real’ purpose of the 1481 expedition was
fishing. Perhaps the salt loaded on the Trinity and the George was
to preserve cod caught off the coast of North America, following
a successful expedition the previous year? 12 The trouble with this
theory is that the amount of salt involved was small relative to the
size of the ships. The Trinity had a cargo capacity of 300 tons and of
the two different Bristol ships named the George, one was of at least
50 tons burden and the other was at least 150 tons. 13 If the ships
had been going on a fishing expedition, far more salt would have
been needed. Indeed, based on sixteenth-century fishing practices,
the Trinity would have needed at least sixty tons of salt to preserve a
full catch. What Croft provided was 40 bushels (about one ton) for
each ship. 14 This would not have lasted long if the ships had been
going on a commercial fishing expedition. But it was a plausible
quantity to take on a voyage of discovery in which fish might be
caught as a by-product, or where game might be taken on some new
land, to be preserved as salted meat for the voyage home.

Although the 1480 and 1481 expeditions to Brasil are the only
ones for which specific information exists, they were not the last.
Followingjohn Cabot’s voyage from Bristol to America in 1497, one
of the Spanish ambassadors in London, Pedro de Ayala, reported
that ‘For the last seven years the people of Bristol have equipped
two, three, four caravels to go in search of the island of brazil and
the seven cities.’ 16

That the focus of Bristol’s ambitions during the 1490s remained
the Island of Brasil is clear from the comments of John Cabot’s

BRISTOL AND ATLANTIC EXPLORATION: THE SEARCH FOR THE ISLAND OF BRASIL 17

companions following the 1497 voyage. In a letter written to
Christopher Columbus in the winter of 1497/ 8 , the Bristol
merchant, John Day, claimed that:

It is considered certain that the cape of the said land was found
and discovered in the past by the men from Bristol who found
‘Brasil’ as your Lordship well knows. It was called the Island of
Brasil, and it is assumed and believed to be the mainland that the
men from Bristol found. 17

Day implies that Cabot had merely relocated a land found in the
past by Bristol men. The link to the legendary isle and the local
conviction that it was a source of brasilwood is further driven home
by Day's assertion that the explorers found an artefact painted with
‘brasil’. The same connection was made in a letter of December 1497,
written by the Milanese ambassador in London. Commenting on
the voyage the previous summer, the ambassador noted that John
Cabot’s Bristol companions ‘believe that Brazil wood and silk are
native there.' 18

Bristol’s search for Brasil has generally been told as a precursor to
Cabot’s more famous voyage in 1497. The ‘Brasil voyages’ explain
why Cabot went to Bristol and why the port’s merchants supported
him. While this is surely true, it is far less certain that Bristol
men had actually discovered America at an earlier date. The chief
proponent of this theory was Professor David Beers Quinn, who
suggested in 1961 that Bristol might have discovered North America
at an earlier time (perhaps in 1480), but then kept this a secret so
that they could exploit the fisheries off Newfoundland. 19

Unfortunately, while it is possible that Bristol’s mariners reached
North America before 1497, there is no evidence that they
established a fishery. And if they had, it would have been impossible
to keep it secret, given that dozens of ships and hundreds of men
would have been involved in the business over the years. Bristol
was not a closed port and the nature of merchants and mariners
was that they travelled a lot and talked a lot. They also spent a
great deal of time writing to their business associates, providing
updates on matters of commercial interest. It is from such letters
that much of our information about Cabot’s voyages comes. John
Day’s letter illustrates just how effective this information network
could be. Cabot’s 1497 expedition involved just one small ship and

BRISTOL AND ATLANTIC EXPLORATION: THE SEARCH FOR THE ISLAND OF BRASIL

about twenty men, with the Venetian having good reason to keep
the particulars of his voyage private. Yet, within a few months of it
taking place, all the key details had been passed on to Cabot’s arch-
rival, Christopher Columbus. If this was true in this instance, is it
really plausible that a large-scale fishery, involving dozens of ships,
could have been kept secret over many years?

The great irony of Bristol’s search for Brasil is that the Americas
did possess a tree that produced a red dye that was very similar
to that extracted from Asiatic Brasilwood. Unfortunately, the
tree in question (Caesalpinia echinata ) grew, not in the northern
hemisphere, but in the Amazon rainforests of South America,
where it was discovered by the Portuguese around 1500. So similar
was the wood of this tree to Asiatic'brasilwood’ that the Portuguese
used the same name (brasil) for the timber of their new tree. South
American ‘brasilwood’ soon became the region’s most valuable
export, to the extent that the region itself became known simply as
‘the land of Brasil’. This is where the modern country of‘Brazil’ gets
its name.

Plate 14 | South
American ‘Indians’
collecting brasil logs
for the Portuguese:
detail from the
Vallard Atlas
(Huntington
Library,

MS 29, map 11)

BRISTOL AND ATLANTIC EXPLORATION: THE SEARCH FOR THE ISLAND OF BRASIL 19

By 1504 Bristol was importing New World brasil for use in the
cloth dyeing industry. But it was coming via Lisbon, courtesy of
Portuguese merchants. 20 If Bristol’s merchants felt slightly sore
about this, it would have been understandable. They had spent
decades searching for the Island of Brasil and its fabled dyewood.
But, in the event, it was the Portuguese who, quite by accident,
discovered a dyewood with similar properties, on a new land across
the Atlantic. But that land lay four thousand miles south of the
seas that Bristol merchants had been exploring. The Portuguese
called the dyewood’brasil' and, as the tales had promised, the land
of brasil made them rich. 21 In Bristol, it must have been salt on the
wound.

Ultimately, it is unclear whether Bristol’s early voyages in search
of Brasil discovered anything. It is possible that Bristol mariners
reached the eastern fringes of North America. Yet, if they did,
they would not have found a dye-wood that could have made
them wealthy. Nevertheless, the search for Brasil provided
Bristol’s mariners with experience of Atlantic exploration, while
demonstrating to others that the port’s merchants might support
similar endeavours. It seems likely that this is why a Venetian
navigator came to Bristol in 1495/6 with a plan of his own. It is to
this man, Zuan Chabotto, known in England and America as John
Cabot, we can now turn.

BRISTOL AND ATLANTIC EXPLORATION: THE SEARCH FOR THE ISLAND OF BRASIL

3 JOHN CABOT: BACKGROUND

John Cabot is the most enigmatic explorer of the Age of Discovery,
so little being known about his birth, life, or even death. But recent
research throws some light on where he came from and the sort of
man he was.

While Cabot’s origins are obscure, a 1498 letter suggests he was
another Genoese like Columbus’, which implies that his family
was from the city-state of Genoa . 1 He must have moved to Venice
by 1461, along with his father, Giulio, and brother, Piero, since in
1476 he became a Venetian citizen on the grounds that he had been
resident there for at least fifteen years . 2 Having probably arrived
while still a child, he became a fully integrated member of that
proud and prosperous city-state. This is perhaps best reflected by
Cabot’s adoption of the Venetian form of his Christian name’Zuan
in preference to ‘Giovanni’ - the latter being the common form of
his name used in the rest of Italy. ‘Zuan’, moreover, is the form of
his name that he kept in London, while its closeness to the Spanish
and English forms of the name, at least when spoken, helps explain
why he was known as ’Juan’ during his time in Spain and ‘John’ in
England,

Image deleted from digitised version of
the book for copyright reasons.

Plate is | Signature
of John Cabot
[Zuan Chabotto]

(Archivio di Stato,

Venice, Notarile
Testamenti 735,
fo 245 bis)

The earliest record of Cabot, or’Zuan Chabotto’ as his signature has
it, comes from 1470, when he was admitted to the confraternity of St
John the Evangelist . 3 Confraternities were religious societies, run by
laymen, that provided mutual support for members and organised

festivals associated with their patron saint. The brotherhood Cabot
joined was one of the most prestigious in Venice, which suggests
that he was already a respected member of the community. The
register that records his admission to the confraternity describes
him as a pellizer’: a merchant dealing in animal skins. But once he
became a full citizen in 1476, he would have been allowed to take
part in Venice's lucrative trade with the Eastern Mediterranean, on
which much of the city’s wealth was based.

Plate 16 | House in
Venice said to have
been the home of
John Cabot.

(Photo: Didier
Descouens) 4

By 1483 Cabot was visiting lands held by the ‘Sultan of Egypt and
he later claimed that he had visited Mecca, albeit that would have
been a dangerous enterprise for a Christian . 5 More certainly, his
trade with the Mamluk Sultanate would have given him as good
an understanding of the Orient and its exotic produce, such as silk
and spices, as any European possessed in his day. That was because
these goods were typically bought by Arab traders in India, or even
in the lands around the China Sea, before being carried through the
Middle East. Knowledge gleaned during Cabot’s dealings with such
merchants, combined with his connections to some of the leading
shipbuilders and cartographers of Venice, probably gave him the
confidence to develop his exploration plans , 6

That Cabot became a famous explorer, rather than a successful but
obscure Venetian merchant, was the result of a personal disaster.

22 JOHN CABOT: BACKGROUND

Fig. 4 | John
Cabot’s activities
in the Eastern
Mediterranean

Letters of justice’ sent out by the Venetian government on 5
November 1488 indicate that Zuan Caboto had fled Venice as an
insolvent debtor, owing money to some of the most prominent men
of the city. 7 It seems that some deal or contract he had undertaken
had gone sour. Rather than face imprisonment for debt in Venice, as
well as the confiscation of all his property, Cabot escaped with his
wife, Mattea, and their three sons: Ludovico, Sebastian and Sancio.

From 1490 to 1493 'Juan Caboto de Montecalunya’, as he became
known, lived in the Spanish port of Valencia, one of the greatest
cities of the Kingdom of Aragon. During this period he sought
employment as a civil engineer, at one point making proposals to
King Ferdinand to improve Valencia’s harbour facilities . 8 In so
doing, Cabot may have been drawing on his experience of house¬
building in Venice, where all construction requires an understanding
of how to build in seawater. Although his plans were considered
seriously, they were not taken up; there was good will, but no
money. After that, Cabot moved to Seville, where he was contracted
in September 1494 to build a stone bridge over the Guadalquivir
River. This would have been the first such bridge over the waterway,
which had long relied on a pontoon bridge for traffic from the east

JOHN CABOT:BACKGROUND

Plate 1 7 | The
pontoon bridge
across the
Guadalquivir River

bank to the west. Unfortunately, the construction of such a bridge
proved impossible, either then, or for many centuries afterwards.
By Christmas Eve 1494 it was clear that the project was not going
well and the City Council ordered an investigation. Shortly after,
Cabot’s contract was terminated, leaving him unemployed. At that
point he had been resident in the city for at least five months . 9

While Cabot did not succeed as a civil engineer, his life in Seville,
with contacts among the city’s elite, must have connected him

Plate 18 | Ferdinand
II of Aragon, the
patron of Cabot
the engineer, and
Isabella of Castile,
the patron of
Columbus the
explorer, from
a late sixteenth
century portrait
relief, University of
Salamanca
(Photo: Procy/
Shutterstock)

24 JOHN CABOT:BACKGROUND

to those involved in the Spanish voyages of discovery led by
Christopher Columbus. From the outset, Seville (including its
outport of Cadiz) was the centre for Spain’s colonisation and
exploitation of the Americas. It was the city from which Columbus
launched his second voyage to the New World in September
1493, with a fleet of seventeen ships and 1,200 men. So, although
Columbus himself returned from this second voyage only in
1496, Cabot was perfectly placed to receive the latest news from
the colonists, explorers and supply ships returning from the
Caribbean. 10

Columbus’ expedition of 1492-3, along with reports coming back of
his second voyage, proved that there were large unknown islands to
the west. These Columbus believed to be part of the Indies and he
thought that China lay just a few hundred miles beyond. Yet, by the
end of 1494, there was ample evidence that these strange new lands
had little to do with the Orient described by Marco Polo: no silks
or oriental spices had been brought back and no great civilisation
had been encountered.

Like Columbus, Cabot thought that China and Japan could be
reached by sailing west, but he believed that there was a better way
to get there. Columbus’ expeditions had taken him into the tropics;
if Cabot followed a more northerly route, the distance to China
would be shorter. Following such a route he might slip past the
Spanish expeditions and reach the Orient before Columbus.

Pedro de Ayala, the Spanish Ambassador in London, reported in
1498 that Cabot had sought support for his plans in Seville and
Lisbon before he came to England . 11 If this is correct, it is unlikely
that it was official support Cabot looked for. By the end of 1493
the Spanish monarchs had thoroughly committed themselves to
Columbus. They granted him monopoly rights to explore to the
west and publically endorsed his claims that the lands discovered
the previous year were part of the Indies. The King of Portugal,
meanwhile, had little reason to be interested in Cabot’s ideas. In
part this was because the Portuguese had their own plans for
reaching India by sailing around Africa. More immediately, they
were unlikely to back voyages across the Atlantic given that in June
1494 Portugal and Spain had signed the Treaty of Tordesillas to
resolve their differences over the regions each could exploit. The
treaty agreed that Spain would have monopoly rights over any land

JOHN CABOT: BACKGROUND 25

Fig 5 | Treaty of
Tordesillas: Line
of demarcation
between Castile
and Portugal

that lay more than 370 leagues (1,362 miles) west of the Cape Verde
Islands, while the Portuguese would take any lands that lay east of
the meridian, or line of longitude, running north and south from
that point. In effect, this divided the world into two hemispheres,
with Spain assuming the right to exploit the western one, while the
eastern half was reserved to Portugal. For Portugal to have backed
a voyage across the Atlantic by Cabot would have been in direct
contravention of a treaty on which the ink had barely dried.

If Cabot sought support in Seville and Lisbon before coming
to England, it seems likely that the people he talked to were the
ones who ultimately backed him. These were the merchants and
financiers of Bristol and Italy. By the 1490s Bristol had extensive
dealings with southern Spain, which continued alongside its
traditional trade with Portugal . 12 Together, the commerce to
southern Iberia accounted for around forty percent of Bristol’s
overseas trade. The port’s merchants were also exploring the
North Atlantic themselves. Having witnessed the success of
Spain’s Italian navigator, Christopher Columbus, it is possible
that Bristol merchants in Seville approached Cabot, or more likely
were approached by him, to see if he might assist their search. At
the same time, Cabot’s connections with the Italian merchant and
banking community in Lisbon and Seville could have persuaded
him that he might get funding for a westward venture from the
London branches of these firms.

26 JOHN CABOT! BACKGROUND

During this period the Italians ran Europe’s most complex,
large-scale and long-distance commercial enterprises. While the
headquarters of these firms were typically in Italy, they maintained
numerous branches in Europe’s principal cities . 13 Italy's venture
capitalists had long had, and would long maintain, an interest
in exploration and colonisation beyond Europe, Indeed, the
importance of Italy's moneymen was such that the extra-European
ventures launched from Iberia might best be regarded as Italian
mercantile ventures undertaken under foreign flags - rather than
as great ‘national’ endeavours. The part played by Italian explorers
such as Columbus, Cabot and Vespucci in the service of foreign
countries has long been celebrated. Modern research has shown that
many Italian financiers supported the discovery voyages in the hope
that lucrative commercial opportunities would follow . 14 But Cabot
could do nothing without royal approval. Given the importance
of the Italian banks to Europe’s exploration voyages, Cabot’s
conversations with his fellow merchants may have suggested that,
although it would be impossible to carry out his plans from Iberia,
if he obtained support from Henry VII of England, he should get
backing from some of the English branches of Italian firms. This
would explain why, when Cabot left for England around the middle
of 1495, he did not go to Bristol. Instead, he went to London, where
the Italian colony was based.

JOHN CABOT: BACKGROUND

Plate tg | John
Cabot after his
arrival in England.
Sitting on a baulk
of timber, Cabot
contemplates his
next move.

Stephen Joyce ( 1986 )
(Photo: Bob Cheung
/ Shutterstock)

28 JOHN CABOT:BACKGROUND

4 CABOT'S PLAN:
LONDON AND BRISTOL

On 5 March 1496, Henry VII granted’John Cabot, citizen of Venice’
the right, by’letters patent:

to sail to all parts, regions and coasts of the eastern, western and
northern sea, under our banners, flags and ensigns,..to find,
discover and investigate whatsoever islands, countries, regions
or provinces of heathens and infidels, in whatsoever part of
the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all
Christians . 1

If Cabot succeeded, he and his heirs would enjoy the profit from any
lands occupied or trade established. For his part the King would
receive one fifth of all profits made from the enterprise. As with a
modern patent, the grant gave the holder the sole right to exploit
his ‘product. That meant the King’s subjects could only sail to any
lands discovered with Cabot’s permission. But the grant did more
than this: since Cabot’s ships would be sailing under the King’s
colours, any attack on the explorers would be treated as an attack
on the King. Foreign powers would know that, if they interfered
with the expedition, England would retaliate. So while Henry VII
did not pay for the venture, the legal and political guarantees were
significant.

Obtaining the patent was crucial to Cabot: without it, his voyages
might not have taken place. The grant, however, represented the
end of a process, not the beginning of one. A poor Italian merchant
could not have obtained a royal privilege like this on his own; just to
get an audience with the King required influential backers. But who
were these people and why did they help this bankrupt Venetian?

It used to be assumed that Cabot’s supporters all came from
Bristol. After all, it was on a Bristol ship, with Bristol men, that
Cabot sailed. Moreover, contemporary commentators made clear
that the port's merchants played a key part in the enterprise. This
is apparent from a letter sent on 18 December 1497 by Raimondo

Image deleted from digitised version of the book for copyright
reasons.

Plate 20 | The 'office
copy’ of the grant to
John Cabot and his
sons

(TNA: C76/178 m.S)

Plate 21 | Henry
VII’s great seal,
which would have
been attached to the
actual letters patent
given to John Cabot

30 CABOT S plan: LONDON AND BRISTOL

de Raimondi de Soncino, the Milanese ambassador to England.
Soncino’s letter to his master, the Duke of Milan, discusses both
the voyage undertaken by Cabot the previous summer and the
one planned for 1498. 2 The ambassador, who had no reason for
exaggerating Bristol’s importance, noted that when Cabot returned
four months earlier, he would not, as a ‘foreigner and a poor man’
have been believed at Court 'had it not been that his companions,
who are practically all English and from Bristol, testified that he
spoke the truth’. Soncino then went on to say of the plans for the
1498 voyage that the leading men in this enterprise are from Bristol,
and great seamen.’

