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1
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6
Sebastian Cabot
—John Cabc)t
o
Endeavored by Henry Stevens g m b etc
Corresponding member of the American Oriental
Society and of the New England Historic
Genecdw^ical Society etc
li
Boston: Office of the Daily Advertiser
LONUOJf : Office of the Author 4 Trafalgar Square
March 1870
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' * I WlWlH li lll> iiii n,i iii ni l >,m i ^ i iiiM»j i.,
Entered nccorrlinj? to Aot of Congress in the year ll^'O by
IIknkv S'JEVENS in the Clerks OtRee of the
Dist/ict Court of the District of
Massachusetts
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To
D H U N I E
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Truth crushed ti) earth shall rise again,
Till" eternal years of God are hers,
JBut Error wounded writhes with pain
And dies among his worshipers.
Bryant.
8
1 1
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The Cabots
ii
i-
N THESE DATS WHEN ELECTROPLATE
and Show invade and pervade our sanc-
tums, banishinjjj many of our sterlins:
national and family treasures bearing
the hall-mark of truth and reality to our jiarrets
or to the vaults of our bankers^ it becomes us
from time to time to lookout and overhaul our
household gods, to inspect iheir condition, that we
May transmit them to our children unimpaired.
Keep the golden candlesticks of your households
polished,and permit neither your Bible, your mor-
ality, nor your historv to become tarnished by
I
'•saaswKBsew**®!
:. *p«w«!i«^ .,
neglect or disuse, was the pateraal advice of the
Old Translators, advice which comes home to out
business and bosoms with peculiar force to-day.
The Fifth of March has already, for the
hundredth time, reminded us of our national
origin and our progress. Soon the hundredth
Fourth of July will be here, and ere long the
four-hundreth anniversary of the birth of our
Continent. In the whirl and turmoil of the pres-
ent, are we sufficiently mindful of the past, that,
as these red-letter days come round, we may, at
short sight, be ready to exhibit to the world, giv-
ing an account of our stewardship, our historical
penates and heirlooms untarnished and pure?
Indulging in this burnishing mood, suggested by
our calendar of events, and resolvintT well for the
future, but hardly knowing where to begin, we
found on our table a little volume bearing this
title: The Remarkable Life, Adventures and
Discoveries of Sebastian Cabot, of Bristol, the
Founder of Great Britain's Maritime Power;
Dlscovertir of America, and its first Colonizer.
By J. F. Nicholls, Citrf Librarian, Bristol. 20opp.
Cap ito, London, Sainpson Low & Co., 18G9.
-'^' J!**4 S-^Sm
ti
We confess that wc cut the leaves of this
beautiful book, from the Cliiswlck Press of
\Vhittin«ham, with an eagerness that has seldom
been ours. Wc read it throufih, and throu;;h, and
thronsh, and closed it witli a profound disappoint-
ment which had never before been ours. We inter-
leaved it dclic:itcly with our historic litmus-paper
and endeavored to test its facts and inferences bv
the new li{2;hts and the new readinjjrs developed
by the active reseat ch of our aftc. We had lonj?
hoped some dny to find time with reverent hanJs
to mouse round in old Bristol and discover some
lony; hidden documents that mi;:;ht throw li^ht
on the honored family of the Cabots. Mr Nich-
olls, as a thorouL;h-2;oinij antiquary, well versed
in the eravc-stone, cuddy-hole and garret lore
of his city, has dispelled that hope.
We know nothing of Mr Nicholls personally,
but his book shows him to be an earnest, pains-
taking bio2:rapher, as honest in his convictions
and statements as an overwhelmin^r partiality for
a pet subiect renders it possible for him to be He
has studied so lovingly and so persistently that he
has Cabotizcd all his surroundin;;s. Not having
--■""SSSw^^?
8
found at Bristol any thing unknown before, prop
crly pcrtainini? to the Cabots, and bcinp; no more
successful elsewhere in Enjiland, he has been
compelled to rehash the excellent but illdijrcsted
work of our countryman Biddlc with the works of
Tytler and Humboldt, seasoning the dish with the
recent discoveries of Mr Rawdon Brown in Ven-
ice and Mr Bergenroth in Spain, flavoring the
whole with a portrait of Sebastian Caoot ex-
quisitely engraved by Rawle, and an extract
from "Sebastian Cabot's map" of 1544, now pre-
scnx'd in the Imperial library at Paris.
