Cabot, John

Cabot, John (c. 1450-1499), Italian navigator and explorer, who, sailing for the English Crown, attempted to find a direct route to Asia and in so doing explored the North American coast. Although Cabot was probably born in Genoa (as Giovanni Caboto), as a youth he moved to Venice, where his seafaring career probably began. He became a naturalized Venetian sometime between 1471 and 1473, and traded spices throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. These spices originated from East Asia and were brought by caravans across Asia to the Middle East and on to Europe, where pepper, nutmeg, and cloves in particular were used to preserve meat. It was about this time that the Geography of Ptolemy was being translated into Latin, reviving the knowledge that the world was round and giving rise to the idea that East Asia might be reached by sailing westwards across the Atlantic.

In 1490 Cabot moved to Valencia, Spain, and in 1492 made a proposal for constructing new harbour facilities there. This was approved by King Ferdinand but shelved in 1493 due to lack of financial support. In that year, Christopher Columbus returned from his first voyage, and Cabot, perhaps realizing that Columbus had not reached Asia, proposed to Ferdinand and Isabella a more northerly voyage to reach the Asian mainland. They refused, presumably because their agreement with Columbus was exclusive. By 1496 Cabot had taken up residence in England, and had persuaded Henry VII to sanction his northern voyage to Asia. The proposed expedition was authorized on March 5, 1496, in spite of the pope's recent ruling that all newly explored lands be divided between Spain and Portugal.

Bristol was specified as Cabot's port of departure, being the most convenient for a westward voyage. The source of financial support for Cabot's expedition is unclear. No Bristol merchants are recorded as his backers. One likely reason is that Bristol fishermen had been secretly fishing on the Grand Banks since the early 1480s, landing on Newfoundland to process and dry their catch, thus making Bristolian merchants reluctant to cooperate with a venture that would bring their fishing ground to public attention and make it known to commercial rivals. Cabot made a voyage in the summer of 1496, but was driven back by storms in the Atlantic. The following year he tried again.

With a crew of 18 men (possibly including the navigator's son Sebastian Cabot), Cabot sailed from Bristol on May 20 (or possibly May 2), 1497, in the Matthew. He steered a generally westward course and on June 24, 1497, after a rough voyage, he landed on what he believed to be the mainland of north-eastern Asia, and claimed the land for Henry VII. He found evidence of human occupation but saw no inhabitants. His landing place and route thereafter is uncertain. His landfall has traditionally been identified as Newfoundland. A contemporary reference (a letter written to Columbus by the English merchant John Day in early 1498), however, states that most of the land was discovered “after turning back”, suggesting that Cabot followed the mainland coast in a north-easterly direction, and meaning that his landfall would have been in Maine or Nova Scotia, following the coast perhaps as far as Cape Breton Island. This route is supported by the statement in the same source that Cabot's crew “confused him”, making him think he was too far north, with the implication that they deliberately sailed further south than Cabot intended, to avoid bringing him to Newfoundland. Nevertheless, this makes Cabot's achievement the first recorded landing by Europeans on the North American mainland. Cabot returned to England on August 6, and was granted a pension.

Assured of royal support, he immediately planned a third exploratory voyage that he hoped would bring him to Cipangu (Japan), which he believed lay to the south of his previous landfall. The expedition, consisting of five ships and some 200 men, left Bristol in May 1498. They were caught in a storm in the Atlantic and one ship returned for repairs while the others continued. Their fate is unknown to this day. One possibility is that the whole expedition was lost at sea. Another possibility is that at least some of the ships reached North America before proceeding south-west along the coast, as Cabot intended. Two pieces of evidence support this. Firstly, in 1501, a Portuguese expedition led by Gaspar Corte-Real to the North American coast contacted indigenous peoples who showed them a European sword and pair of earrings which, it seems in retrospect, probably came from Cabot's 1498 expedition. Secondly, a Spanish expedition of 1499 to the southern Caribbean led by Alonso de Ojeda, Juan de la Cosa, and Amerigo Vespucci, seems to have encountered the remnants of Cabot's fleet off the Guajira Peninsula of northern Colombia. This was stated by the Spanish historian Martín Fernández de Navarette in 1829, and is supported by the wording of the licence for Ojeda's follow-up voyage in 1501, which mentions exploring land to the west of Guajira, “in the region ... where the English were making discoveries”. If there was an encounter, it seems likely that the English were killed, and the charts of their discoveries taken. This is suggested by Juan de la Cosa's map of 1500, and by the Vespucci-influenced 1507 map of Martin Waldseemüller, which both contain representations of the Central and North American coasts before they had been visited by any known European voyages. The lack of any firmer corroborating testimony may be due to Ferdinand and Isabella suppressing information to prevent it damaging negotiations for the marriage of their daughter, Catherine of Aragón, to Henry VII's son, Prince Arthur, which were then taking place.

Despite the mysterious outcome of the 1498 voyage, and the total cessation of English exploration under Henry VIII, Cabot's 1497 expedition had laid the groundwork for England's interest in, and later colonization of, North America. Although he did not find the spices of the Orient, he brought the Grand Banks fishing grounds, which became the basis of the European fishing industry in subsequent years, into open public knowledge. Cabot's voyage gave European geographers their first hint of the size and extent of the North American continent, and led to searches for a North West Passage to the Orient.