Plate 22 | Ludovico
Maria Sforza,
Duke of Milan.

His ambassador’s
letters home are an
important source
of information
concerning John
Cabot.

(Victoria and
Albert Museum) 3

Image deleted from digitised version of the
book for copyright reasons.

Clues as to why Bristol supported Cabot can be found in the
letters patent. While this was issued to the explorer, such grants
could be assigned to others, in whole or part. In the same way that
modern venture capitalists will buy shares in an enterprise from
an entrepreneur who has a patent, Cabot could give away part
of his rights to others in return for the money needed to fund
his expeditions. In theory such investors could have come from
anywhere. In practice, a clause in Cabot’s grant made it particularly
likely that Bristol’s merchants and, indeed, the port’s broader
community, would support him. This clause was the stipulation that
all ships operating under the patent should use the port of Bristol
at which they are bound and holden only to arrive’. All future trade
was to be conducted through Bristol. This made investment in the
enterprise particularly attractive to the port’s merchants. It would

CABOT S PLAN: LONDON AND BRISTOL

also benefit the town more generally, since more trade would flow
through it if Cabots plans succeeded.

During the sixteenth century, Lisbon and Seville became two of the
richest cities in Christendom precisely because the Portuguese and
Spanish monarchs decreed that all extra-European trade should
pass through these ports. The result was that the fortunes made
from colonial commerce were not limited to those who were directly
involved in it; many people in Seville and Lisbon became rich by
providing ships, provisions and services to the trade. With Bristol
being granted very similar monopoly rights in 1496, the potential
rewards for the port and its inhabitants were as great as they were
for Cabot . 4

Plate 23 | The town
quays of the port of
Bristol in 1673: detail
from Millerd Map
(Bristol Record Office:
Photo Roger Leech)

32 CABOT S plan: LONDON AND BRISTOL

While Bristol’s role in Cabot’s voyages has always been clear,
the significance of the Italian community in London has only
recently become apparent. During the 1960s Dr Alwyn Ruddock,
an historian and lecturer at the University of London, found
documents that cast new light on how and why the voyages came
about. Ruddock’s discoveries showed that part of Cabot’s funding
came from Italian banks based in London. She also suggested that
his chief supporter in England was Brother Giovanni Antonio de
Carbonariis, an Augustinian friar from Milan. He was no ordinary
friar: Carbonariis was an important ecclesiastical administrator,
with responsibility for collecting the Pope’s taxes in England. He
was also a diplomat who served as Soncino’s guide and advisor
when he arrived in England as ambassador for the Duke of Milan.
If Cabot had the support of such a man, it would go a long way to
explaining how the would-be explorer got access to the King. That
Carbonariis was involved in the later voyages is certainly known,
in that he sailed on Cabot’s 1498 expedition. Ruddock, however,
appears to have found evidence that the friar was the explorer’s
chief supporter from the very start, suggesting that Carbonariis
arranged Cabot’s audiences with the King and, later on, secured the
explorer’s rewards . 5

Plate 24 | Austin
Friars, London. The
friars ministered
to London’s Italian
community, and
Cabot may have
lodged there. 6

cabot’s plan: London and Bristol

The great tragedy here is that, while Alwyn Ruddock's research was
ground-breaking, she never published her findings and on her death
in December 2005 she ordered the destruction of her draft book,
her notes, and the photographs she had taken of her sources. Since
that time the authors of this book, along with our collaborators,
have sought to relocate the twenty-three new documents Ruddock
said she had found during the four decades she spent investigating
the Cabot voyages . 7 Our research is discussed in a number of
academic articles and document transcriptions that can be accessed
online. To date, not all of the documents Ruddock found have been
re-discovered, which makes it impossible to verify all her claims.
On the other hand, we have re-located many of her sources. These
include the accounts of the Bardi, a famous Florentine banking house
that had a branch in London. One of the Bardi’s commercial ledgers
includes a record of two payments, totalling 50 nobles (almost £17)
to John Cabot in April and May 1496 to help fund his expedition to
search for the new land'. Although their contribution would only
have covered a part of Cabot’s expedition costs, it confirms that he
received money from the Italian merchant community in London . 8

Image deleted from digitised version of the book
for copyright reasons.

Plate 25 | Late
fifteenth - century
decoration of a
beam and ceiling in
the Bardi’s house in
Florence. It includes
a frieze of nautical
imagery

(Photo: Francesco
Guidi Bruscoli)

34 CABOT S plan: LONDON AND BRISTOL

Image deleted from digitised version of the book for copyright reasons.

Plate 26 | The Bardi
transfer 50 nobles,
valued at £16 13s
4-d in ‘old’ money,
to John Cabot
Venetian’ (Giovanni
Chabotte viniziano)
'so that he can go
and find the new
land’

(Archivio
Guiccardini,
Florence, Carte
Bardi 12, fo. 215)

At the very least this demonstrates that the Bristol voyages were not
purely a local venture. Indeed, from the perspective of his Italian
backers, they might be regarded as part of their broader drive to
search for new markets beyond Europe. To the Italians, Bristol’s
merchants and Henry VII were simply another set of partners in
their search for new commercial opportunities.

Cabot’s chief aim, as he described it following his 1497 voyage, was
to reach China and Japan by sailing west across the Atlantic, Like
Columbus, the Venetian knew that the Orient produced many
luxury goods that Europeans wanted, such as silk and spices. The
problem was that these goods were very expensive because of the
vast distances they had to travel. Some goods spent a year on the
road’ before reaching Europe, passing through the hands of many
merchants. Each of these merchants needed to pay the cost of
transporting the goods, as well as any customs duties levied on
the lands they passed through. And, of course, each merchant also
needed to make a profit. The result was that oriental goods could
cost ten times more in Europe than in their countries of origin. So,
if a European merchant could sail to those countries directly, buy at
the local rate and ship the goods home at low cost, he would become
rich. This is precisely what Columbus hoped to do. His expeditions
were based on the assumption that the world was much smaller
than it actually is, and that India and China lay just a few thousand
miles west of Europe. Indeed, according to his initial projections,
made before he set sail, the coast of China was at least a thousand
miles east of where we now know the coast of North America to
be. This is why Columbus declared that the Caribbean islands he
discovered in 1492 were part of the ‘Indies’ and that China must
be nearby. Cabot clearly believed something very similar. Indeed,

CABOT S PLAN: LONDON AND BRISTOL

on his return in 1497 he suggested the lands he had discovered in
North America were those of the ‘Grand Khan’ by which he meant
the Emperor of China . 9

While Cabot’s plan was similar to that of Columbus, what
distinguished it was the route he meant to follow. Columbus had
sailed south to the Canaries, before heading west to the Caribbean.
By contrast, having left Bristol and passed Ireland, Cabot headed
north before going west. His voyage thus ran on a line that was
roughly parallel to the route taken by Columbus, but more than
1,500 miles to the north. If the world had actually been much
smaller, this would indeed have made a lot of sense, in that he
would be arcing over the top of the world and might have reached
Asia much faster. It was also a route that took advantage of the
prevailing winds and ocean currents.

If Cabot s aims are clear, those of his backers are less obvious. First,
it seems that his Bristol supporters hoped that his voyage would
locate the Island of Brasil. They must also have bought into Cabot’s
hope of finding a new trade route to the Orient. Beyond this, it has
sometimes been argued that Bristol was interested in sailing west
because the port’s merchants wanted to find new fishing grounds.
This is because, when the 1497 expedition returned, Cabot’s Bristol
companions reported that the sea there is swarming with fish’ and
that they could bring so many fish that this kingdom would have no
further need of Iceland, from which place there comes a very great
quantity of the fish called stockfish ’. 10 This fishery, which lies along
the coast of Newfoundland, later became one of the world’s most
important cod fisheries. This does not mean, however, that the
explorers had set out to find such a fishery. Indeed, the actions of
Bristol men both before and after Cabot’s expeditions demonstrates
that they were not particularly interested in developing such a
fishery themselves.

As noted earlier, when in the early fifteenth century Bristol merchants
started trading to Iceland, their main purchase was stockfish - a
form of freeze-dried cod that keeps for many months. Yet even at
the trade’s height, only a few Bristol ships sailed to Iceland each year,
with the Iceland venture never accounting for more than about five
percent of Bristol’s overseas commerce . 11 Moreover, having reached
a peak during the middle decades of the century, Bristol’s trade
to Iceland went into decline. Bristol’s surviving customs accounts

36 CABOTS PLAN: LONDON AND BRISTOL

Fig 7 | Bristol’s trade
as recorded in the
1492/3 customs
accounts 17

show that only one ship entered from Iceland in the accounting year
1485/6; none is reported in the customs records for 1486/7; and
only one in 1492/3, which was the last known voyage from Bristol
to the island . 12 By the 1480s, Bristol’s ‘Iceland venture’ was a dying
concern undertaken by only one or two ship-owning merchants.

The decline of the Iceland trade has led some historians to suggest
that the English were‘forced’ out of Iceland by the Hanseatic League
and that this prompted Bristol to go searching for a new source of
fish to the west . 13 There are a number of problems with this theory.
First, it ignores the fact that, throughout the fifteenth century, most
of Bristol’s fish came from southern Ireland, If Bristol needed more
fish, the Irish trade could have been expanded. The second problem
is that the English were not'forced out’ of Iceland during this period;
Hull merchants, for example, continued to trade to Iceland until the
end of the century . 14 Indeed, the English fishery off Iceland actually
grew in the late-fifteenth century and on into the sixteenth century.
By the 1530s it was one of England’s most important fisheries, with
up to 130 ships sailing there annually . 15 It is just that nearly all of

CABOT S PLAN: LONDON AND BRISTOL

these vessels came from East Anglia. Bristol’s merchants did not
participate in the Iceland fishery because Bristol had never been
much of a fishing port — the interests of its merchants were in trade,
not fishing. So, it would have made no sense for them to search for a
new fishery across the Atlantic that they did not need, and showed,
in the event, little interest in exploiting.

That Bristol merchants stopped going to Iceland in the later
fifteenth century is best explained by rising trading opportunities
in Spain after 1453, as relations between England and Castile
improved following the end of the Hundred Years War. This led
to a dramatic increase in Bristol’s commerce with Spain, which
soon became much larger than its trade with Iceland had ever been.
Bristol’s merchants were not ‘pushed’ out of Iceland, they simply
abandoned it in favour of more profitable opportunities in Iberia . 16
In particular, the summer trade to Iceland for fish was replaced by
a higher value trade to the Basque ports of northern Spain for iron
and woad.

38 CABOT S PLAN: LONDON AND BRISTOL

5 1496 AND 1497 EXPEDITIONS

Once Cabot received his patent in March 1496 he was keen to sail.
The only record of his voyage that summer is a letter to Christopher
Columbus, written in early 1498 by the Bristol merchant, John Day:

Concerning the first voyage which your lordship wants to
know about, what happened was that they took one ship, and
he [Cabot] was unhappy with the crew and he was badly
provisioned and he found the weather to be unfavourable, so he
made the choice to come back . 1

This unsuccessful expedition seems to have been a rushed affair,
undertaken too late in the year. Until Cabot secured his patent on
5 March it would have been difficult to secure funding; and even
after that it took some time to get the money to pay for the voyage.
The Bardi, for example, did not make their initial payment until
27 April, followed by a second instalment on 2 May. Ideally Cabot
should have been at sea by then — as he was in both 1497 and 1498.
Yet, since he was still collecting money in London in May 1496, it
is unlikely that he could have scratched together a ship, crew and
provisions before late June or July.

After his return to Bristol, Cabot had at least eight months to
prepare his next venture. The interval allowed him to charter the
ship of his choice and to make sure it was well provisioned. Above
all, it gave him time to gather a crew who were willing to undertake
a voyage of unknown length in uncharted waters.

The ship chosen for the 1497 expedition was the fifty-ton Matthew of
Bristol. She was provisioned for an eight-month voyage. Contrary
to popular belief, there is no particular reason to think the Matthew
was specially built for Cabot; and her subsequent employment was
in Bristol’s ordinary trade to Ireland and France. The bare details
of the ship’s most famous voyage are recorded in an Elizabethan
chronicle:

This year, on St.John the Baptist’s Day [24 June 1497], the land
of America was found by the Merchants of Bristow in a shippe of
Bristowe, called the Mathew; the which said ship departed from
the port of Bristowe, the second day of May, and came home
again the 6th of August next following. 2

Plate 27 | This
1951 statue by Sir
Charles Wheeler
stands at the
entrance to Bristol's
City Hall. A pensive
John Cabot clutches
his letters patent;
an astrolabe, a
portable scientific
instrument used as
an aid to navigation,
hangs from his belt.
Artistic licence has
been used to depict
the letters patent: in
reality, they would
have been little
bigger than his hand
(Photo: Jamie
Carstairs)

40 1496 AND 1497 EXPEDITIONS

Other accounts of the voyage were written in Cabot’s lifetime, in
four letters written in the months after the expedition’s return . 3
None were written by Cabot, or by anyone who was directly involved
in the voyage. The earliest known, written by a fellow Venetian
merchant, seems to be based partly on reports of conversations
with Cabot, but survives only in copy. The second letter, a dispatch
to the Duke of Milan of news from England, mentions Cabot's
voyage only in passing. Five months later, the diplomat Raimondo
de Soncino, again writing to the Duke of Milan, combined a report
of actual conversations with Cabot and his companions, with tittle-
tattle about future plans.

The exception to the newsletter format of the London-based
merchants and diplomats was John Day’s letter to Columbus.
This was sent by a Bristol merchant to a man who was interested
in gleaning the exact details of where Cabot had sailed and what
he had found. This was because Columbus had not achieved what
he had set out to do. Although he had sailed to many islands in
the Caribbean, and established a colony, he had not reached the
mainland and had certainly not discovered the Orient. He still

Plate 28 |
Posthumous
portrait of
Columbus
by Sebastian
de Piombo
(Metropolitan
Museum of Art)

1496 AND 1497 EXPEDITIONS

believed, however, that China lay not much further west. This made
Cabot a dangerous competitor who threatened his territorial and
commercial interests. If an English expedition, backed by Henry
VII, reached the Orient before Columbus, it would be difficult to
stop them trading there. So the Grand Admiral of the Ocean Sea
needed to know where the Bristol expedition had gone.

Image deleted from digitised version of the book for
copyright reasons.

Plate 29 | 'I kiss
the hands of your
lordship’ [signed]
Johan Day
(Archivo General
de Simancas,
Autografo 103)

According to John Day, the Matthew had twenty men on board.
This included Cabot and two friends: one from ‘Burgundy’ (the
Netherlands) and the other from Genoa in Italy, a ‘barber’ who
may have served as the ship’s surgeon . 4 The size of the crew was
slightly larger than on a typical commercial voyage, but this was no
ordinary venture . 5 If someone died, or became sick, he could not be
replaced at the next port. So, it made sense to carry additional crew
and to take more provisions than might be needed for a summer
reconnaissance expedition. One or two merchants may also have
been on board. If so, they probably included the Bristol merchant
William Weston, who received a reward from the King in January
1498 and was later to lead an independent voyage of discovery from
Bristol . 6

Once the Matthew had passed Ireland, Day says that she headed
north ‘for some days’ before turning west. This first passage took
the explorers into waters that Bristol’s mariners knew well from
their voyages to Iceland and their long search for the Isle of Brasil.
The difference was that Cabot carried on, sailing for thirty-five days
until he sighted land. The exact location of his landfall has long
been disputed: until the discovery of John Day’s letter in the mid-
1950s it had been placed as far south as New England or as far north

42 1496 AND 1497 EXPEDITIONS

Fig 8 | Probable
route of 1497
voyage

as Labrador. What makes Day’s letter valuable in this respect is that
he provided the latitude of two of the areas Cabot explored. This
would have been a crucial point to Columbus, since it would have
given him a clear idea of where the lands were, relative to those he
had charted himself. The information would also have been prized
because the latitudinal position of Cabot’s discoveries was the one
thing that the explorer could have calculated reasonably accurately
using a cross-staff or astrolabe. By contrast, any assessment of how
far east or west the lands lay, that is, their longitude, would have
relied on the navigator’s estimates of the distance travelled each day,
which was difficult to determine at sea. The southernmost point
Day mentions lay due west of the‘Bordeaux river' in France. By this
he would have meant the mouth of the Gironde estuary in Gascony.
The northernmost point lay due west of Dursey Head, in southwest
Ireland. If these two points represented the latitudinal limits of the
land explored, which would have been what Columbus would have
been most interested in, it implies the coast investigated that year
was limited entirely, or almost entirely, to Newfoundland - ranging
from just below the Avalon Peninsula, on the south coast of the
island, to the end of the Great Northern Peninsula. Day indicates
that the expedition returned home from the northerly point
mentioned, following a thirty-five day exploration of the coastline.
It seems likely that the initial landfall was made fairly close to the
southernmost point mentioned, in that Day says that ‘it was on

1496 AND 1497 EXPEDITIONS 43

the way back that were found most parts of the lands that were
discovered’. This suggests an initial landing on the Avalon Peninsula
in Newfoundland but does not entirely rule out Bonavista, which
lay about 160 miles north and which later tradition reputed as the
landfall. Equally, it does not exclude Cape Breton Island, south
west of Newfoundland.