Mr Nicholls as a painstaking chronicler, has
used, it must be admitted, all the materials that
the active research of many geographers and
antiquaries has turned up in the present century.
Nothing old or new, bearing directly on the Ca-
bots, seems to have escaped him, not even the
latest disquisitions of Mr Bancroft, Dr Kohl or
M. d'Avezac. The result is the above remark-
aole title-page to a more reniarkable book of
which the following remarkable passages are the
substance of his conclusions:--
^\f
I If
"And Sebastian Cabot win henceforlh have a Uomo In
erery English heart, as well as In that of the great nation
who dwell In the land which he first discovered, and
which ought at this day, Instead of America, to be
called Cabotla." [Pagex.j "The date of his dcath,llke that
of his birth. Is unknown.... Even where his ashes lie Is a
ixjysterv; and he who gave to England a contlnent.and to
Spain an empire, lies in some unknown tomb." Page 187
"This man, who surveyed and depicted three thousand
miles ot a coast which he had discovered ; who «ave to
Britain, not only the continent, but the untold riches of
the deep, in the fisheries of Newfoundland, and the whale
flshcy of the Arct!c sea ; who broke up a monopoly that,
vamplre-like, was sucking out England's infant strength,
and unlocked for her the treasures of the world, paying.
'Go, vrln and then wear them ;' who is never reported to
have struck an aggressive blow ; who made enemies into
friends, and whose friends were ever warmly attached to
him : who, by his uprightness and fair dealing, raised
England's name high among the nations, placed her
credit on a solid foundation, an(? r^ade her citizens re-
spected ; who was the father of free trade, and gave ua
the carrying trade of the world ; this man has not a statue
in the city fBristoij that gave him birth, or in the metrop
olisof the country he so greatly enriched, or a name on
the land he discovered. Emphatically, the most scientific
seaman of his own or, perhaps, many subsequent ages-
one of the greatest, bravest, b. ' of men— his actions have
been misrepresented, hia disc veries denied, his deeds
h
10
ascribed to others, and calumny has flung its fllth on his
meTuory." [Pagel88.J "We have striven to clear away the
misrepresentations with which ignorance, pr-^judlce, and
malignity have overlaid his life and actions To us It has
been Indeod alabor of love ; for, iike some glorious f\ntiuue
in an acropolis of weeds, he g.ew in beauty as we lifted off,
one after an another, the aspersions which had been cast
upon him, until, as the last stain was removed, and our
loving work was done, ab ^A stood before us In the
majesty of his true uanhood, w<? were amazed that such
a man stiould have remained so little known, and our only
sorrow in connection with our worli was ibis— that the
taek of exhurjlng his reeutation bad not fallen into abler
and more efficient hands." i Page 189. J
Now, without attempting to become champions
of Historic Truth, being familiar with all the
materials specially bearing upon the Cabots
used in compiling this book, and acquainted
with much more of a general character which
ought to have been used by the loving compiler,
we cannot forbear any longer to record our earn-
est and loving protest, in behalf of the memory of
Christopher Columbus and John Cabot, against
such wholesale assumptions. We hesitate nc . to
declare that there is no warrant in the documents
used by Mr Nicholls to justify him in placing
Sebastian Cabot on (his pedestal.
f
i
»!««£••<«»«
;
ii
I
II
f
h
Uiuil very recently it was not possible to elimi-
nate the exploits of Sebastian, the son, from the
story of John Cabot, the father. Peter Martyr,
Oviedo, Gomara, Ramusio, Eden and Ilakluyt,
all speak of them at times indiscriminately and
very confusedly. All their testimony is either
gossipy and loose, or recorded at second or even
third hand, long after date, r.ith a painful lack of
precision and chronology, evidence altogether
untrustworthy. This confusion has now been
made apparent by 'he contemporary documents
recently given to the world. The matter is now
partiallv, not wholly, cleared up,, leaving our
present knowledge of Sebastian Cabot very
slight, ev^en less than when he shone in his
father's plumes.
It is only by making his hero tell a positive
falsehood (see page 110) that Mr Nicholls makes
Sebastian Cabot an Englishman at all instead of
a Venetian, and in the face of the most valuable
contemporary papers he appropriates lienors to
the son which rightfully belong to the father,
John Cabot. The truth is that all these contem-
porary documents of 1497 and 1498 recently
»*j^-»^,;
f
brought to light from the archives of Venice,
Simancas and Seville, by Mr Rawdon Brown
and Mr Beri^enroth, at the instigation of the
British government, refer only to John Cabot
and the voyage of 1497, merely alluding to the
larger expedition of 1498 as having gone forth,
John Cabot with it, but not yet returned.
Nothing whatever on contemporary authority at
present is known of the details or results of this
latter voyage, or of Sebastian Cabot's connection
with it. That he was in both voyages, though
verv young, there is little doubt, but in a subor-
dinate capacity. Ar- nothing more is beard of
John Cabot it is not unlikely that he died during
the voyp.ge of 1498, and so his sou took
command— but even this is not certain.
We have no distinct account of the second voy-
age of 1498, nor have we of any subsequent
voyage from England, of Sebastian Cabot. If he
made the voyages of 1502, or 1517, or 1527, or
the "many other voyages, which I now preter-
"mit," they "took none effect," and we have no
reliable accounts of them. Like the spurious
voyage of 1494, thev must have got into history
Y'
C>
?
13
from typoorapliical errors (like 1494 from mcccc-
xcvii, II for a bad v,) misreadings of authoritif^,
or from illogical old gossips like Peter Martyr
of Anffleria and Butri^arius.
It is always dangerous, we know, to attempt
the proof of a negative from circumstantial
evidence, for any day new documents may turn
up to confront us and spoil our reasoning. But
our present lights, if hung with impartiality and
judgment, are sufficient to dissipate the fog that
has so long obscured the discoveries of the Ce-
bots. They are not to be used like the hand-Ian-
tern of Diogenes, but the student with painful la-
bor must light up and go over the wholo fiold of
history and geography of that day, and look into
the 'sea of darkness,' as the Atlantic was then
ca'ed, stand in their shoes, and see our sphere as
the Oabots saw it.
Bear in mind that our grand old globe then
stood bolt upright and independent, while the
sun, before Copernicus commanded it to stand
still, was good enough to revolve round it, the
land being much Jiore extensive than the water,
Europe and Asia coming round the north like a
H
bi<r overcoat covei rng its back and shoulders, so
that the North Atlantic was his shirt front,
England being a button, and the Gulf of St
Lawrence, then supposed to be in Asia, the cor-
responding button-hole, while Africa and India
were the tails hanging down into the sea below
the equatorial waistband. No one then dreamed
of an Intervening new continent, or a Pacific slit
up the back.
Let us dismiss all our geographical knowledge
acquired since the year 1498, and then read the
following extracts of letters written from Lon-
don. The first is from Pasqaaligo to his brothers
in Venice, daied August 23, 1497 :—
'•The Venetian, onr countryman, who went with a ship
from Bristol In quest of new islands. Is returned and says
that seven hundred leagues hence he dlscoverec*. land, the
territoryof the Grand Cham. He coasted three hundred
leagues and landed; saw no human beings He was
three months on the voyage and on his return saw two is-
lands on his right hand, but would not land, time being
precious, and he was short of provisions.... The King of
England is much pleased with the intelligence. The King
has promised that In the spring [of 1498] our countryman
shall have ten ships," etc "He is now at Bristol
with his wife, who is also Venetian and with his sons;
I
'
%
his name Is Zuan Cabot, and he is styled the great a .-
iniral....The discoverer of these places planted on his
new found land a large cross, with one flaar of Ennland
and another of St Mark (Venice) by reason of his being
a Venetian."
The next day, August 24, 1497, Raimundus
in London wrote to lils government in Venice: —
"Also some months aeo his Majesty [Henry VII] sent
out a Venetian LJohn Cabot] who is a very good mariner
and has good skill in discovering netv^ islands, and he has re
turned safe, and has found two very large and fertile new
islands.... The next spring [14981 his Majesty means to
send him with 15 or 20 ships."