All three main commentators on the voyage, including Day,
indicate that the crew only disembarked once, close to where they
first sighted land. 8 There, Cabot raised the banners of the Pope and
the King of England, asserting legal possession of the land as an
English territory, subject to the religious authority of Rome. This
symbolic act of appropriation was directed at a European audience.
It stated clearly that the land was now known to Christians’ and
that it belonged to the King of England, John Day says of Cabot
that since he was there only with a few men, he did not dare to
penetrate into the land any further than a crossbow’s shot’. However,
they did find clear evidence that the place was inhabited. Two of
the accounts state that the explorers discovered the remains of a
fire, a trail and various tools, one of which had been painted red
with what they thought to be’brasil’ dye. It seems likely the objects
found by the explorers had been left behind by Newfoundland’s
native Beothuk people, hunter-gatherers known for their love of

Plate 30 | A statue
of John Cabot gazes
across Bonavista
Bay from Cape
Bonavista, the place
where, according to
tradition, he first
sighted land
(Photo: William
Gilbert) 7

44 1496 AND 1497 EXPEDITIONS

red ochre, a red earth pigment found on the island. 9 With this they
painted themselves, their houses and tools. So the red paint’ found
on the tool was probably ochre.

Following their month-long exploration of the coast, the explorers
made exceptionally good time on their return voyage, managing the
2,200 mile crossing of the Atlantic in just fifteen days. Reaching
Bristol on 6 August, despite a navigational error on the part of his
crew that took him via Brittany, Cabot barely caught his breath
before riding to the manor of Woodstock, ten miles north of Oxford,
to inform the King of his success. He must have been granted an
immediate audience, for the King’s account books record a payment
to the explorer on io or n August. It is a brief note, made only to
document the King’s personal reward of £10 to ‘hym that founde
the new isle’. 10 Given that an ordinary labourer earned about £5 per
year, this was not an insignificant sum. More would come later, as
Cabot prepared his third voyage.

Plate 31 | The 'palace'
of Woodstock in
I7I4 11

Plate 32 | ‘Item to
hym that founde the
new Isle — x li' [£10]:
Henry VII’s gift to
Cabot

(TNA: E101/414/6,
fo. &}v)

Image deleted from digitised version of the book for copyright reasons.

1496 AND 1497 EXPEDITIONS

Plate 33 | Henry VII
by Michael Sittow
(National Portrait
Gallery)

Although John Cabot was not showered with gold’ on his return,
some fuss was made of him and the explorer was certainly not shy
about his success. On 23 August, Lorenzo Pasqualigo, a Venetian
merchant in London, wrote to his brother that that Venetian of
ours’ is called the Great Admiral and vast honour is paid to him and
he goes dressed in silk, and these English run after him like mad.’ 12
The tone is slightly tongue-in-cheek, perhaps in the knowledge that,
back home in Venice, Cabot’s status was that of a renegade bankrupt.
In England, by contrast, Cabot’s admirers were comparing him to
Columbus, whose official title, the ‘Grand Admiral of the Ocean
Seal was now being mimicked by Cabot’s friends. The Venetian
would no doubt have appreciated the compliment and already had
plans to live up to the flattery by leading a much larger expedition
the following year. With this, he hoped to sail on to the civilised
parts of the Orient, which he thought lay not much further west.

46 1496 AND 1497 EXPEDITIONS

Unfortunately for Cabot, the excitement that followed his return did
not last long: events intervened. Just four weeks after the explorer’s
return, the Yorkist pretender Perkin Warbeck landed in Cornwall
to raise a rebellion against Henry VII: the second uprising that year.
It was a serious threat to a King who had only come to power twelve
years earlier. With an army to mobilise and a crown to preserve, it
seems unlikely that the King paid much attention to Cabot over
the following weeks. Indeed, he could have been entirely forgotten
but for the fact that Brother Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis,
Cabot’s companion on the 1498 voyage, played a role in the military
emergency.

Fig 9 | Warbeck's
campaign in
England in
September 1497

Carbonariis was at Exeter when the rebels tried to capture the city
on 17 September and when Warbeck withdrew from the city, the
friar seems to have followed them to Taunton. By 20 September it
was clear that the uprising was failing and people started to desert.
That night Warbeck fled, abandoning his rag-tag army. 13 According
to a letter from the Milanese ambassador, written just a few days
later, Carbonariis then ‘went with all speed to Woodstock^ where
the King was gathering his army, and brought word of everything.
Accordingly his Majesty dismissed all his army except 6,000 men,
with whom he himself is going into Cornwall.’ 14 Henry had good
reason to be grateful to the friar. One beneficiary appears to have
been Carbonariis’ protege, John Cabot. On 26 September the
explorer had an audience with the King at Burford, while Henry

1496 AND 1497 EXPEDITIONS

was en-route to the West. Cabot was given another small reward,
this time of £2. More importantly, it seems likely that promises
were made that further gifts would follow and that there would be
royal support for a new expedition: a voyage in which Carbonariis
would take part. 15

Henry VII remained in the West Country for nearly six weeks. 16
Warbeck had fled to sanctuary at Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire,
but surrendered in return for the promise of his life. On 5 October,
he appeared before the King at Taunton, where he admitted
publically that his claim to be the younger son of Edward IV was
false, effectively ending the rebellion. The King finally returned
to London in late November, at which point the normal business
of government resumed. Henry now had more time for Cabot.
Soon after the King’s return the explorer made a presentation to
the King and Council, illustrating his case with both a globe’ and
maps. Money followed: on 13 December the explorer was granted a
pension, or annual salary, of £20 per year to be paid during the King’s
pleasure'. 17 This put Cabot formally into the King’s service, with the
pension backdated to 25 March 1497, just to make clear that Cabot
had also been in the King’s service when he had discovered the new
lands the previous summer. Those lands had been claimed in the
King’s name, with a display of the King’s banner, by a paid servant
of the King. As far as Henry was concerned, they belonged to him.

Image deleted from digitised version
of the book for copyright reasons.

Plate 34 | The King’s
devices: the Tudor
colours of green
and white, with
dragon, greyhound
and portcullis (just
visible) and the
royal arms
(TNA, £33/3/1)

48 1496 AND 1497 EXPEDITIONS

6 THE MYSTERY OF
THE 1498 VOYAGE

By the time Cabot was granted his pension in December 1497, he
had clear plans for the following year. These are detailed in Soncino’s
letter of 18 December, based on his conversations with Cabot and
his Bristol supporters. The explorer’s intent was to return to the
newly-discovered land and then:

keep along the coast from the place at which he touched, more
and more towards the east [i.e. the Orient], until he reaches an
island which he calls Cipango [Japan], situated in the equinoctial
region [near the equator], where he believes that all the spices of
the world have their origin, as well as the jewels . 1

To Cabot, this was all about trade. He believed the coast explored
the previous summer was part of Asia, and that he could follow it
west and south until he came to the civilised parts of the'East’. There
he could buy goods for a fraction of their price in Europe. When
they were sold back home, he and his investors would become rich.
Unlike the voyage of 1497, this was not a simple reconnaissance
expedition. Cabot planned to take a small fleet of ships, confident
that some would be equipped by the King. There was even talk of a
colony being established, while a number of‘poor Italian friars’, led
by Carbonariis, would bring Christianity to the new land.

John Day’s letter, written in early 1498, states that the explorers
hoped to send ten or twelve vessels’ on the next voyage. However,
by 3 February, when Cabot was issued with his second letters patent
by the King, his plans seem to have been scaled back. This grant did
not replace Cabot’s 1496 patent: its purpose was merely to assist
preparations for the new voyage. In particular, it gave the explorer
permission to charter up to six English ships, each of not more than
200 tons, paying only the rates that would be charged if they were
in the King’s service. The patent also made a general order that
English officials should not hinder his plans, or subject the explorer
to restrictions while he prepared his expedition. 2

In the event Cabot sailed with five ships, departing at the beginning
of May with provisions for a year. The Great Chronicle of London
spells out the commercial ambitions of those involved. 3 Various
trade goods, ranging from small manufactured items to bulk
commodities, were dispatched on the ships. This cargo included
cloth, caps and laces, sent by both London and Bristol merchants. 4
The difficulty for the investors was that, while they knew what they
wanted to buy in the Orient, they had no idea what the Chinese
or Japanese might want in exchange. So it made sense to test the
market by taking a variety of merchandise.

The largest ship in the fleet was manned and provisioned by the
King. It was probably under the personal command of John Cabot.
The other vessels from Bristol were said to be small ships’, albeit
that may only be by way of comparison. Henry VII’s account books
confirm that he invested in the voyage, providing loans totalling £113
8s. to Thomas Bradley and to Lancelot Thirkill ’for his Shipp going
towards the new Ilande’. 5 Bradley was a merchant with connections
to both London and Bristol, while Thirkill seems to have been
London based. 6 In April 1498 another man, John Cair, goying to
the newe lie’, was given a free gift of 40 shillings by the King. 7

Image deleted from digitised version of
the book for copyright reasons.

Plate 35 | Payment
of £20 to Lancelot
Thirkill going
towardes the new
lie’, March 1498;
Henry VII signs off
the payments for
the week with his
initials 'HR'

(TNA, Ei01/

_ 414/16, fo. 2ov)

What happened to Cabot remains a mystery. A letter written on
20 June 1498 to the Duke of Milan confirms that the ships had
left and that Brother Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis, whom
the Duke knew well, had gone with them. On 25 July, the Spanish
Ambassador also recorded the departure of the fleet in a letter to
his sovereigns, adding that the ship carrying Carbonariis had been
damaged in a storm and forced to land in Ireland.‘The Genoese) by
which the ambassador meant Cabot, had ‘kept on his way.’ While

THE MYSTERY OF THE I498 VOYAGE

the expedition was expected to return by the autumn, the author
of the Great Chronicle of London noted that ‘no tidings’ had been
received by Michaelmas (29 September) 1498, After these reports,
there is nothing. 8

So what became of Cabot’s fleet? Given the lack of definite
information about the voyage, it has often been supposed that
Cabot was lost at sea. Support for this can be found in the writings
of Polydore Vergil, the humanist scholar who from 1502 replaced
Carbonariis as papal tax collector. In a draft of his general history of
England, written in 1512, Vergil reported that Cabot had sailed with
a ship provided by the King to search for new lands in the ‘British
ocean’, but that these proved to be:

nowhere but on the very bottom of the ocean, to which he is
thought to have descended together with his boat, the victim
himself of that self-same ocean; since after that voyage he was
never seen again anywhere. 9

The problem with Vergil’s account is one common to all the early
chronicle sources. Both Vergil and the English accounts confuse
the chronology of the expeditions. In Vergil’s case, however, the
weaknesses are compounded by the fact that he was not even in
England at the time of the voyages. So it would be unwise to put too
much store on his words, which must have been based on second,
or even third-hand, information.

Plate 36 |

Polydore Vergil
(National Portrait
Gallery)

Image deleted from digitised
version of the book for
copyright reasons.

THE MYSTERY OF THE I498 VOYAGE

If Cabot’s expedition survived, why are there no records of
its return? This is why many assume the expedition ended in
disaster. The trouble is that records relating to the Bristol voyages
are very patchy. The 1496 expedition only came to light with the
discovery of the ‘John Day letter’ in 1955/6, while evidence has
emerged since then of several other successful Bristol expeditions
to North America that took place between 1499 and 1508. Until
recently nobody knew that these voyages even took place, let alone
that they returned. Given how poor the evidence is for any of the
Bristol voyages, it is possible that at least part of Cabot’s 1498 fleet
returned home, but that the evidence for it has not been preserved.
This might be true even if the expedition explored a substantial
part of the North American coastline. By today’s standards that
would be a notable achievement: an event to be trumpeted. But
by the standards of the time, even a voyage right down the eastern
seaboard as far as Florida might not have been regarded as a great
success. Such a voyage would merely have demonstrated that the
land was not inhabited by rich and civilised peoples with whom
the explorers could trade. Indeed, if Cabot’s expedition had got
as far as the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, all it would have
shown was that, if the Orient’s rich empires did lie that way, the
route was blocked by the Spanish. This would have been a sore
point given that Henry VII’s charter to Cabot only extended to
lands previously ‘unknown to Christians’. Cabot could not claim
lands, or continue his exploration, in a region the Spanish had
already colonised. Given this, and the King’s personal commitment
to deepening the alliance with Spain, if the Bristol expedition had

Fig 10 | The 'English
coast’ of North
America depicted
in the La Cosa
map (1500). The
red-and-blue flags
represent the royal
arms of England

THE MYSTERY OF THE 1498 VOYAGE

investigated the entire east coast of North America and reached the
Caribbean, it would not have been something that either Cabot or
the King would have wished to celebrate.

While it is unclear whether the 1498 expedition reached the
Caribbean, there are reasons for believing that it did explore further
down the coast. The best evidence for this is the world map of Juan
de la Cosa drawn in Spain in 1500. 10 This includes the results of the
Atlantic discoveries made by the Spanish, Portuguese and English,
as illustrated in the introduction to this book. Bristol's contribution
is reflected in the five English flags placed along the North American
coast. Features are named for the most easterly section of this coast.
They seem to be Spanish renditions of English names. While
not all are now legible, these include 'Cavo de ynglaterra’ (Cape
of England), ‘Cavo de S: Jorge’ (Cape of St George) and ‘Cavo de
lisarte’ (Cape of [the] Lizard). The last was presumably named after
its supposed similarity to the Lizard Peninsula, a famous landmark
on the southernmost tip of Cornwall,

Plate 17 | Profile
of the 'The Lizard',
taken from a book
of sailing directions,
The Mariners
Mirrour (1588) 11

•A

‘ Lft’zjirtf or Cnjjc of Corn eu)n11 ^

C ns ti apiicavcifi t£>hm tfie Htji stufe
£ JT-h/Z jZomjnotl
Rnji ettAe North
r ~int

Plate 38 | The focus
of rhumb lines
on the Cornish
Lizard indicates
its importance
to sailors as a
navigation landmark
(Bodleian Library,
MS Ki (111))

Image deleted from digitised version of
the book for copyright reasons.

THE MYSTERY OF THE I498 VOYAGE

The two western flags define an unnamed coast but are accompanied
by a caption indicating that this was the ‘mar descuhierto por inglese
(the sea discovered by the English).

The inclusion of specific place names for coastal features implies
that la Cosa took his information from an English chart. That
would not have been difficult given that the Spanish certainly had
copies of at least some of the maps made by Cabot. In July 1498 the
Spanish Ambassador in London reported to his sovereigns that he
had seen and discussed Cabot’s findings with Henry VII 'several
times’, but that:

Since I believe Your Highnesses will already have notice of all this
and also of the chart or mappa mundi which this man [Cabot]
has made I do not send it now, although it is here 12

The named section of the North American coastline on la Cosa’s
map is most likely based on Cabot’s map. On the other hand, the
lack of place names for the area to the west implies that, while la
Cosa believed that this coast had been explored, he did not have a
chart of these discoveries. What is unclear is whether this implied
second voyage is the one undertaken by Cabot in 1498, or whether
it refers to the 1499 expedition undertaken by William Weston,
which will be discussed later.

Plate 39 | Juan de
la Cosa’s World
Map, hand drawn
on parchment
taken from a single
ox hide, 181 cm
wide. The'New
World’ is the solid
green, drawn at an
enlarged scale, at
the ‘neck’ end of the
skin

54 THE MYSTERY OF THE 1498 VOYAGE

Another hint that the 1498 expedition may have reached the
Caribbean can be found in a Spanish royal patent issued in June
1501. This was granted to Alonso de Ojeda for his exploration
of the north coast of South America. In the patent, Ojeda was
instructed to set up marks along the coast he explored ‘because it
goes towards the region where it has been learned that the English
were making discoveries’. The hope was that such marks would stop
the exploration of the English in that direction.’ 13 This suggests that
the Spanish believed that the Bristol expeditions had got close to
the region. Such concerns are unlikely to have been aroused by the

1497 expedition, which had taken place far to the north. It seems
more likely that the Spanish officials believed that one or more of
the later expeditions from Bristol had sailed much further south.
But whether this related to the 1498 expedition, or the 1499 one, we
do not know. 14

If the outcome of the 1498 voyage is not already uncertain enough,
another element has been added to the mystery in recent years.
This concerns the claims of the historian Dr Ruddock, who was
mentioned earlier. Although all her research notes were destroyed
following her death in 2005, a book proposal she wrote in 1992
survives. In it, she suggests that Cabot reached the Caribbean in

1498 before eventually returning to England in 1500, after a gap
of almost two years. Ruddock also implied that she had evidence
that the Italian friars, including both Carbonariis and a mysterious
‘friar from Naples’, succeeded in establishing a religious colony on
Newfoundland, complete with North America’s first church, at a
place that later became known as'Carbonear’. 15 If so, the friars’ ship
must have been repaired after the damage it sustained at the start
of the 1498 expedition, which had forced it to land in Ireland. Once
any problems had been addressed, the ship could have set sail once
more, following in Cabot’s wake.

Over the last few years, the authors of this book have relocated a
number of the 'new documents’ on which Ruddock’s arguments
were based, including references from the summer of 1500 that
could relate to Cabot’s return. 16 Nothing, however, has been learnt
of Carbonariis’ fate, and we have not been able to confirm Ruddock's
most remarkable claims about this expedition. 17 For now then, the
outcome of Cabot’s last voyage remains a mystery. Was the entire
expedition lost at sea? Possibly. Was a religious mission established

THE MYSTERY OF THE I498 VOYAGE

in Newfoundland? Perhaps. Did at least part of Cabot's expedition
return to England? Quite likely. Right now, however, the outcome
of the expedition remains an enigma.

THE MYSTERY OF THE 1498 VOYAGE

7 BRISTOL AND THE
NEWFOUND LAND':
1499 1508 VOYAGES

Bristol’s exploration voyages to North America, and the King’s
support for them, did not end with Cabot’s 1498 expedition. Over
the next ten years the port's merchants undertook several voyages to
North America, and created a company to make money from their
discoveries.