Don Pedro de Ayala, the Spanish ambassador
at the Court of Henry VII, wrote to Ferdinand
and Isabella on the 25th of Jul/, 1498, of John
Cabot, as follows: —
"I think that your Majesties have already heard that the
King of England has LthiR year] equipped a fleet in order
to discover certain islands and continents which he was
informed some people from Bristol, who manned a few
ships for the same purpose last year ri497], had tound. I
have seen the map which the discoverer has made, who
is another Genoise, like Columbus, and who has been in
Seville and in Lisbon, asking assistance for his discoveries.
The people of Bristol have, for tha last seven years, sent
out every year two, three or four light ships (Caraveias)
7^£i»^;K£^i^^tiiim^S '^»»ii^Si23in»i»isM!^I^I^Siiie@j^^^^t.'.
^^ mmmmmt^ii ^ iiiS^sm0i-» ' ''**>''^''^'-'- ■■ '■'■» > '^
i6
insearjhofthe Idand of Brazil and the Seven Cities ac-
cording to the fancy of this Genolse. The King determln.
ed to send out cmore ships this year, 14981 because the
year before they brought certain news that they had
found land. His fleet consisted of Ave vessels, which
carried provisions for one year. It is said that one of
them. ...has returned to Ireland in great distress... The
Genoise [John Cabotj has continued his voyage. I have
seen on a chart the direction which they took, and the
distance they sailed, and I think that what they have
found, or What they are in search of, Is what your Ma-
lestles already pop less [being west of the line of Demarca-
tm]. Itisexpeotedthat they will be back In the month
of September."
These documents are perfectly authentic, and
the statements in the extracts are positive, ira-
portant and susrgestive. In the first place, they
speak only of John Cabot, and effectually dispose
of the pretence that the islands were discovered
on the 24th of June. 1494, as pertinaciously con-
tended by M. d'Avezac, and feebly argued by Mr
Nicholls, instead of 1497.
From the year 1491 or 1492, there was a
search by the people ot Bristol, in accordance
with the fancy of John Cabot, for the fabled
island of Brazil, supposed to lie somewhere west
#
W
I
h
I
17
of the coast of Ireland, but there is no intimation
that they had found it, or that Cahot had gone
himself to look for it; but in 1497 this Genoise
did find land, for the first time. It was on the
island of Cape Breton, as we learn from other au-
thorities. The same 6 ay he saw the island of St
John, now Prince Edward's Island, and on his
return voyage, coasting 800 leagues, saw two
other islands, probably Anticosti and the north end
of Newfoundland, near the Straits of Belle Isle;
thence home, after an absence of threa months.
Nothing south of the Gulf of St Law-
rence could have been seen in this voyage, not
even the province of Maine. If he effected a
landing it was probably on the island of St
John. He did not land on the other two islands
seen on the right in his homeward passage. It is
not unlikely that the south side of Labrador may
have been seen; but it is very doubtful if John
Cabot or any one of his party touched the North
American main continent in. 1497, or before
Columbus landed in Scuth America, in Vene-
zuela, the 30th May, 1498, though this is a matter
of no consequence, as far as the priority of the dis-
n
mmimm
i8
covery of America by Christopher Columbus
is concerned.
These extracts show that John Cabot was a fel-
low-countryman of Columbus, though by naturali-
zation in 1476 he became a Venetian ,and suggest a
plausible theory to account for his movements be-
tween the granting of his patent in March 1496,
and the sailing of his ship, the Mathew, in May
1497. Columbus returned from his second or
three years' voyage in June 1496, bringing his
master of charts, Juan de la Cosa, with him to
Seville. The Spanish ambassador writes that
Cabot has been in Seville, that is recently. This
may have been between March 1496 and April
1497, or between September 1497 and the early
spring of 1498.
In either case John Cabot might have seen both
Columbus and La Cosa in Seville. La Cosa's great
chart very accurately depicting the north side of
the Gulf of St Lawrence was finished in the year
1500, and bears every mark of authenticity, but
contains no evidence of discoveries south of the
Straits of Belle Isle after the yoyage of 1497,
I
A
mmmmmm
M^mmm-ji '
t9
either by the Cabots or the Cortereals. There is,
of course, great uncertainty in this reasoning:,
but at all events this important passage in the
ambassador's letter shows the early connection
of John Cabot with Spain if not with Columbus
and La Cosa.