Plate 40 | The
‘Weston letter’.
Signed at the top
by the King with
his initials (HR),
this is the earliest
known reference to
a post-Cabot voyage
of discovery
(TNA: C82/332)

The first of the ‘post-Cabot’ expeditions was in 1499, led by the
Bristol merchant, William Weston. This probably took place under
Cabot’s patent, since Weston had been associated with the explorer
from the start of 1498, at the latest. The very existence of this voyage
was only established in 2009, with the publication of a letter found
more than thirty years earlier by Margaret Condon. The letter,
apparently written on 12 March 1499, was sent by Henry VII to
his Lord Chancellor ordering the suspension of legal proceedings
against William Weston, merchant of Bristol, because he shall
shortly...passe and saille for to serche and fynde if he can the new
founde land’. 1 On his return Weston received a £30 reward from
the King to help cover the expenses incurred in finding the new

land’, thereby confirming that the voyage took place . 2 At this time,
‘finding’ had a broader meaning than it does today. It could refer
to both ‘discovering for the first time’ and ‘investigating something
further’. This wider usage was necessary because the words explore'
and exploration’ did not enter the English language till the mid-
sixteenth century . 3 In his letter of 12 March, the King seems a little
uncertain about Weston’s abilities. So when the King talked of
Weston going to ‘fynde’ the new land, he might have meant both
‘relocate’ andexamine further’. In awards made to Bristol’s merchants
between 1500 and 1509, it is much clearer that those recompensed
for ‘finding’ the ‘new found land’, were being rewarded for ongoing
investigation, not first discovery. These voyages are discussed below.

Where the 1499 voyage went is unclear: but Alwyn Ruddock,
who also knew of these documents, believed Weston went first to
the friars’ settlement in ‘Carbonear’, Newfoundland. She suggests
that he then headed north up the coast of Labrador as far as the
entrance to Hudson Bay, accompanied by the friars’ ship, which
she identified as the Dominus Nobiscum. Such a voyage would have
taken the expedition into ice-filled seas, along a barely inhabited
coastline. The only plausible explanation for a search this way was
that the explorers were looking for a northern route around the
landmass. If so, this was not only the first English-led expedition to
America, it would also have been the first of the many ‘Northwest
Passage’ expeditions to take place over the next few centuries.

Fig 11 | Course of
Weston's voyage,
based on Ruddock

58 BRISTOL AND THE NEW FOUND LAND': I499-I508 VOYAGES

Meanwhile, Cabot’s death, whether in the New World or, as
Alwyn Ruddock believed, shortly after a return to England, left
a vacuum. As Columbus discovered in Spain, a monopoly was
only a monopoly so long as a monarch chose to uphold it. But
the English voyages raised wider issues. According to the Treaty
of Tordesillas (1494), concluded between Spain and Portugal, but
with the implicit backing of the Pope, Portugal claimed the right
to all newly discovered lands that lay east of a meridian starting
370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands . 4 The Portuguese were
convinced that the new lands discovered from Bristol belonged to
them. And since Henry VII had assured the Spanish ambassador
in 1498 that the territories found by Cabot were not west of the
Tordesillas line, he could not now claim that they were not to the
east of it . 5 Until this time, the main thrust of Portuguese discovery
had been down Africa and towards India. Having learnt what the
English were doing, King Manoel of Portugal decided to dispatch
his own explorers to the regions discovered by the English: regions,
he felt, belonged to Portugal.

Plate 41 | Coat of
Arms of King
Manoel I of Portugal
(Arquivo Nacional
Torre do Tombo,

Foral do Casal de
Alvaro e Bolfar, PT/

TT/FC/001/34 4)-

Variants of these
arms appear on
contemporary maps
showing lands
discovered and
claimed for Portugal 6

Image deleted from digitised version of the book for
copyright reasons.

In October 1499 and May 1500 King Manoel granted two letters
patent for westwards discovery, the first to Joao Fernandes, of whom
we shall hear more later, and the second to Gaspar Corte Real. Of
the two, Corte Real moved faster. He undertook two expeditions:
the first, in 1500, resulted in the rediscovery of Greenland, albeit
he only charted its southern tip. On the second voyage, in 1501,
he again touched Greenland but then went on to chart parts of
Newfoundland and the Canadian east coast. It may have been on
this trip that he planted, in contrast to Cabot’s fragile flags, a carved

BRISTOL AND THE NEW FOUND LAND': 1499-1508 VOYAGES

stone marker known as a padrao, of the type that had way-marked
Portuguese expansion along the coast of Africa, claiming the land
for the King . 7 On one or other of the voyages it seems likely that he
commenced a search for a north-west passage.

Gaspar Corte Real was lost in the course of the 1501 expedition, yet
his voyages are important to the story of the Bristol expeditions for
three reasons. First, it is possible that Gaspar recovered evidence
of Cabot’s final voyage, since two of the ‘indians’ he sent to Lisbon
were adorned with European goods - a broken sword and earrings.
The Venetian ambassador in Lisbon, who witnessed their arrival,
interpreted this as evidence that the new land was mainland, so
implying that the artefacts were trade goods. Given that this would
have been impossible in practice, some historians have argued that
the sword and earrings might have been acquired from Cabot’s
1498 expedition. Second, Corte Real’s survey was preserved in
a succession of maps of 1502 and later years. This meant that his
charts and the place names he assigned to the coast became the basis
for later mapmakers, rather than Cabot’s earlier chart . 8 Finally, it
was almost certainly because Joao Fernandes had effectively been
side-lined by Corte Real’s expeditions that he decided to abandon
Portugal and offer his services, along with two other men from the
Azores, to the King of England.

The successful voyage of 1497, the King’s solid support for the
expedition of 1498, and the more limited assistance given to
Weston, showed that ITenry VII was interested in discovery and
the exploitation of new lands. Henry did not accept the validity of a
Portuguese claim to lands they had neither discovered nor occupied,
whatever the Pope or the monarchs of Castile and Portugal
decreed. As far as Henry was concerned, so long as the lands found
were ‘unknown to all Christians’, as Cabot's and subsequent letters
patent stipulated, they could be claimed for England. Indeed, in
an extraordinary clause included in letters patent of 1501 and 1502,
Henry’s patentees were permitted to ‘wage war’ on any foreigner
violently intruding into lands discovered on behalf of the King of
England . 9

On 19 March 1501 new letters patent were issued jointly to three
Bristol merchants, Richard Warde, Thomas Asshehurst and
John Thomas, and to three foreigners, who, as residents of the
Azores, were subjects of the King of Portugal, These men were

60 BRISTOL AND THE‘NEW FOUND LAND’: 1499-1508 VOYAGES

Plate 42 | The
extraordinary
‘Cantino’ world
map of 1502, by
an unknown
cartographer,
incorporates secret
information that
was 'hot off the
press’ from Corte
Real’s expedition.
This detail from
the map shows
both the southern
tip of Greenland
and, to the left,
the section of the
forested Canadian
coast Corte Real
had explored. Like
Cabot, he remarked
on the suitability of
native trees for ship
masts.

Joao Fernandes, Francisco Fernandes and Joao Gonsalves. The
patent was a much more detailed and sophisticated document than
the 1496 grant to Cabot. The text occupies nine pages of print in a
modern transcript of the original Latin, to Cabot’s one and a half.
The product of extensive discussions with the King and Council,
the grant gave the syndicate vice-regal powers in lands they might
discover, a monopoly on trade for ten years, and the ability to assign
both their rights and grant licences to trade to other merchants.
The patent also gave the holders the right for four years to bring
back one ship from any voyage customs free, laden with products
of the land: gold, silver and jewels were listed as likely products . 10
The explorers were to receive their patent without paying any of the
usual fees, further demonstrating the King's commitment . 11 As with
Cabot’s 1496 patent, that of March 1501 specified that the explorers
would only have rights to lands ‘unknown to all Christians’. It thus
excluded the territories explored by the Spanish, those discovered
by Cabot’s patent holders and the parts of the coast of Canada and
Greenland that had been investigated by Corte Real the previous
year.

Grand t\cvtypEfttgiull

It seems that at least one voyage took place in 1501. 12 As with
Weston’s 1499 voyage, no description of it survives. Yet there is
good financial evidence that an expedition occurred and that the

BRISTOL AND THENEW FOUND LAND’: 1499-1508 VOYAGES

King was pleased with the result. Around 7 January 1502 Henry
VII granted a reward of 100 shillings (£5), to the 'men of Bristolle
that founde thisle’. This came from the King's personal treasury. The
same day an order was sent to the officers of the King’s Exchequer
for a'tally’ to be made out in favour of the Bristol merchants Robert
Thorne, his brother William and Hugh Eliot, The tally allowed the
merchants to claim a £20 deduction from customs duties payable
on goods brought to the port on the first inward voyage of the
Gabriel. This was a ship the merchants had recently bought second¬
hand in Dieppe . 13 The Gabriel, of around 120 tuns burden, sailed
at least twice to North America after January 1502, and there is
copious evidence that Robert Thorne and Hugh Eliot were heavily
involved in the later Bristol voyages. Indeed, Robert Thorne junior,
writing in 1527, described his father and Eliot as the discoverers of
the Newfound Landes’, which raises the possibility that they had
been involved since Cabot’s time. At any rate, given that the reward
in January 1502 was paid on the same day that the King’s warrant
authorising the customs deduction was sealed, it seems highly
probable that the two Thornes and Eliot were the men of Bristolle'
who had undertaken a 1501 voyage acting as assigns or deputies of
those who were granted the March 1501 patent . 14

More is known of the voyage made in 1502, which certainly took
place under the terms of the 1501 patent, Hugh Eliot sailed in the
Gabriel as an assign’ of the patentees. It seems likely that at least
one other ship sailed with her, albeit none is recorded by name. The
explorers returned to Bristol in September 1502, just too late to find
the King at nearby Berkeley Castle. They were thus forced to follow
Henry to his hunting lodge at King’s Langley, Hertfordshire . 15
There, they found favour: on 26 September 1502, pensions of £10
per year, payable from the customs of Bristol, were granted to both
Francisco Fernandes and Joao Gonsalves for the services they had
given as captains into the new found land ’. 16 These services probably
included the bringing back of three savage men’, who were said
to be clothed in beasts’ skins and ate raw flesh. The three Native
Americans seem to have been taken into the King’s household, one
commentator noting that two years later he:

saw two of them apparelled after [the manner of] Englishmen
in Westminster Palace, which at that time I could not discern
[i.e. tell them apart] from Englishmen, till I learned what men
they were . 17

BRISTOL AND THENEW FOUND LAND: 1499-1508 VOYAGES

Plate 43 [ " 'Tiera de
Llabrador’ which
was discovered by
the English from the
town of Bristol...”
Ribeiro map, 1529:
(from Nordenskiold,
Periplus: original in
Vatican Library) 21

A series of European charts, commencing from about 1503, ascribe
the discovery of lands that can be interpreted either as the north¬
east coast of Canada, or Greenland, to a ‘labrador’ in the service of
the King of England. A'labrador’ in this context means a landowner
from the Azores. This discovery too seems likely to date from the
1502 voyage and is consistent with the exotic goods brought back
as gifts for Henry VII. 18 In mid to late September, books of the
King’s personal treasury report that two mariners had brought
Henry hawks and an eagle. This was followed, about a week later,
by a reward of £20 to ‘the merchauntes of bristoll that have bene
in the newe founde landes’. The merchants undoubtedly included
Hugh Eliot, and possibly Robert Thorne. 19 Eliot himself was
granted a pension of twenty marks (£13 6s 8d) and it was he who
took advantage of the right, permitted by their patent, to import a
single lading of merchandise from the new land free of custom. The
Gabriel, mastered by John Amayne, had brought back 18 lasts of salt
fish (54 tons), worth £180 by customs valuations. The tax due on
this would have been £9. 20 Although this was a significant quantity
of fish, the consignment was not large enough for the venture to
have been entirely a fishing voyage. The limited size of the catch, set
against the generous scale of the King’s response, indicates that the
1502 voyage was primarily a voyage of exploration.

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BRISTOL AND THENEW FOUND LAND : 1499-1508 VOYAGES

Despite the apparent success of the 1502 expedition, there were
signs of fracture in the partnership. Whether this was by death or
disagreement is unknown. By this time Henry VII must have been
aware of Corte Real’s explorations and if the King were to make
claims to lands based on‘first discovery’ he had to acknowledge that
the doctrine of primacy worked both ways: the King of Portugal
now had a claim to lands in the region. The changed situation
required a new grant, which was issued on 9 December 1502 to
a revised group of patentees: Hugh Eliot, Thomas Asshehurst,
Francisco Fernandes and Joao Gonsalves . 22 The tone of this patent
is darker, making reference to the great costs and heavy dangers of
any expedition, and the terms were consequently more generous.
This time, the rights of the King of Portugal were specifically
protected, as were those of any other prior discovery by servants of
other powers in friendship with England . 23

The new patent, like its predecessor, was very detailed, with explicit
provisions allowing for the sale of shares in the patent to third
parties. In effect the grant created something very like a chartered
monopoly company of the type that would become common
in the later sixteenth century. The group became known as the
‘Company Adventurers to the New Found Land’. The use of the
name adventurers’ is particularly significant, in that this was the
term used for merchants who engaged in speculative long-distance
commerce. It seems that the explorers still expected to get their
money back through trade.

Whether there were any English expeditions in 1503 is uncertain.
In September the King received a ‘brasil bow’ and two red arrows
whilst he was on progress in the Midlands, and he was given hawks
‘from the newe founden Ilande’ in November. 24 It seems likely these
were the fruits of a voyage undertaken that summer: but further
detail is absent.

In 1504 there was an expedition about which we would dearly like
to know more, since it appears to have been the first to engage
Sebastian Cabot, John Cabot’s son, in a leading role. Two ships were
involved: the Gabriel of Bristol, mastered by Philip Ketyner, and the
Jesus, under Richard Savery. Hugh Eliot and his long-term business
partner, Robert Thorne, and Robert’s brother, William, seem to
have been the principal organisers. Eliot led the expedition, with
Sebastian Cabot probably serving as pilot . 25 They must have sailed

64 BRISTOL AND THE NEW FOUND LAND': 1499-1508 VOYAGES

Plate 44 | Bristol’s
sheriff and law
officers

(Ricart’s Kalendar,
Bristol Record
Office) 27

rather later than was usual, perhaps as late as June, since Richard
Savery only returned around 20 May from a commercial voyage
to Bordeaux . 26 Robert Thorne was unable to join them: in early
1504 the town council had made him a sheriff of Bristol, following
the unexpected death of one of the two serving officers. While
prestigious, it was a demanding role, which leading citizens were
frequently forced to take on. Whether or not Robert was pleased
by the development, his new legal duties would have precluded
exploration on the far side of the Atlantic.

Given that Sebastian would have inherited his father’s patent
rights, his participation in the voyage suggests that all those who
had been engaged in Bristol’s expeditions since 1496 were now
working together. This time, the ships’ passengers included a
priest, who may have been fired by the same missionary zeal that
had inspired Carbonariis and the Italian friars in 1498. 28 Around
Easter Sunday (7 April 1504), the unnamed priest received a good¬
will gift from the King of forty shillings for his journey to the ‘new
Ilande ’. 29 As with Hugh Eliot’s 1502 expedition, we only know of the
ships used on the 1504 voyage because of the customs exemption
granted by the terms of the revised patent of 1502. In this instance
the consignment brought from the ‘Newe Found Ilande’ amounted
to 20 lasts of salted fish and 7 and a half tons of fish livers . 30 Again,

BRISTOL AND THE NEW FOUND LAND’: 1499-1508 VOYAGES

while not insignificant, the shipment (67 tons) did not represent
anything like a full loading for two vessels that had a combined
cargo capacity of about 250 tons. Fishing thus apparently remained
a side activity, rather than being the primary function of the voyage.

What would have interested the King was the exploration aspect
of the Bristol voyages, with their potential to open up valuable new
trade routes, or find commodities as the Portuguese and Spanish had
done. It was almost certainly to support such aims that a reward of
£100 was made at about this time towards the cost of an expedition
to the new found isle in two ships . 31 On the other hand, Henry
also seems to have been attracted, like many others at this time,
by the sheer novelty of the new world and its exotic products. He
certainly saw presentations by Cabot, describing the lands he had
found; and the King was clearly pleased by both the new animals he
was brought and by three native Americans, whom the King treated
relatively well by the standards of the day, giving them a place in
his court. Such pleasure was demonstrated again in the week of 10
August 1505, when some ‘Portyngales’ (Portuguese) were rewarded
for bringing the King cattes of the mountaigne’ and popyngayes of
the newfounde Island’ for his royal menagerie. It is unclear whether
this followed yet another Bristol expedition, about which we know
nothing, or whether they were a gift from Portugal . 32 While the
popinjays’ (parrots) could have been Carolina parakeets, by 1502
Brazil was also known for its highly-coloured birds.

Within a few years, the merchants and explorers who had been
brought together in 1502 seem to have fallen out. In 1506 William
Clerk of London sued Hugh Eliot in relation to a number of
alleged debts, including expenses he had incurred for a Voyage of
the Company Adventurers prepared into the new found lands’.
Around the same time Francisco Fernandes, who was one of the
Portuguese named in the 1502 patent, appealed to the King in the
Court of Chancery following his imprisonment in Bristol for non¬
payment of a £100 debt to Eliot. The Portuguese claimed not only
that he did not owe the money but that Eliot actually owed him
money . 33 These court cases suggest that there was much‘bad blood'
between the members of the Company, presumably rooted in their
failure to either make a profit, or to identify a route to the Orient.

It is possible that the Company Adventurers to the New Found
Land dissolved around 1505/6 and that the legal disputes relate

BRISTOL AND THENEW FOUND LAND: 1499-1508 VOYAGES

to its final break up. There was, however, one last voyage from
Bristol during the reign of Henry VII, this time led and organised
by Sebastian Cabot. As already observed, Sebastian had certainly
taken part in the expedition of 1504 and on 3 April 1505 the King
granted him a pension of £10 per year, to be received out of the
customs revenue collected at Bristol for services ‘in and aboute the
fyndynge of the newe founde lands to oure full good pleasur and for
that he shall doo hereafter in and aboute the same’. It was backdated
to the previous Michaelmas (29 September 1504). 34

Unlike the voyages that took place from 1499-01506, various
accounts of Sebastian’s voyage survive, based on the explorer’s
own version of events. The problem is that Sebastian was not an
entirely reliable witness. Indeed, in his later life, he started claiming
that it was he, rather than his father, who had first discovered
the new world, which is why John Cabot was largely written out
of English discovery history from the late-sixteenth century to
the mid-nineteenth century . 35 It is also why, when it was finally

Plate 45 | Sebastian
Cabot: engraving by
Samuel Rawle from
a now lost portrait 36

BRISTOL AND THE‘new FOUND LAND’: 1499-1508 VOYAGES

established that John had in fact led the expeditions of the 1490s,
Sebastian went from being a ‘hero’ to a ‘villain’ of English discovery
history: branded a ‘liar and a charlatan’ by late-Victorian writers,
for claiming his father’s achievements . 37 Sebastian was, however, a
notable explorer in his own right.

As a navigator and promoter of exploration voyages, Sebastian’s
main interest was to talk-up his personal achievements as a way
of bolstering his own reputation. So his voyage accounts cannot
be taken at face value. Nevertheless, they should not be written off
entirely. In particular, some credence should be given of his story
of a voyage apparently undertaken in 1508-9, particularly given the
earliest description of it was penned just a few years after it took
place, when there were still many other people around who could
have gainsaid him. That Sebastian was absent from England in 1508
is almost certain, since he did not collect the first instalment of his
pension for that year until May 1509. 38

The first account of the voyage, published in 1516 by his friend,
Peter Martyr of Anghiera, suggests that Sebastian had led a voyage
involving two ships and 300 men . 39 The expedition started by sailing
north along the American coastline until, in July, they found their
way blocked by great icebergs. Based on some later accounts, Cabot
may have got as far as Hudson Bay . 40 He then headed south, passed
through the rich cod fisheries that lie off the coast of Newfoundland
and New England, and continued on until he was almost in the
latitude of Gibraltar’ and almost the longitude of Cuba’. This would

Plate 4 6 | It is likely
that Sebastian used
an astrolabe to
establish his latitude
(Photo: Shutterstock)

BRISTOL AND THe'nEW FOUND LAND’: 1499-1508 VOYAGES

suggest that he reached as far as the Chesapeake, close to what is
now Washington D.C. Following this he sailed back to England.
Although Peter Martyr’s earliest account does not give the date of
the voyage, in later writings he indicated that the voyage had taken
place around 1508/9. This is supported by an unrelated report made
before the Venetian Senate in the 1530s, which states that, when
Sebastian returned to England at the end of this voyage, ‘he found
the King dead, and his son cared little for such an enterprise .’ 41
Given that Henry VII died in April 1509, it seems likely that the
voyage had started in the summer of 1508, with the expedition over¬
wintering on the East Coast of the modern United States before
returning home.

Fig 12 | Presumed
course of Sebastian
Cabot’s voyage of
1508-9

Sebastian’s expedition was the last exploration voyage to be
launched from Bristol during the Tudor era. It may be that Bristol's
merchants had become disillusioned after repeatedly funding
expeditions that had brought only modest returns, and which had
certainly not found gold, spices or a route to the Orient. Moreover,
Sebastian’s final English expedition appears to have resulted in the

BRISTOL AND THE‘NEW FOUND LAND’: 1499-1508 VOYAGES

death of a large part of the crew. Beyond this, it was certainly the
case that Henry VIII proved much less interested in promoting
discovery voyages than his father, as the later report to the Venetian
Senate implies. Indeed, while Henry VII has a reputation for being
rather mean with money, one of the chief outcomes of the research
conducted over the last fifty years has been to show that the King
maintained an active interest in the Bristol voyages throughout
the latter part of his reign: offering money, political support and
administrative interventions to ensure they continued. By contrast,
his son was more interested in conquering old territories in France
than he was in finding new ones across the Ocean. The result was
that, while there were some voyages to North America in Henry
VIII’s reign, they were modest affairs, and they no longer involved
Bristol. 42 It seems likely that it was this decline in interest from
both the new king and the merchants of Bristol that explains
why Sebastian decided to leave England for Spain in 1512. There
he subsequently played an important part in Spain’s endeavour to
explore and colonise the Americas.

70 BRISTOL AND THE NEW FOUND LAND’: 1499-1508 VOYAGES

8 THE NAMING OF THE LAND

When John Cabot and his Bristol companions returned to England
in 1497 they did not seek to name their newly discovered land.
Christopher Columbus named his Caribbean discoveries after Spain
(Hispaniola), for his sovereigns (Isabella), and for God (Trinidad).
But in England the area explored by Cabot was described at first
only as the new isle’ or new Ilande’, while after 1499 it was also
known as the‘new found ilande’ or the‘new founde lande’. 1 The last
of these was the name that stuck, with Newfoundland now being
the name of the great island off the coast of Canada. But this does
not mean that all sixteenth-century references to the ‘new found
land’ refer to the island. For a long time the 'new found land’ simply
meant what it said: it was the land discovered and explored from
Bristol in the years 1497—1508. Although this included the modern
island, it encompassed a much wider area.

Cabot charted his discoveries in 1497 and incorporated them in a
mappa mundi and globe he exhibited to the King. While neither
Cabot's original charts nor his world map survives, his findings
were integrated into Juan de la Cosa’s Spanish mappa mundi of
1500. Neither La Cosa’s map, nor any of the statements made by
Cabot or his contemporaries, suggest that the explorer invented a
new name for the country. That was probably because it seemed
unnecessary. When Cabot returned in 1497 he told people that the
region belonged to the Emperor of China. He further suggested
that some of the country was the land of the‘Seven Cities’, a name
that was included in the La Cosa map and had appeared on world
maps for at least two centuries. The following year Cabot planned
to sail down the coast to China and Cipango (Japan). Once he
had done that he probably assumed that he would learn from the
rich and civilised peoples of those countries just what they called
the territory he found in 1497. So naming this land, as opposed to
charting the coast and assigning names to navigational landmarks,
probably seemed superfluous.

Over the next century the continents and countries of the Americas

would be known by many names. While lots of these are still used
today both the form of each name and the geographical limit
to which it applies has often changed. The islands explored by
Columbus, for instance, were initially simply called the ‘Indies’,
because he believed them to be part of Asia. It was only much later,
when it became clear that this was wrong, that the name transmuted
to the ‘West Indies’.

The most important new name for the discoveries across the
Atlantic was, of course, ‘America’. While this name has nothing
to do with Bristol, its origin is worth discussing. That is because
of a persistent Bristol myth that America is named after a Bristol
customs officer called Richard ‘Ameryk’.

There are many uncertainties in the field of discovery history.
But the origin of the name ‘America’ is not one of them. The two
continents get their name from the Florentine navigator Amerigo
Vespucci (1454-1512): a man with as many careers as John Cabot,
and an inveterate self-publicist. He was also a successful explorer
who, unlike Cabot, published accounts of his voyages. These
accounts proved extremely popular in the early sixteenth century for
their vivid descriptions of exotic landscapes, peoples and wildlife.
Vespucci was also known for being the first to propose that the new
discoveries were not a part of Asia, but were instead a genuinely
‘New World ’. 2 This put him at odds with Columbus, who was still
arguing up until his death in 1506 that the lands were part of the
Orient.

A few years after the publication of his chief works, Vespucci
was honoured by two German scholars: the humanist Matthias
Ringmann, and Martin Waldseemiiller, a monk who was a skilled
printer and mapmaker. In their Cosmographiae Introductio of 1507,
they proposed a new continent or‘fourth part of the world’:

Today these parts of the earth [Asia, Europe, Africa] have been
more extensively explored than a fourth part of the world ...
that has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci. Because it is well
known that Europe and Asia were named after women, I can see
no reason why anyone would have good reason to object to calling
this fourth part Amerige, the land of Amerigo, or America, after
the man of great ability who discovered it . 3

THE NAMING OF THE LAND

The large twelve-sheet map that Waldseemiiller created to
illustrate their text attempts to show the world as a sphere . 4
Martin Waldseemiiller placed the name ‘America’ prominently on
what we would now call South America. In the top border of the
map, Waldseemiiller included portraits of Vespucci and the great
classical cosmographer, Claudius Ptolemy, and small half-globes
showing the old world and the new continent . 5 Comments printed
on the map pay tribute to both Columbus and Vespucci, and to
their royal patrons . 6

Plate 47 | Amerigo
Vespucci with
Asia and the New
World from the
Waldseemiiller
map. Most of
North America is
unexplored: the
detached island at
the top we know
to be Corte Real's
discoveries
(Library of Congress)

Waldseemiiller’s map was soon forgotten . 7 But the Cosmographiae
Introductio proved influential; and Waldseemiiller’s and Ringmann’s
use of the name ‘America’ was picked up by other cartographers and
scholars . 8 The name became widely adopted as the umbrella term
to describe the southern continent, but it only began to be used to
describe the northern continent in the second half of the sixteenth
century, two generations after the exploration voyages of Columbus
and Cabot. For their part, Bristol’s merchants, along with other
Englishmen, used the term'new found land’ to describe the country
they had explored. That was true in the first decade of the sixteenth

THE NAMING OF THE LAND 73

century, when the ‘Company Adventurers to the Newfound land'
was founded; it was true in 1523 when Robert Thorne of Bristol
boasted that his father was one of the discoverers of the Newfound
Landes’; and it was true in the 1560s when Bristol’s merchants
complained to the Queen that theyre oft attempted voyages to the
newfoundland’ had given them little profit. 9 The term ‘America’
does not seem to have been used to describe the Bristol discoveries
until the 1560s and then only rarely.

There is then a great deal of evidence that the continent of South
America was named for Amerigo Vespucci, including statements
to this effect by the men who coined the term. By contrast, there
is no evidence that the term was used to describe the lands to the
north until the later sixteenth century, when the vast extent of
the northern land-mass, and that it was joined to the southern
continent, was better understood. Before then, Bristol men, the
royal administration, and even French mariners, preferred to use
‘New found land’ for the discovery, while the Spanish tended to
refer to the North American territories they explored and settled
after 1513 as‘New Spain’ or‘Florida’.

So why should anyone propose that the new continent was named
after a Bristol customs official? The answer seems to be that many
people simply ‘want’ this to be true. This myth began with a Bristol
antiquarian, Alfred Ffudd, who published a document in 1897 that
he called the ‘Cabot Roll’.

Plate 4 8 | Payment
by Arthur Kemys
and Richard ap
Meryke of Cabot’s
pension

1498-9 from‘The
Cabot Roll’. Cabot’s
£20 (xx li.) is just
one of the eleven
payments on this

74 THE NAMING OF THE LAND

Hudcl’s book provides a facsimile, Latin transcription and English
translation, of an official document that summarises the audited
accounts of the customs officers of the port of Bristol for a three-
year period. For each year, the document lists the payments made
from the money that the Collectors of Customs had received on
behalf of the Crown. These include the payment of John Cabot’s
English pension from 1497-1499, 11 The two‘Collectors of Customs’
at Bristol were Arthur Kemys and the Welshman, Richard Ap
Meryk. In those days spelling was not formalised and people did
not worry about the precise form of either first names or surnames.
It is thus not unusual that Ap Meryk’s name is recorded in many
different ways in contemporary documents: including A Merik’, ap
Meryke’, ‘Meryk’, ‘Meurik’ and ‘Ameryke’. Hudd noticed that some
variants of the customs officer’s name resembled the name‘America’.
On this slender basis he proposed in 1908 that John Cabot might
have named the continent after the customer . 12

Plate 49 | Richard
ap Meryk:
contemporary
name variants.
The first names
are abbreviations
of the latin forms
for Richard; the
surnames read: a
Meryk, Meryk, a
merik, ap meryke,
Amerik, meurik,
and Apmerike. 13

The Welsh name Ap Meryk means 'son of Meryk’, (or ‘Meurig’) in
the same way that Fitzpatrick means‘son of Patrick' and Macdonald
son of Donald’. As with other patronymics, such names had
become common surnames by the fifteenth century. Richard Ap
Meryk was said to be from Chepstow in Monmouthshire, but like
many aspiring Welshmen, he moved to Bristol. 14 Fie made his
money through trade and by at least the mid-i470s had begun to
acquire a landed estate that would give him status as a gentleman. 15
In August i486 he was appointed as one of the two customers’ of
Bristol, responsible for collecting dues payable to the Crown on
merchandise passing through the port. He retained this office until
December 1502. 16 Nine months later, he became one of Bristol’s
sheriffs. His appointment was meant to last from 29 September
1503 - 29 September 1504, but he died suddenly around December,
only three months into his term. 17

THE NAMING OF THE LAND 75

In October 1493 Ap Meryk had been joined as customer by
Arthur Kemys, who had previously been controller’ in the port . 18
Controllers were employed to keep an independent record of the
goods declared at the customs house, with the sole purpose of
preventing a customer from defrauding the Crown. For example, a
customer might under-charge merchants for their goods, in return
for a bribe. He might also falsify records after duty had been paid,
recording lower figures in his books and pocketing the difference.
In 1489, and repeatedly in the 1490s, Ap Meryk was charged with
malpractice. His alleged offences included engagement in foreign
trade, which was forbidden for customs officers, sharp practice,
and falsification of records. He eventually avoided a guilty verdict
and retained his office. That, however, was only because the local
juries proved reluctant to convict. This was a common problem at
the time, even when the evidence was overwhelming, and does not
mean that Ap Meryk was innocent - a point underlined by the fact
that one set of legal proceedings ended only after he negotiated
directly with the King and agreed to pay a £100 fine. That was
equivalent to almost two years of his official income, or five times as
much as John Cabot’s annual pension . 19 The case against Ap Meryk
must have been strong,

Ap Meryk’s only known association with John Cabot is his
responsibility, shared with Kemys, for the payment of the explorer’s
pension from the customs revenues collected at Bristol. This does
not demonstrate any special relationship between the two: the
funds collected from customs dues belonged to the Crown and
it was perfectly normal for the King to pay people's salaries and
pensions from such local funds. Indeed, of the two men, Kemys
had the more personal association, in that his nephew, John Kemys,

Image deleted from digitised version of the book for
copyright reasons

Plate so | The annual
rent of 40 shillings
payable in 1498-9 by
John ‘Cabotta’ for a
house (messuage)
on'Seynt Nycoles
Strett’ is the
most expensive
in this short list
for the street
(Gloucestershire
Archives,
D6y4/a/Zg)

THE NAMING OF THE LAND

owned the property on St Nicholas Street that John Cabot rented
when he lived in Bristol . 20 This though was a very slight connection,
in that John Kemys was a minor, whose estate was managed by his
guardian, and future father-in-law, Philip Grene of Bristol . 21

The lack of any evidence for a business association between Ap
Meryk and Cabot has not stopped local historians from asserting
that there was one. For example, it has been said that Amerike’
helped finance the expeditions and even provided timber for the
Matthew; and that the grateful explorer then decided to name the
land he discovered after his benefactor. There is, unfortunately,
no evidence for any of this. When historians wish to establish
something, it is not enough to say that someone said this in their
book’. It is necessary to chase back the references and find the
original documents on which any claim is based. In this case that is
not possible, because the claims are baseless.

Richard Ap Meryk is an interesting and complex character. Many
of his activities are well documented: particularly those that relate
to his corrupt practices as a customs officer, and his opportunism
in exploiting the financial woes of others in the course of building
his landed estate . 22 No evidence has been found, however, to show
that he was one of Cabot's supporters, or that he contributed in
a positive way to the expeditions. Indeed, if anything, the Bristol
customs officers seem to have been an irritation to Cabot, refusing
to make the initial payment of his pension in January 1498, even
though the King’s grant made it clear that this should happen. The
officers’ objection was, in effect, that Cabot had not acquired all the
correct paperwork’. While he had a personal order from the King
in the form of his letters patent, he had not used this to obtain
an authorising warrant acceptable to the exchequer, instructing
the customs officers to make the payment. Cabot was thus forced
to ride 120 miles back to London to sort the matter out. While
the customers’ actions were legal, they were neither helpful, nor
suggestive of a close personal interest in Cabot . 23 Bristol’s customs
officers had, in fact, very little to gain from Cabot’s success, since the
explorer’s 1496 patent specified that any trade he established would
be customs free. So Kemys and Ap Meryk would not have been
able to profit from any trade established, either by collecting official
fees for processing goods, or by demanding ‘facilitation payments’
for doing their jobs in a timely fashion, or for turning a blind eye to
smuggling activity.

THE NAMING OF THE LAND

When all is said and done, there is no evidence that Ap Meryk
supported Cabot and little reason why he should have done so.
There was no reason why Cabot would have named his new land
after Ap Meryk and there is no evidence that he did so. The copies
made of Cabot’s charts imply that he invented no new name for
the lands he explored, while for generations afterwards Bristolians
referred to the territories discovered from their port as the ‘new
found land’. That was true even after ‘America’ started being used as
a term for the northern continent in the second half of the sixteenth
century . 24 By contrast, the term ‘America’ was used to describe
continental South America from 1507, when the term was coined
by a German mapmaker as an explicit tribute to Amerigo Vespucci.

Plate 51 | America
south of the
Equator on the
Waldseemuller map
(Library of Congress)

78 THE NAMING OF THE LAND

9 SHIPS AND SAILORS OF
THE DISCOVERY VOYAGES

Plate 52 | Portuguese
ship from world map
of c. 1550
(Bodleian Library,
MS Ki(iu))

In the Elizabethan period, when Bristol’s chroniclers finally became
interested in the earlier discovery voyages, they did not remember
Cabot. Rather they recalled that it was ‘men of Bristol’ who had
discovered America, in a Bristol ship called the Matthew . 1 There
was some justice to this view, given that most of the ventures of the
period 1496-1508 were led by Bristol men, sailing in Bristol ships.
But what was the world of these ships and mariners like?

The 1503/4 customs account for Bristol provides a good sense of the
port’s fleet in this era . 2 The overseas trade it records was much more
typical of the port’s maritime activity than voyages of discovery.
Bristol ships completed dozens of commercial voyages each year.
By contrast, only a few ships were employed for exploration and
most of those voyages lasted only a few months. So even ships that
were bought for the purpose of exploration, such as the Gabriel,
spent most of their time ploughing the regular sea-lanes between
Bristol, France and Iberia.