If Sebastian Cab , therefore, as Mr NicholTs
claims 'surveyed and depicted three thousand
miles of a coast,* it must have been in the Gulf
of St Lawrence, or north of it, as a subordinate
to his father John Cabot, and not later than
149b. There is at present, as far as we know, no
authentic contemporary evidence known that
either John or Sebastian Cabot ever surveyed the
coast south of Nova Scotia. We have not over-
looked the statement of Peter Martyr or that of
Butrigarius, or the assertions of scores of other
later authorities based upon these two gossins,
the one writing wildly eighteen, and the other
more than forty, years after the events described.
In the fall of 1512, John Cabot in whose name
thepaient of 1496 and the supplemental license
of 1498 stood, being dead, Sebastian Cabot, it is
so
well known, haying received no further encour-
agement from Henry VH or Henry VHI, was
residing in October in Seville, with a royal
commission as captain in his pocket, awaiting
orders there, in the service of the King of
Spain, where he remained for a great num-
ber of years, though perhaps visiting England
occasionally. Here he became the intimate
friend of Peter Martyr, one of the Council
of the Indies, and shortly after was ap-
pointed a member of that board himself.
A little later, rising in honors and salary, he be-
came in 1518 the pilot mt^jor of Spain, andin
152d was deputed as one of the twenty-four wise
men of Charles the Fifth, to preside over the
celebrated Geographical Congress of Badajos.
After the return of the Victoria in 1522 with the
glorious results of Magellan's unfortunate expe-
dition, maritime enterprise, public and private,
was greatly a-oused throughout Spain and Por-
tugal. Innumerable schemes for developing com-
merce with the Orient, and making further
discoveries and explorations, were pro-
posed to the Council of the Indies and
l\
»l
*
discussed. Every pilot, whether amateur or
practical, had his card of the ' hortest route to
the Indies. Of these schemes, no loss than six
were approved and adopted by the government
and promoted wholly or in part by the public
funds, viz: that of Cortes, of Loaysa, of Gomez,
of Ayllon, of Cabot himself, and of Saavedra,
besides many others of minor importance.
Now in the several official positions of Sebas-
tian Cabot in Spain, it was his duty to superintend
and watch over all the discoveries and explora-
tions of the Spanish navieators, to supply them
with instructions, charts and scientific instru-
ments, etc.
As councillor, as pilot major and president of
the geographers, and as a man of vast experience,
he was presumed to know all that had been dis-
covered by his contemporaries. Is it reasonable,
therefore, to suppose that if he had been down
the coast of Maine, Massachusetts and Virginia,
from Bacalaos, as his advocates claim, in 1497 or
1498, to latitude 30 degrees, or as some say to the
point of Florida, he would have yielded without a
I 0Mi^Jl»aKii:^-^'.^i^JJSBn-3>Sei^ii&^^SSf^-^^-'--'iS^^
22
word of protest his prior right to the discoveries
of Ponce de Leon in Florida in 1518, of Griialra,
Cortes and Garay, in the Gulf of Mexico, in
1518 20, of A jUon as far north as Cape Fear in
1520 and 1526, of Gomez up to Rhode Island in
1525, to say nothing of the voyages of Verazzano
for the French ? No writer pretends to deprive
these navigators of their rights as discoverers
and explorers, and no protest or contemporary
claim is forthcoming from Sebastian Cabot, who
was all the time in the field and well acquainted
with the affairs.
It is to be borne in mind that, while these
navigators were groping their way up the
coast of the present United States from Florida
towards Cape Malabar, or the south side of Cape
Cod, between 1518 and 1525, they supposed they
were exploring the coast of Eastern Asia, beyond
where Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville had
been, never suspecting an intervening continent,
so much out were they and all the scientific
world besides in their calculations of longitude.
La Cosa laid down the Asiatic line in 1500, con-
tinuing it from a little boyond the Ganges to
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meet the parts discovered by John Cabot. La
Cosa positively limits, in a very definite manner,
the discoveries of the English to the Mar or Gulf
0/ St Lawrence.