In all there were at least 23 vessels in Bristol’s fleet, ranging from
ships of around 130 tons burden to single-masted boats of perhaps

Ship Name

Type

Size (tons)

Known destinations

Jesus Bonaventure

Small ship

136+ (c.130)

N. America, Bordeaux

Mary Tower

Small ship

128+

Lisbon

Mary Katherine

Small ship

125+

Andalusia, Lisbon, Bordeaux

Gabriel

Small ship

103+ (c.120)

N. America, Andalusia, Bordeaux

Margaret

Small ship

112+

Bordeaux

Mary Belhouse

Small ship

105+

Andalusia, Algarve

Julian Bonaventure Small ship

79+ (100+)

N. Spain, Bordeaux

Michael

Small ship

72 + (95)

Andalusia, La Rochelle

Trinity

Small ship

Bordeaux

Christopher

Small ship

45+

Lisbon, Bordeaux,

La Rochelle, Ireland

Julian

Small ship

39+

Lisbon, Bordeaux, Ireland

Matthew

Small ship

34+ (50)

N. Spain, Bordeaux, Ireland

George

Small ship

31+

N. Spain, Bordeaux

Francis

Small ship

30+

Algarve, Ireland

Christopher

Boat

32 +

Brittany, Ireland

St Mark

Boat

27 +

Portugal, Galicia, N. Spain

Andrew

Small ship

24+

Guernsey

Philip

Boat

22+

La Rochelle, Ireland

Barbara

Boat

23+

Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Ireland

Mary

Small ship/Boat

Ireland

Katherine

Boat

Ireland

Augustine

Boat

Ireland

Ellen

Boat

Chepstow

Table l | Bristol fleet
in 1503/4 3

80 SHIPS AND SAILORS OF THE DISCOVERY VOYAGES

2-io tons. The smaller vessels rarely went further than Wales or
Ireland, while the greatest ships were used for the long-distance
voyages to Spain, Portugal and France. The most famous of the
ships listed here is the Matthew, which John Cabot used for his
1497 expedition. She bustled between Bristol, Ireland and the Bay
of Biscay, carrying a variety of commodities for whoever wanted
to charter her. Not all of this trade was legal: smuggled goods
were seized from the Matthew in November 1498 and then again
in 1500. 4 Such versatility made the Matthew suitable for the initial
exploration voyage of 1497. Being small would have made her
fairly cheap to hire and to crew but limited the number of men
and provisions she could carry. This may explain why larger ships
such as the Gabriel and the Jesus Bonaventure were used in the later
expeditions.

Plate S3 | Portuguese
ship from a map of
c. 1510

Although there are no detailed depictions of Bristol ships from
this period, there are contemporary illustrations of vessels used
in the trade of Atlantic Europe, including the caravels’ and ‘naus’
that the Spanish and Portuguese favoured for Atlantic exploration.
These provide a good sense of what Bristol’s ships would have
looked like, since the vessels used by English merchants to trade

SHIPS AND SAILORS OF THE DISCOVERY VOYAGES

to France, Spain and Portugal were very similar to those used by
the merchants of those countries. Indeed, several of Bristol’s ships
were foreign built. They include two discovery vessels: the Gabriel,
which was bought from Dieppe in c.1501 and the Jesus Bonaventure,
which was acquired from the shipyards of St Jean-de-Luz in 1502. 5
Similarly, when the Matthew of Bristol went out of commission in
1507, her owner, John Shipman of Bristol, replaced her with a ship
built in Spain, which he also called the Matthew . 6

Plate 54 | John
Shipman's
merchant’s mark
(1504) references
his initials‘JS’. Such
marks were drawn
on merchandise
to identify the
owner and were
often objects of
pride, incorporated
into signet rings
or engraved on to
the tombstones
of successful
merchants.
(Archives

departementales de
la Gironde, MS 3E
12209, Jo. 185J 7

A good modern example of the vessels used for exploration is
the reconstruction of the Matthew of Bristol, which was built to
celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of Cabot’s 1497 expedition.
She is a three-masted vessel with square sails on her main and
foremast, and a triangular lateen sail on the mizzen (rear) mast,
which makes it easier for the ship to tack into the wind. Like most
vessels of that period, the modern Matthew is carvel-built’, which
means she was built by first constructing a heavy wooden skeleton,
on to which planks were then laid edge-to-edge.

Bigger ships, of course, required bigger crews. But they were
more efficient, so a ship of 200 tons burden did not need twice as
many seaman as one of 100 tons. The fifty-ton Matthew's ordinary
complement would have been around thirteen to sixteen men and
boys, not counting the master or any merchants on board. For a ship
of her size, the rough rule-of-thumb was that one crew member
was needed for every 3 to 3.5 tons; a larger ship might only have
had one man to every four or five tons of carrying capacity . 8 Even
though she took about twenty men on the 1497 voyage, including
Cabot himself, the Matthew was under-manned by the standards of
the Spanish explorers. For example, the Guerra-Grajeda expedition
of 1501 allowed 30 mariners and 10 soldiers, not including the

SHIPS AND SAILORS OF THE DISCOVERY VOYAGES

Plate ss | Bristol’s
replica ship, the
Matthew, out 'at sea'
in the tidal Severn
Estuary
(Photo: Shawn
Spencer-Smith)

gentlemen, for a ship of c. ioo tons, while an accompanying vessel,
which was the same size as the Matthew, was to carry 23 mariners
and 7 soldiers. 9

Although Cabot was the chief navigator and captain’ of the Matthew,
the day-to-day running would have been the responsibility of the
shipmaster. Other members of the crew would have included the
ship’s carpenter, who was responsible for the fabric of the ship, and
the bosun, who looked after the sails and rigging. Even small ships
like the Matthew would also have had a gunner and a few soldiers,
to defend her if she were attacked by pirates. By way of armament,
she would have carried bows, crossbows and swivel-mounted guns.
Such weapons were an essential part of her apparel’, the marine
equivalent of fixtures and fittings.

Most of Bristol's mariners lived in Bristol itself, or at Pill and
Shirehampton, about five miles downriver. It was there, in an area

SHIPS AND SAILORS OF THE DISCOVERY VOYAGES 83

Fig 13 | The River
Severn and the
ports of Chepstow
and Bristol
(includes Kingroad)

called the Hungroad, that much of the activity of the port took
place: ranging from the loading and unloading of the largest ships, to
repair work and the supply of provisions and equipment for voyages.
On the other hand, few crews would have been made up entirely
of local men. A contemporary business account refers to Bristol
ships taking on additional men in Wales, Somerset and Ireland. 10
Mariners were a skilled, specialised and highly mobile profession,
who could sell their skills to any master, of any nationality. It would
have thus been unusual to find a crew that was made up entirely of
Englishmen and some may have come from far-flung destinations.
Christopher Columbus’ crews in 1492 are well documented, and
included a'negro’ and several Portuguese sailors. 11

While Cabot was probably in his fifties by the time he sailed,
most mariners were young, typically in their late teens or twenties,
although masters and their deputies might continue into middle
age. Most ships also carried a few boys, or'pages’ as they were called
in the records. Popular tradition unkindly gave the role of cook to an
old sailor no longer fit for active service. 12 Life at sea was hard and
required strength, bravery, and great physical toughness. Frequently
wet, often cold, even resting was rarely comfortable, with the crews
of smaller vessels sleeping on deck, under the covered forecastle.

84 SHIPS AND SAILORS OF THE DISCOVERY VOYAGES

When the wind blew and the waves rose, a ship like the Matthew
would be tossed about like a cork, her yards sinking into the foam,
while great waves crashed over the decks. In such conditions, sailors
had to work on: taking in sail, steering the ship and even climbing
frozen rigging at night to reach the crow’s nest. In such conditions,
one slip would be fatal: those washed into the sea were rarely seen
again.

Working at sea required a lot of energy, so while the diet was
monotonous, the food allowances were generous. A typical daily
diet consisted of i lb. of dried ship’s biscuit, 2 lb. of salt beef and 10
pints of ale, with cheese and dried fish sometimes taking the place
of the beef. 13 In all, this amounted to about 5,000 calories, which is
about twice that recommended today for a grown man. If the food
was plentiful (and the alcohol allowances more so), there was little
variation to the diet, with almost no fresh food, such as fruit, bread
or unsalted meat, once a ship had been a week at sea. And much
food had to be eaten cold, for heating was only possible when the
sea was calm and it was possible to light a fire in a special metal dish
that was placed on deck. This made it possible to cook pots of stew
that would be served up into the wooden bowls that each sailor
kept as one of his prized personal possessions.

Plate 5 6 |Three of
the 188 wooden
bowls recovered
from the Mary Rose,
wrecked in 1545
(Mary Rose Trust).
Food was often first
ladled into a large
bowl as a‘mess’ to
be shared between
several men; from
this, each man could
serve his portion
into his own bowl.

Although a mariner’s life was hard and often dangerous, there were
always periods on any voyage when the wind was fair, or absent,
when there would be little to do. At those times sailors carried out
routine tasks, like mending clothes, or relaxed by playing board
games and gambling with dice. The playing pieces recovered from

SHIPS AND SAILORS OF THE DISCOVERY VOYAGES

shipwrecks such as the Newport Medieval Ship and the Mary Rose
would be familiar today. 14 Sailors also had time for entertainment,
with singing being a regular feature of an English mariner’s life
throughout the Age of Sail. Little of their rhymes or shanties'
survives from the Middle Ages, but, almost uniquely, a fragment of
a Bristol mariner’s song of Cabot’s time survives in a note written
down in an idle moment by a local legal clerk. It preserves some of
the rhythm of the sailors’ teamwork as they hauled on heavy ropes,
or pulled on sweeps, and prayed for a fair wind:

Hale and howe Rumbylowe

Stire well thegode ship and lete the wynde blowe .... 15

SHIPS AND SAILORS OF TH

DISCOVERY VOYAGES

10 AFTERMATH

One of the things people today find most difficult to understand
about the Bristol discovery voyages is why we know so little about
them. Why did so few contemporaries write about the expeditions?
The answer is that, however impressive the explorers’ exploits might
seem today, after the first euphoria, people at the time did not feel
they had achieved much of value. Indeed, even if the explorers had
succeeded in charting the entire east coast of North America, that
would not have been thought terribly important, since America
was not what they were looking for. When they set sail, they were
hoping to find rich commodities they could bring home, such as
brasilwood, or civilised people they could trade with, such as the
Chinese.

What Bristol’s mariners discovered instead was a wild coastline
inhabited by hunter-gatherers and, if they went further south,
stone-age farmers. These people had little worth trading, and
certainly none of the silk, spices, gold, gems, or dyewood that had
been hoped for. Moreover, there was no indication that there were
readily extractable resources, such as precious metals. The natives did
have land, of course; but the Bristol explorers were not particularly
interested in colonisation. In the late-fifteenth century, England was
still recovering from the Black Death, with a population half what it
had been 150 years earlier. With land cheap and wages high at home,
it would have been very difficult to persuade Englishmen to settle
in America. The explorers’ patents saw settlement as a possibility;
but even a hundred years later it was a daunting prospect. All this
meant that, to the Bristol explorers, North America was no more
than an obstacle blocking the way to Asia. To them, discovering
America was probably a bitter disappointment.

The irony of the Bristol voyages was that the one economic resource
they could have exploited was one that they chose not to. As early
as 1497, Cabot’s Bristol companions had noted the great quantities
of cod that could be found off the coast. This fishery, stretching
from Newfoundland to New England, was one of the richest in the

world. In later centuries it became one of North America's most
important natural resources. Bristol’s explorers were probably the
first to attempt commercial fishing there, bringing back a total of
about 120 tons of salted fish from the expeditions of 1502 and 1504.
But this may be all the fish brought back to Bristol at this time,
given that they had no incentive to under-declare their catches.
Indeed, given the terms of their Letters Patent, it would have been
foolish not to declare every last fish taken, to ensure that Bristol’s
customs officers did not record it as taxable merchandise. Yet,
following these early trials, Englishmen showed very little interest
in the Newfoundland fisheries until the 1570s.

England’s lack of interest in North America’s fisheries did not
mean that they were left undeveloped: a major European fishing
industry was established during the sixteenth century. When the
Englishman, John Rut, visited Newfoundland in 1527, he reported
seeing fourteen fishing vessels just in the harbour of St Johns. But
they were all French, Breton, or Portuguese . 1 By the mid-sixteenth
century, hundreds of ships were taking part in the Newfoundland
fishery each year, with the French expanding their operations to
include further exploration, notably by Jacques Cartier, along with
early attempts at settlement and trade. So, the Bristol enterprises
of the period 1496-1508 did lead to the rise of a major industry and
further exploration. It was just that, for most of the century, it was
other European nations that benefitted . 2

In the last decades of the sixteenth century, England began to
expand its maritime horizons once more. Many argued that the
country needed to develop its own overseas trade and colonies. In
part this was driven by the fear that Protestant England would be
crushed by the ascendant Catholic empires of Spain and Portugal;
countries that had become rich from extra-European trade and the
colonisation of the Americas. In response, English explorers and
buccaneers, such as Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh,
attacked Iberia’s commerce and sought to establish new trade
routes and colonies in the Americas. Such ambitions were now
easier to achieve because rapid population growth from the 1520s
had driven up the price of land and food in England. This made
the establishment of foreign colonies and fisheries more appealing.
Moreover, when war broke out between England and the combined
powers of Spain and Portugal in 1585, the English started attacking
Iberian shipping wherever they could find it. That included the

AFTERMATH

Spanish and Portuguese fishing fleets off Newfoundland. Over the
next twenty years of war, English privateers drove the Iberians out.
They were replaced by West Country fishermen, predominantly
from Devon and Dorset, who subsequently became the dominant
players in the region . 3

Plate 57 | An
eighteenth century
fishing station
showing the
processes involved
in drying cod and
extracting liver oil
(John Carter Brown
Library) 4

Image deleted from the digitised version of the
book for copyright reasons.

All this, of course, happened more than two generations after
the exploration voyages discussed in this book. But the late
Elizabethan endeavours had another impact: they changed the
way the earlier Bristol voyages were remembered. Writers such as
Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas wanted to persuade people
that England’s destiny lay with the sea. One way of doing this was
to tell people about their country’s past maritime achievements.
To these writers, Cabot was no longer the man who had failed to
discover a route to the Orient; he was the pioneering explorer who

AFTERMATH

had discovered North America and claimed it for England . 5 And
North America was now seen as useful, not just for its fishery, but
as land ripe for colonisation. Since Cabot had claimed this land
for England in 1497, imperialists argued that England had a right
to the continent by virtue of first discovery. Such claims would be
advanced throughout the colonial period and, indeed, even today,
the doctrine of discovery' underpins the historic land claims of the
USA and Canada . 6

In the late-sixteenth century Cabot became a ‘hero’ figure for
those who wanted England to become an imperial power. As the
settlement of British North America grew in the seventeenth and
eighteenth century and Britain became the world’s leading maritime
power, the explorer’s reputation also grew, even if most writers
believed that the Bristol voyages were led by Sebastian Cabot,
rather than his father, John. It is for these reasons that the Cabots
are remembered today. Contemporaries may not have known or
cared much about the exploration voyages from Bristol, but the
explorers' part in the creation of English-speaking America, and the
role the voyages played in the development of the British Empire,
led to the expeditions being celebrated, particularly in England and
Canada . 7 As a result, you cannot go far in Bristol or Newfoundland
today without coming across memorials of the Cabot voyages:
be that in the form of statues, paintings, buildings, street names,
businesses, memorial towers and even working replicas of Cabot’s
ship, the Matthew.

Plate 58 | Cabot
Memorial Tower
of 1897 on Signal
Hill, St John’s,
Newfoundland
(Photo: Shutterstock)

go AFTERMATH

Endnotes

INTRODUCTION

1. The rhyme is usually attributed to Winifred Sackville Stoner (1902-83) and a poem
she published in 1919.

2. The first recorded Spanish expedition to North America was that of Juan Ponce
de Leon in 1513, which explored the coast of Florida.

1 BRISTOL IN THE AGE OF DISCOVERY

1. Illustration from J. F. Nicholls, Bristol Past and Present (3 vols, Bristol, 1881-2) iii, 274.

2. For a useful summary, including references to recent scholarship, Wendy R. Childs,
Trade and Shipping in the Medieval West: Portugal Castile and England (Porto, 2013).

3. The best general description of Bristol's trade at this time remains:

E. M. Carus-Wilson, ‘The overseas trade of Bristol' in E. Power and M. M. Postan
(eds.), Studies in English Trade in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1933).

4. Evan T. Jones,‘The shipping industry of the Severn Seas’ in Evan T. Jones and
Richard Stone (eds.), The World of the Newport Ship (University of Wales Press,
forthcoming); details of individual voyages and cargoes taken from the customs
accounts, including those in E. M. Carus-Wilson (ed.), The Overseas Trade of
Bristol in the later Middle Ages (Second edn, London, 1967), passim.

5. Childs, Trade and Shipping, 119-122; Hilario Casado Alonso and Flavio Miranda,

‘The Iberian economy and commercial exchange with north-western Europe in
the later Middle Ages', in Jones and Stone, The World of the Newport Ship. The
knowledge Bristol merchants had acquired of Portugal's Atlantic ventures seems
to be reflected in William Worcestre's account of Madeira and other Atlantic
islands off the coast of Africa, following his visits to Bristol in the 1480s: R. A.
Skelton,‘English knowledge of the Portuguese discoveries in the 15th century: a
new document’, Actas Congresso Internacional de Historia dos Descohrimentos, ii
(Lisbon, 1961), 367-71.

6. E. M. Carus-Wilson,'The Iceland trade', in Power and Postan, Studies in English
Trade, 155-71.

2 BRISTOL AND ATLANTIC EXPLORATION:

THE SEARCH FOR THE ISLAND OF BRASIL

1. Claudius Ptolomaeus, Cosmographia, (transl.) Jacobus Angelus, (ed.) Nicolaus
Germanus (Ulm, 1482). The maps were printed from woodcuts and hand coloured,
so that there are numerous variations in surviving copies as well as in later facsimiles.

2. T. J. Westropp,‘Brasil and the legendary islands of the North Atlantic: their
history and fable. A contribution to the “Atlantis” problem^ Proceedings of the Royal
Irish Academy, Vol XXX, Section C (1912), 223-60.

3. Permission to use this image was granted by the Italian Ministry of Heritage,
Cultural Activities and Tourism on the condition that further reproduction is
forbidden.

4. The exact location of Brasil on charts did naturally vary, given that nobody had
actually visited it. Indeed, four of the five late-fifteenth century maps preserved in
the Florentine state archives place the Island of Brasil in two places: off the coast
of Ireland and off Cape St Vincent in Portugal: Archivio di Stato, Firenze,

CN5-9: see Richard L. Pflederer, Catalogue of the Portolan Charts and Atlases in
the Archivio di Stato di Firenze (Privately printed, USA, 2013). The most recent
study of‘Hy-Brasil’ is Barbara Freitag, TTy-Brasil: the Metamorphosis of an Island:
from Cartographic Error to Celtic Elysium (Amsterdam, 2013), especially 3-30 and
the list of maps at 265-97. Freitag's discussion includes, not just the'Brasil' near
Ireland, but also the‘Brasil’ island in the region of the Azores, which is probably
Terceira and perhaps named for the dye-stuff orchil; and the northern‘isle of Brasil',
which first appears on the so-called Catalan map of c. 1480 and moves between 47 0
and 63° north until it disappeared from maps at the end of the sixteenth century.

5. Harvey L. Sharrer, 'The passing of King Arthur to the Island of Brasil in a
fifteenth-century Spanish version of the post-vulgate Roman du Graal', Romania,

92 (i97i)> 65-74. The authors thank Professor Sharrer for providing them with a
translation of the Spanish text.

6. In its unadulterated form, brasil produces a red dye, albeit one that was not lightfast
over time; its colour could be further enhanced or altered when used in combination
with other dyes: Dominique Cardon, Natural Dyes: Sources, Tradition, Technology
and Science, (transl.) Caroline Higgitt (London, 2007), 274-88.

7. Melchior Fokkens, Beschrijvinge der wiidjt-vermaade Koop-stadt Amstelredam
(Doornick, 1664), 716-7. The task is being performed by prison labour.

8. Wendy R. Childs, Anglo'Castilian Trade in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester, 1978).

9. Childs, Trade and Shipping, 92-4,132-4.

10. Frances Neale (ed.), William Worcestre: The Topography of Medieval Bristol, (Vol. 51,
Bristol Record Society, 2000), 234-35.

11. Carus-Wilson, Overseas Trade, 161-5; D. B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of
America 1481-1620 (London, 1974), 8-9, 73-5. For more on Croft, see C. S. L. Davies,
‘Thomas Croft (c. 1436-1488), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (OUP, 2004,
online edn. 2008).

12. David Beers Quinn,'The argument for the English discovery of America between
1480 and 1494', The Geographical Journal, Vol. 127 (1961), 277-85.

13. T. F. Reddaway and A. A. Ruddock (eds.),'The accounts of John Balsall, purser of
the Trinity of Bristol, 1480-1’ Camden Miscellany XXIII (London, 1969), 3,10, 24.
For the size of the two Georges Carus-Wilson, Overseas Trade, 277-9, 2.85 from The
National Archives [TNA: PRO] E122/19/14; Neale, William Worcestre, 140-1.
Worcestre appears to suggest that the smaller George was the ship involved in the
search for islands’ in 1480.

14. Sixteenth-century records indicate that fishing vessels sailing to Iceland expected to
use a wey of salt (40 bushels, or just over a ton) to preserve 800-1000 codfish. That
works out at around 2 pints of salt per fish: E. T. Jones/England’s Icelandic fishery in
the early modern period' in D. J. Starkey et al. (eds.), England’s Sea Fisheries: The
Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300 (Chatham Press, 2000), 109.

15. Carol Belanger Grafton, Medieval Life Illustrations (1996) (reproductions of medieval
woodcuts).

16. Luis A. Robles Macias,‘Revised transcription of Pedro de Ayala’s 1498 report about
English voyages of exploration, 11-13: www.academia.edu/12319069/. This is a
translated and slightly abridged version of the article by the same author entitled
‘Transcripcion revisada del informe de Pedro de Ayala de 1498 sobre las expediciones
inglesas de descubrimiento', Revista de Indias, 74, no. 262 (2014), 623-60. While
Ayala’s comments suggest further voyages, it would be unwise to put too much faith
in the numbers or chronology quoted, since Ayala had been largely resident in
Scotland until late in 1496.

17. New translation from the original manuscript by Dr. Fernando Cervantes and
Gonzalo Velasco Berenguer on behalf of the authors. The first published transcript
and translation of the letter by its discoverer, Louis-Andre Vigneras, was imperfect,
as Vigneras later recognised. It is, however, still the mostly widely used translation,
not least because it was included without alteration by James Williamson in his
source book, James A. Williamson, The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery under
Henry VII (Hakluyt Society, 2nd Series, no. 120 (1962)), 211-4. The best published
transcript of the original Spanish is that of Juan Fernandez Gil and Consuela Varela,
Cartasparticulares a Colony relaciones coetdneas (Madrid, 1984), 266-9.

18. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 210.

19. Quinn,‘The argument for the English discovery of America^ 277-85. A number of
popular historians have propagated this notion, in great part because it implies that
Bristol men reached North America before Columbus. See, for instance: Ian Wilson,
The Columbus Myth: Did Men of Bristol Reach America before Columbus ? (1992);
Rodney Broome, Amerike: The Briton who gave America its Name (Stroud, 2002).

20. Susan Flavin and Evan T. Jones (eds.), Bristol’s Trade with Ireland and the Continent
1503-1601 (Bristol Record Society, 2009), 21, 81.

21. Cardon, Natural Dyes, 275, 279-81, 285-9.

3 JOHN CABOT: BACKGROUND

1. Robles Macias/Revised transcription of Pedro de Ayalas 1498 report,

2. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 190-91.

3. E. GiufFrida/New documents on Giovanni Caboto', in R. Mamoli Zorzi (ed.)
Attraversare gli Oceani: Da Giovanni Caboto al Canada Multicultural (Venice, 1999),
62, 64-5. Giuffrida is the discoverer of the only known examples of Cabots signature.

4. Although now known as Cabots house, the memorial plaque affixed to the house in
1881 claims only that he lived in the Castello area of the city, in which this house is
situated.

5. The Mamluk sultanate extended from Egypt through lands known in medieval times
as the Levant, which included the important ports of Beirut and Tripoli, and
stretched through modern Israel and Syria. The sultanate included also the Hejaz on
the east side of the Red Sea, as far south as Mecca. For Cabots purchase of a slave in
one of the trading posts of the Sultanate, Giuffrida, ‘New documents on Giovanni
Caboto', 63.

6. GiufFrida/New documents on Giovanni Caboto', 47—71.

7. M. F. Tiepolo/Documenti Veneziani su Giovanni Caboto’, Studi Veneziani, xv (1973),

585-97.

8. M. Ballesteros-Gaibrois/Juan Caboto en Espana: nueva luz sobre un problema viejo',
Revista de Indias, iv (1943), 607-27; supporting documents translated in Williamson,
Cabot Voyages, 196-9.

9. Juan Gil, Mitos y utopias del Descubrimiento: I. Colon y su tiempo (Madrid, 1989),
77-81; partial translation into English of the documents in Francisco Albardaner i
Llorens/John Cabot and Christopher Columbus revisited', The Northern Mariner, 10
no 2 (2000), 93-4.

10. It has been suggested that Cabot might have accompanied Columbus' 1493
expedition, returning to Spain the following year: Douglas Hunter, Race to the New
World: Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, and a Lost History of Discovery (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), 78-82, 91-3. While possible on grounds of chronology, there is no
firm evidence for this, and no crew list for Columbus’ 1493 expedition has yet been
found.

11. Robles Macfas/Revised transcription of Pedro de Ayala’s 1498 report',

12. 1492/3: Total value of trade £33,890, Andalusia £4984 (15%), Portugal £7,674 (23%).
Calculated from the Bristol customs ledger for September 1492-3, TNA: PRO,
E122/20/9.

13. M. Bratchel,‘Italian merchant organisation and business relationships in early Tudor
London’, T he Journal of European Economic History, 7 (1978), 5-31; Giuliano Pinto,
‘Cultura mercantile ed espansione economica di Firenze (secoli XIII-XVI)' in

G. Pinto et al. (eds.), Vespucci, Firenze e le Americhe (Florence, 2014), 3-18. Studies in
English of individual banks are few, but Raymond de Roover, The Rise and Decline of
the Medici Bank 1397-1494 (London, 1963) is a classic.

14. The support given by Giannotto Berardi to Columbus is well known and
documented. But, for example, Bartolomeo Marchionni, resident in Lisbon, was an
investor in the voyage of Cabral that ‘found’ Brasil; he continued as a significant
investor and trader in the Portuguese trading fleets to India, In 1523 at least thirteen
Florentines invested in a voyage under the French flag of Giovanni da Verazzano:
Francesco Guidi Bruscoli, Bartolomeo Marchionni ‘Homem de grossa fazenda (ca.
1450-1530): Un mercanto fiorentino a Lisbona e I’impero Portoghese (Florence, 2014),
esp. 140-75. For these and other examples of Florentine finance, Francesco Guidi
Bruscoli, ‘Capitali fiorentini nei prima viaggi verso il Nord America: Giovanni
Caboto e Giovanni da Verrazano', in Pinto, Vespucci, Firenze e le Americhe, 105-121;
and C. Verlinden/La Colonie Italienne de Lisbonne et le developpement de
l'economie metropolitaine et colonial Portugaise’ in Studi in onore di Armando Sapori
(2 vols, Milan, 1957), I, 617-28.

4 CABOT'S PLAN: LONDON AND BRISTOL

1. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 204-5. The‘letters patent' was a solemn legal document
that Cabot could show openly and which carried the King's great seal.

2. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 209-11. Soncino had been in England only a few months.

He crossed the Channel 23 August 1497, too late to witness Cabots return, but had
been in touch with his fellow countrymen before then,

3. Bronze medal formerly attributed to Caradosso Foppa. The reverse shows Sforza on
his throne and the fortified harbor of Genoa (V&A, 7664-1861),

4. E.T.J ones,‘The Matthew of Bristol and the financiers of John Cabots 1497 voyage to
North America, English Historical Review, 121 (2006), 778-95.

5. E. T. Jones,‘Alwyn Ruddock: “John Cabot and the Discovery of America Historical
Research, 81, (May, 2008), 224-254; Cal. State Papers Milan, I, 321-3; Williamson,
Cabot Voyages, 227.

6 . Charles Knight, Old England: A Pictorial Museum (2 vols, London, c.1860), i, 345. For
the suggestion that Cabot lodged in the London Austin Friars, based on a
seventeenth-century reference, Jones, Alwyn Ruddock', 231-2.

7. Jones, Alwyn Ruddock^ 228; this is now known to be a minimum number, excluding
at least one of her most important finds. See also Evan T. Jones,‘Bristol, Cabot and
the New Found Land, 1496-1500' in P. E. Pope and S. Lewis-Simpson (eds.)
Exploring Atlantic Transitions: Archaeologies of Permanence and Transience in New
Found Lands (Woodbridge, 2013), 27-30.

8. Francesco Guidi Bruscoli, John Cabot and his Italian Financiers', Historical Research,
85 (August, 2012), 372-93.

9. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 207-11.

10. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 210.

11. Although no detailed customs accounts survive from the period of the Iceland trade's
height (c.1430-50), later accounts reveal that the value of the goods carried by
merchantmen sailing to or from Iceland was relatively small. For instance, when the
Anthony of Bristol, left for Iceland in 1466, its exports were valued at £106, which
amounts to about 1% of the total recorded exports (£12,932) that took place between
29 Sept 1465 and 14 May 1466. Similarly, when the'navis' (great ship) the Trinity of
London, returned from Iceland on 18 Sept i486, the declared value of its goods was
£238. This represents 2% of imports (£13,607) that year. This suggests that, even when
the Iceland venture trade was at its height, with perhaps three or four great ships
sailing north each year, it would still have represented a very minor component of
Bristol's overall trade.

12. TNA: PRO, E122/20/5, fo. 3ir; E122/20/7; E122/20/9, fo. 4iv; licence to named
Bristol merchants for two ships 1488-9, TNA: PRO, C76/173, m. 15. The London
owner of the i486 Trinity seems subsequently to have transferred his interest to the
east coast route.

13. E. M. Carus-Wilson,‘The Iceland Trade', 182; Quinn, Discovery of America, 47-50.

14. W. R. Childs,‘England's Icelandic trade in the fifteenth century: The role of the port
of Hull', Northern Seas (1995), 11-31*

15. Jones,‘England's Icelandic fishery in the early modern period', 106-7.

16. Richard Stone,‘Bristol's overseas trade in the later fifteenth century', in Jones and
Stone, World of the Newport Ship .

17. TNA: PRO, E122/20/9.

5 1496 AND 1497 EXPEDITIONS

1. Translated from the Spanish of the original manuscript by Dr. Fernando Cervantes
and Gonzalo Velasco Berenguer on behalf of the authors.

2. G. E. Weare, Cabot’s Discovery of North America (London, 1897), 116.

3. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 207-14.

4. For the Burgundian and the Genoese, see Soncino's letter, Williamson, Cabot
Voyages, 211. David Quinn and others have suggested that the'Burgundian could
have been the globe-maker and adventurer Martin Behaim: but in the current state
of knowledge it is unlikely that this man’s identity will ever be known with certainty.

5. On crew ratios in the latter half of the fifteenth century, see Childs, Trade and
Shipping, 86; Ian Friel,'The rise and fall of the Big Ship, 1400-1520' in Jones and
Stone, World of the Newport Ship.

6. TNA: PRO, E101/414/16, fo. I2r and below, Chapter 7.

7. The statue of John Cabot is by Hans Mills (1970).

8. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 208-9, 212.

9. J. P. Howley, The Mineral Resources of Newfoundland (St.Johns, Newfoundland,

1892), 35-6; Ingeborg Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk, (Montreal,
1996), esp. 14-16, 337-41, 387-420, 441; William Gilbert,‘Beothuk-European contact
in the 16th century: a re-evaluation of the documentary evidence’, Acadiensis, XXXX,
no.i (2011), 24-44. For Beothuk tools and hunting methods, albeit from sparse
evidence, see Marshall, History and Ethnography, 311-6, 327-33.

10. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 214; M. M. Condon/Itinerary of Henry VII’
(unpublished) under date.

11. ‘Remains of Henry the 2nd’s Palace as it stood in Woodstock park in 1714’:
published for Samuel Ireland (1744-1800) in 1799. The surviving buildings were
demolished in 1723. In the fifteenth century Woodstock was always known as a
‘manor’ rather than a palace'.

12. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 207-8.

13. The best account of the rebellion is Ian Arthurson, T he Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy
1491-1499 (Stroud, 1994), 169-201.

14. Cal State Papers Milan, I, no. 545.

15. Jones/Bristol, Cabot and the New Found Land’, 29. As in other instances of casual
payments to Cabot, the explorer is identified by description, and not by name. In this
instance he is described as a lumbard [a general word for Italians] that found thisle’.

16. Condon/Itinerary’.

17. Payment at the King’s pleasure' meant this was a conditional grant rather than a
grant for life, although the two were often synonymous. It would be a further six
weeks before the grant of 13 December was given effective legal validity by the issue
of letters patent under the King's great seal. This delay may have taken place, in part,
simply because Cabot would have had to pay the considerable costs involved in
having the formal patent drawn up: Margaret M. Condon and Evan T. Jones (eds.),
‘The grant of a pension of £20 per year to John Cabot, 13 December 1497’ (University
of Bristol, ROSE, 2011): http://hdl.handle.net/1983/1792.

6 THE MYSTERY OF THE 1498 VOYAGE

1. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 209-11.

2. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 226-7. The initiative for seeking the patent came from
Cabot, who petitioned the King directly. He is likely, however, to have acted on
advice and may well have received official encouragement for doing so.

3. The Great Chronicle of London is one of the major narrative accounts for the period
and was completed in its present form around 1512, albeit much would have been
copied from earlier records. For the date, possible authorship, and sources for the
Great Chronicle: A. H. Thomas and I. D. Thornley (eds.), The Great Chronicle of
London (London, 1938); Mary-Rose McClaren, The London Chronicles of the Fifteenth
Century (Woodbridge, 2002).

4. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 220-21.

5. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 214-15.

6. Jones,‘Alwyn Ruddock^ 242-3.

7. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 215.

8. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 103-11, 220-23. Annotations in the original manuscript of
the Great Chronicle are a year out when translating regnal years into years AD.

9. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, pp. 224-5; Denys Hay,‘The manuscript of Polydore
Vergil’s “Anglica Historia'”, English Historical Review, 54 (1939), pp. 246-7.

10. Discussed in Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 72-83,107-9, 298-307. The original is in the
Museo Naval, Madrid. Scholarly literature on the La Cosa map is extensive and
frequently contradictory. It includes a major monograph by Fernando Silio Cervera
(i995)* A recent contribution, by Luis Robles Macias (2010), using new methodology,
suggests that, for the Americas, latitudes are very nearly accurate from south-east
Cuba to the Amazon, but show increasing distortion and cartographic invention to
both north and south as the mapmaker attempted to make sense of a jigsaw of
information fragments from recent expeditions, including those of John Cabot.

11. Lucas Janszoon Waghenaear, (ed. and transl. Anthony Ashley), The Mariners
Mirrour (London, 1588).

12. Robles Macias,‘Revised transcription of Pedro de Ayala’s 1498 report', 13.

13. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 109-10, 233-4.