The highly important Portuguese portolano
now preserved at Munich, and described by
Kuntzmann, made about 1514, one of the earliest
and honestest maps known, after adding the dis-
coveries of the Cortereals to those of the Cabots,
and of Ponce de Leon, leaves the whole space
from Nova Scotia to Charleston open, as being
entirely unknown. From all these circumstances
we are forced to the conclusion that the rights of
tbe English to the discoveries of John Cabot and
his family in 1497-98 were allowed to lapse, and
that Sebastian Cabot never saw the North Amer-
ican coast south of Nova Scotia.
In April, 1528, Sebastian Cabot, after long and
ample preparations at Seville, sailed for the
Moluccasvia the Straits of Magellan, with four
well equipped ships, for the purpose of reen-
forcing and assisting the expedition of Loaysa
vrhich had sailed nine months before by the same
■■i
route, with the view first to succor the men left
there by Magellan's fleet, and then to establish
and protect in the Moluccas Spanish Commercial
Bureaus. Cabot's expedition was an utter failure,
chiefly from his practical incompetence and dis-
obedience of orders. Juan de Solis had been
down the coast of Brazil, and Cabot had con-
ceived a notion that by penetrating the great
river afterwards called Rio de la Plata he might
pass through to the Moluccas, and thus
avoid the Southern straits and shorten the
distance to the Spiceries. Accident and mutiny
had something, no doubt, to do with his change
of plan, but his ambition to find a new route
had more.
In this expedition Cabot penetrated far into
the interior of Paraguay', explor* i many larjje
rirars and fertile provinces, suffered many hard-
ships, lost most of his men and ships, and finally,
after more than five years of toil, hardship and
disappointment, returned to Spain, in 1531, with-
out any favorable results, to find that Charles the
Fifth, hard up for money, had pawned the Moluc-
cas to the King of Portugal, and was too happy
to avoid any Inquiry into the failures of his six
great exploring expeditions. So Cabot resumed
his oflacia! duties and remained in office till 1548,
when he returned to England at the affep-obably
of seventy-two or seventy-six years.
Shortly after this he was made use of by cer-
tain merchants of London in getting up a trad-
ing company to Russia, and to seek a North-
eastern passage to China. But of these honor-
able enterprises very little has come down to us
of a character to lift him to the high position
claimed by Mr NichoUs. Documents may here-
after turnup justifying in a degree the high
encomiums of our author,but at present we know
of them not. Nor do we know of any one whose
'calumny has flung its filth on his memory.' On
the page of history if one find^ very little in favor of
Sebastian Cabot to raise him far above the level,
yet no one has found anything against him.
His record, so far as we know, is honorable, but
there is very little of it, and it seems to us idle at
this day by mere assertion to build up a reputa-
tion for him.
26
1^ I
Sebastian Cabot died probably in 1558, but no
one at present knows precisely when or where,
and therefore it would be as diflacult to find a fit
place to erect a monument to him, as to find a
good p.nd sufficient reason for it. It is better far,
according to the old saw, that people should ask,
why hath not this man a monument? than, why
hath he one? We ask why should a statue be
erected to Sebastian Cabot? and why should the
new Continent be named Cabotia?
To all intents and purposes Christopher Colum-
bus was the discoverer of America, and is entitled
to that honorable distinction. The grand idea
of sailing west to find the east was his, and the
success was his; let the honor be his. For
eighteen years was he laboring to cipher out and
to carry out this theory, which was all his own.
Tired and worn out in Portugal, after ten years
he found his way into Spain in 1485. For
seven long years he danced attendance on the
Sp-^nish Court, with no fortune but his idea;
sometimes thread-bare and bare-footed, ever
pressing his suit, never flagging in his confidence,
■iifir (iiiniii
i
27
i
questioned and ridiculed by commissions of
geographers and scientific men, scorned by the
Church and its narrow-pated sciolists ; without
ever being able to penetrate the conservative
ignorance of the learned, the reverend and the
courtly, 01'^ as he compluined, to convince any
one man how it was possible to sail west and
reach the East.