14. The early nineteenth century historian Martin Fernandez de Navarrete was
convinced that the 1498 expedition had reached the region of Coquiba^oa on the
north-east coast of Venezuela, but no firm evidence to support his assertion has ever
been found. James Williamson pointed to a short section of the Venezuelan coast in
La Cosas map which appeared to be accurate beyond the point known to have been
reached by Spanish expeditions by 1500: but, in a judgment with which the authors
concur, was reluctant to draw firm conclusions from it: Williamson, Cabot Voyages,
108-12.

15. Jones,‘Alwyn Ruddock^ 244-9; see also Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 93. Today
Carbonear is a town of c.5,000 people. Recent archaeological investigations by
Professor Peter Pope (Memorial University, Newfoundland), revealed traces of
seventeenth-nineteenth century settlement in the area but found no evidence of
earlier European habitation.

16. Jones/Bristol, Cabot and the New Found Land’, 28-30.

17. Ruddock believed that Giovanni Antonio did not come back: Jones, Alwyn Ruddock^
249. There is no mention of Carbonariis in Milanese correspondence with England
in 1499; and the record then ceases entirely until 1513, following the capture by the
French of both the city and its duke.

7 BRISTOL AND THE NEW FOUND LAND': 1499-1508 VOYAGES

1. Evan T Jones/Henry VII and the Bristol expeditions to North America: the
Condon documents', Historical Research, 83 (August, 2010), 444-54. For a more
detailed and updated discussion of the letter, see: Margaret M. Condon and Evan
T. Jones (eds.)/Henry VII’s letter to John Morton concerning William Westons
voyage to the new found land’ (University of Bristol, ROSE, 2011):

http://hdl.handle.net/1983/1734.

2. Jones and Condon/William Weston: early explorer of the New World’, forthcoming.

3. For the first use of these words, see: Oxford English Dictionary .

4. On 4 May 1493 Pope Alexander VI had issued the papal bull Inter Caetera, which
specified that all newly discovered lands that lay west of a meridian lying 100 leagues
west of the Azores would belong to Spain. All lands to the east of the meridian
would belong to Portugal. While this line of demarcation was modified by the Treaty
of Tordesillas, the papal bull, in effect, meant the Pope was sanctioning a division of
the non-Christian — and still largely unknown — world into two hemispheres, one of
which was to‘belong’ to Spain and the other to Portugal.

5. Robles Macias/Revised transcription of Pedro de Ayalas 1498 report’.

6. The arms appear also on several important metal objects recently recovered from a
wreck from Vasco da Gama's second Indian fleet of 1502-3: David L. Mearns et al, A
Portuguese East-Indiaman from the 1502-1503 Fleet of Vasco da Gama off
Hallaniyah Island, Oman: an interim Report’, International Journal of Nautical
History (2016), 14-17.

7. For Pedro Reinel’s map (Kunstmann I) Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 316; Maria
Fernanda Alegria et al./Portuguese Cartography in the Renaissance’ in David
Woodward (ed.), The History of Cartography, Vol 3 pt i (Chicago, 2007), 986.

8. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 118-24, 229-30, 312-9 and Plates IV, XII, and XIII
(Cantino, Reinel, and Kunstmann III); H. P. Biggar, The Precursors of Jaques Cartier
(Ottawa, 1911), 61-7; Alegria,'Portuguese Cartography', 986, 992-4.Juan de la Cosa’s
1500 manuscript map, which does appear to preserve some‘Cabot’ names, was the
work of a Spanish cartographer at a time when the Portuguese were making major
discoveries: and was not used by later mapmakers. Alberto Cantino, an Italian
diplomat based in Lisbon, commissioned, on behalf of the Duke of Ferrara, the 1502
map that now bears his name. The map incorporates the latest discovery
information, even though the explorers' charts were closely guarded state secrets.

9. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 241, 255.

10. The Azoreans were also offered naturalisation. This would have given them legal
rights and some of the fiscal advantages of native-born Englishmen, but would have
required them to swear allegiance to Henry VII as their overlord. This seems not
to have happened.

11. Biggar, Precursors, 7-8, 41-50; Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 235-47.

12. This voyage probably took place under the terms of the 1501 patent, although it might
have taken place under Cabots earlier patent, which was still valid.

13. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 215, 247-8; TNA: PRO, E101/415/3, fo. 79V. A tally was a
notched wooden stick representing a sum of money: and is best thought of as a
primitive form of cheque, with built-in safeguards against forgery. The Gabriel was
expected to enter Bristol from Bordeaux, at which point the merchants would claim
their exemption from customs dues.

14. For the Thorne letter, Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 26-9, 202, and A. A. Ruddock,

‘The Reputation of Sebastian Cabot, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, xlii
(1974), 96. The full text is in D. B. Quinn, New American World: a Documentary
History of North America to 1612 (5 vols, London, 1979), 1 ,182-9.

15. Condon, ‘Itinerary’.

16. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 248-49.

17. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 220. Spelling modernised with comments added in
roman; see also Gilbert, ‘Beothuk-European contact, 28-9.

18. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 309-22; see also the letter of Robert Thorne the younger
to Dr. Edward Lee in 1527, in Quinn, New American World, 1 ,184,187-8.

19. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 216 from TNA: PRO, E101/415/3, fos. I03r, v.

20. Ruddock,‘Reputation of Sebastian Cabot, 98; Quinn, New American World, I, no.
The size of a‘last varied depending on the commodity but in this case the record
makes clear that the calculation had been based on three tons to the last.

21. A. E. Nordenskiold, Periplus: an Essay on the early history of Charts and Sailing
Directions (Stockholm, 1897).

22. With this new grant, Joao Fernandes, Richard Warde, and John Thomas, the other
patent holders of 1501, were specifically excluded from further participation unless by
licence of Eliot and his fellow patentees, and would be required to pay their share of
costs.

23. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 250-61. Latin text in Biggar, Precursors, 70-81.

24. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 216. Since Williamson wrote, the original chamber book
has become available, British Library Add. MS 59899, fos. 32V, 38r. For the Kings
movements, Condon,'Itinerary'. The weapons were brought to the king by a servant
of Sir Walter Herbert; the giver of the hawks is unknown.

25. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, p. 137-8; Ruddock,‘Reputation of Sebastian Cabot', 95-9.

26. Jones, ‘Matthew of Bristol’, 785.

27. The new charter of 1499 required two sheriffs, serving jointly.

28. At this date, ships rarely carried a priest to say mass or minister to the crew, and the
presumption must be that his intention was to be land-based; for the dry mass' and
religious observance on board ship, Vincent V. Patarino jnr.,‘The Religious Culture
of Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century English Sailors', in Cheryl Fury (ed.), The
Social History of English Seamen 1485*1649 (Woodbridge, 2012), 149-55.

29. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 216; BL Add MS 59899, fo. 53r.

30. Ruddock,‘Reputation of Sebastian Cabot’, 97-8.

31. Jones/Henry VII and the Bristol expeditions to North America, 452-3. The reward
was made within two years of Michaelmas (29 September) 1502.

32. BL Add MS 59899, fo. 96V, correcting date in Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 216.

33. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 263-4.

34. A. P. Newton,‘An early grant to Sebastian Cabot English Historical Review, Vol. 37
(1922), 564-5, corrected by Ruddock,‘The reputation of Sebastian Cabot', 96-9.

35. D. B. Quinn, Sebastian Cabot and Bristol Exploration (Local history pamphlets,

Bristol Branch of the Historical Association, 1968).

36. Samuel Seyer, Memorials Historical and Topographical of Bristol and its Neighbourhood
(2 vols, Bristol, 1821-3), if plate between 208-9.

37. 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 (London,
1896); Peter Pope, The Many Landfalls of John Cabot (Toronto, 1997), 43-68.

38. Quinn, New American World, 1 ,121-3, including a translation of Cabot’s receipt. In
May 1509 Cabot was also paid both installments for 1507. This could suggest the

voyage was actually 1507/8, or that it was of longer duration than is generally
supposed.

39. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 266-9; see also Ruddock,'Reputation of Sebastian
Cabot, 95-6.

40. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 165-6.

41. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 270.

42. J. A. Williamson, The Voyages of the Cabots and the English Discovery of North
America under Henry VII and Henry VIII (London, 1929), 244-71.

8 THE NAMING OF THE LAND

1. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 214-6; British Library, Add. MS 59899, fo. 38r; Condon
and Jones,‘Henry VII's letter to John Morton.

2. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Amerigo, the man who gave his name to America (London,
2006), 146-50,183-203; Alfred Hiatt, Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes before
1600 (London, 2008), pp. 191-8.

3. Translation and photograph of Latin original in John W. Hessler, The Naming of
America: Martin Waldseemuller’s 1507 World Map and the Cosmographiae Introductio
(London, 2008), 52,101.

4. Waldseemiiller also produced printed globe gores that could be cut out and pasted
on to a sphere to create a globe. These have a simplified version of the map but still
label the southern continent as America: illustration, Hessler, Naming of America,
36-9. Five sets of the gores, including a later variant, have now been found. The most
recent discovery is University Library of Munich, ULM Cim. I07#2, with the name
America prominent on the southern continent. Made up, the globes would have
been very small — little more than four and a half inches in diameter.

5. Hessler, Naming of America, 18, 24-5, including illustrations.

6. Hessler, Naming of America, 12-13,16-17, including illustrations. Cabot and the Corte
Reals are not mentioned. The land Gaspar Corte Real explored is labelled as an
unknown shore, and floats in the sea beneath the portrait of Ptolemy. It is barely
legible in the small-scale reproduction in Hessler, but can be identified by the
Portuguese flag.

7. Hessler, Naming of America, 46; more fully in John W. Hessler and Chet van Duzer,
Seeing the World Anew: the radical vision of Martin Waldseemuller’s 1507 & i$i6 world
maps (Florida, 2012), 19-22. Only a single copy (discovered in 1901) survives. It was
purchased by the Library of Congress in 2003 and is now referenced as G3200
1507.W3.

8. Christine R. Johnson/German Cosmographers and the Naming of America^ Past
and Present, 191 (2006), 3-43 explores the intellectual context of Waldseemiiller and
Ringmann's naming of the land, and its enduring use.

9. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 202, 262-3; F. F. Fox and J. Taylor, Some Account of the
Guild of Weavers in Bristol: Chiefly from MSS (Bristol, 1889), 92. The quote comes
from a petition from Bristol’s fullers of c. 1568, addressed to the town's mayor, which
summarises an earlier city petition to Elizabeth I.

10. E. Scott and A. E. Hudd (eds.), ‘The Cabot Roll': The customs roll of the port of Bristol
(Bristol, 1897), facsimile.

11. Hudd had been alerted to the existence of the manuscript by‘Mr Coote of the
British Museum’. The document had been found by Edward Scott, the Keeper of
Manuscripts at the Museum 1888-91 and from 1891 Keeper of Muniments at
Westminster Abbey. Extracts in translation in Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 219.

12. Alfred E. Hudd,‘Richard Ameryk and the name America^ Proceedings of the Clifton
Antiquarian Club, vii (1909-10), 1-9.

13. TNA: PRO, E356/23, E122/26/13, and E326/3264. The name‘Amerike’, which
perhaps looks most similar to ‘America^ comes from his daughter’s tomb brass in St
Mary RedclifFe church, Bristol. She died in September 1538.

14. Suit for debt brought by William Byrd against Richard Meryk'of Chapstow' in 1477,
Bristol Record Office JTol//J/1/1, fo. 74. For the Welsh in Bristol, Peter Fleming,
‘The Severn Sea: Urban Networks and Connections in the Fifteenth Century' in
Jones and Stone, World of the Newport Ship.

15. Ap Meryk is first found shipping through Bristol in 1472. For his trade in 1475 and

I479'8o, Cams-Wilson, Overseas Trade, 203-4 [1475]; 246, 256, 263, 268, 278, 280
[i479'8o].

16. Cal. Fine Rolls 1485-1509, pp. 51-2; TNA: PRO, E356/24, rot. 1.

17. Bristol Record Office, (BRO) 04720, fo. 134V; Addams Chronicle, BRO, 13748/4
under date, confirmed by TNA: PRO, E372/349 Bristol.

18. Cal Fine Rolls 1485-1509, pp. 199-200; Cal Patent Rolls 1485-1494, 269. Kemys and
the previous customer, John Walshe, in effect swapped offices, with Walshe replacing
Kemys as controller.

19. Cal Patent Rolls, 1494-1509, 43,171; TNA: PRO, E101/414/16, fo. 134V. Ap Meryk is
to be the subject of a future article by Condon and Jones.

20. W. St. Clair Baddeley, A Bristol rental, 1498-9', Transactions of the Bristol and
Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, no. 47 (1925), 126 (original roll now
Gloucestershire Archives, MS D674/a/Z9).

21. By 1490 Arthur Kemys had placed his nephew, John, in the household of Philip
Grene, a Bristol grocer, transferring (for a sum of money) the custody known as
wardship. Grene, as was not unusual, married his daughter to his ward Cal Patent
Rolls, 1485-94, 86; Bristol RO 5139/167; TNA: PRO, PROB11/14, fo. 64r.

22. For an example of the latter, Carus-Wilson, Overseas Trade, 150-1.

23. For more on this, see: Margaret M. Condon and Evan T. Jones/War rant for the
payment of John Cabots Pension, 22 February 1498' (University of Bristol, PURE,
2011): http://hdl.handle.net/1983/1795.

24. That America first appears as the name for the southern continent, which John
Cabot did not explore, and was not used for the northern one for at least sixty years,
has been ignored by advocates of the Amerike theory.

9 SHIPS AND SAILORS OF THE DISCOVERY VOYAGES

1. Weare, Cabots Discovery of North America, 116 quoting from a copy of a Bristol
chronicle written in 1565.

2. The 1503/4 ledger is the first full-year account to survive since that for 1492/3. The
accounting year started at Michaelmas (29 September). Modern edition in Flavin
and Jones, Bristol’s Trade with Ireland and the Continent, 1-102.

3. Jones,‘Mafffiew of Bristol^ 786. The spellings of the ships have been modernised here.
The figures in brackets are tonnages recorded in sources other than the account:
ibid., 785 nn. 23-4.

4. M. M. Condon and Evan T. Jones, ‘New light on the Matthew of Bristol'
(forthcoming).

5. Jones, ‘The Matthew of Bristol’, 785.

6. Condon and Jones,‘New light on the Matthew.

7. A well-known collection of Bristol merchant marks over several centuries, drawn
from Bristol sources, is Alfred E. Hudd, Bristol Merchants Marks (Bristol, 1912).

8. Childs, Trade and Shipping, p. 86; Friel,‘Rise and fall of the Big Ship'.

9. Louis- Andre Vigneras,‘The Three Brothers Guerra of Triana and their Five Voyages
to the New World, 1498-1504', The Hispanic American Historical Review, 52 (1972),
635-6. A similarly high ratio of 1:3 or 1:3.5 operated for English ships in the mid¬
sixteenth century Guinea trade: J. D. Alsop,'Tudor Merchant Seafarers in the Early
Guinea Trade in Fury, Social History of English Seamen, 87-8. The fifty-ton Vizcaina,
used by Columbus in 1502, similarly carried 23 men, including a chaplain: Franco Gay
and Cesare Ciano, The Ships of Christopher Columbus, trans. L Bertolazzi and L. F.
Farina (Rome, 1996), 255.

10. Reddaway and Ruddock,‘The accounts of John Balsall', 8.

11. C. Varela, Cristobal Colon: de corsario a Almirante (Barcelona, 2005), 92.

12. Evidence relating to the age of mariners comes mostly from the sixteenth century: see
G. V. Scammell, 'Manning the English merchant service in the sixteenth century',
Mariners Mirror, 56 (1970), esp. 133,136-40,146-51; Ann Stirland, 'The men of the
Mary Rose’, in Fury, Social History of English Seamen, 47-73; Alsop,‘Tudor Merchant
Seafarers', 88-92.

13. Cheryl A. Fury/Health and Health Care at Sea^ in Fury, Social History of English
Seamen, pp. 194-8. When Henry VII’s great ship, the Sovereign, was moored in the
Thames in the winter of 1496-7, the mariners left on board to safeguard her were

each allowed around ten pints a day: M. Oppenheim (ed.). Naval Accounts and
Inventories of the Reign of Henry VII (Navy Records Society, viii, 1896), 163
[calculated using a tun of 240 gallons],

14. Bob Trett (ed.), Newport Medieval Ship: A Guide (Newport, 2011), 21; Margaret Rule,
T he Mary Rose (London, 1982), 190-1,198-9,

15, Tolsey Court Book, Bristol Record Office 08154(1), p. 158: cited (including the verse
that follows, and repeated refrain) Carus-Wilson, 'Overseas trade of Bristol’in Power
and Postan, Studies in English Trade, 190-1.

10 AFTERMATH

1. Williamson, Voyages of the Cabots (1929), 104-5.

2. E. Jones/Bristol and Newfoundland 1490-1570’, in I. Bulgin (ed.), Cabot and his
World Symposium, June 1 997 (Newfoundland Historical Society, 1999), 73-81; Peter
E. Pope, Fish into Wine (Chapel Hill, 2004), 11-32; Michael Huxley Barkham,'La
industria pesquera en el Pais Vasco peninsular al principio de la Edad Moderna: una
edad de oro?) Istas Memorial Revista de Estudios Maritimos de Pais Vasco (vol. 3,

2000), 54-65.

3. G. T. Cell, English Enterprise in Newfoundland 1577-1660 (Toronto, 1969).

4. II Gazettiere Americano, (publ. Marco Coltellini, Livorno, 1763), iii, 154.

5. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (CUP, 2000), 61-99;

Peter C. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: an Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America
(Yale, 2007).

6. L. C. Green/Claims to territory in colonial America) in L. C. Green and O. P.
Dickason, The Law of Nations and the New World (Edmonton, 1993).

7. For the Canadian reception and memorialisation of the voyages, see: Peter Pope, The
Many Landfalls of John Cabot (Toronto, 1997).

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