To us, therefore, it seems but trifling with com-
mon sense and playing with wr ds for Mr
Nicholls to contend that Sebastian Cebot discov-
ered America, just as it does for Senhor Vamha-
gen to bestow the distinction of Discoverer upon
Amerigo Vespucci. In the year 1492, Columbus,
after having first made his landfall upon a small
island, explored the northeast coast of Cuba,
supposing it to pertain to Asia. Thence return-
ing eastward, he visited Hispsniola, taking it to
be the Zipangn of Marco Polo — the Japan of to-
day. In 1494, in his second voyage, he explored
almost the entire southern coast of Cuba, having
his Master of Charts, Juan de la Cosa, with him
to delineate his discoveries] and soon after cir-
cumnavigated his Zipangu, visiting Jamaica and
■M««
28
Other islands. In 1506, two years before Cuba
was found to be an island, Columbus d!.,d in the
belief that, by a weetem route, he had found the
land of the Grand Cham of China. Now at that
time, whatever portions of the globe did not per-
tain to Europe or Africa, belonged to Asia. He
placed his discoveries in Eastern Asia, giving
names only to certain islands in compliment to
hi.^ patrons, but was too just and modesUo
bestv-'w his own name on the ancient continent of
Asia, parts of which Alexander had conquered
and Aristotle described. By a circumstance per-
fectly fortuitous, after the death of Columbus,
and without the knowledge of Vespucci, in 1507,
by a little knot of eaiuest students, in a remote
mountain town of France, the beautiful name
America was suggested for the newly described
large island of Terra Santa Crusis, or Brazil.
This large country was nearly a thousand miles
from thfc regions first discovered by Columbus,
and another thousand from that other province
of Asia called Bacalaos, afterwards seen by John
Cabot. No one then suspected that all these
fields of discovery were parts of one grand conti-
K
it-.
I
V
29
nent, to become thereafter known as the New
Hemisphere. Of these names of distinct pro-
vinces, Cuba, Paria, Brazil, America and Baca-
laos, the chances cf one supplanting the rest
were as good as thosfi of another. But, as usual,
beauty triumphed. As subsequent explorations
connected the islands and developed the conti-
nent, the beautiful name America extended by
degrees ovCi the whole, by the same law of man-
ifest destiny which caused the easily pronounced
name of the little province of Apeica to sup-
plant that of ancient Libya. Within about a
century, the new hemisphere became North and
South America, the fourth grand division of the
globe. Cuba, therefore, discovered in 1492, is as
much a part of America as England is of Eiirope,
or Martha's Vineyard is of Massachusetts; and
hence Columbus is entitled to the designation of
Di8coverer,ju8tasmuchasif he had the same
year first put his foot upon Florida, Labrador or
Brazil.
Thus the ambitious monument which Mr
Nicholas has achieved for his hero with such
commendable zeal and love is chipped away by
mm
■m
■I
30
the cold chisel of simple facts, leaving his book
without a hero and his hero without a record.
Sebastian Cabot, who has been cruelly dragged
into prominence within the last forty years by
over-zealous advocates, must now bow to the in-
exorable laws of historic truth and retire to
respectable mediocrity, unless some new old
documents may reinstate him, while his father
will assume his true position on the page of
history.
We are sorry for Mr Nicholls and dear old
mercantile Bristol to lose a pet hero like Sebas-
tian Cabot; but if with his manifestly earnest
and amiable qualities the author can transfer his
labor of love to John Cabot, elide a great deal of
irrelevant padding, correct innumerable authorial
and typographical errors, state his opinions in
something like logical sequence, with guesses
a little narrower and studies a little broader, with
more precision and less fine writing, with bigger
facts and smaller inferences, he may yet achieve
a Cabotia of some sort or other for Bristol, and
deposit in the British Museum a Life of John
Cabot that shall be a credit to himself, a valuable
mm
4
'
31
contribution to biographical literature, and an
honor to Bristol. Let him suppress his finely en-
graved map, because, of the sixty-five names
upon it, his copyist and engraver have managed
to misspell above forty, hopelessly disguising
some of them. This is a very serious matter, un-
necessarily complicating questions too obscure
already.
In a future edition Mr Nicholls might also
explain, in respect of the excellent line-en-
graved portrait, that what was true of it forty
years ago is not true now. The original portrait
(not by Holbein, as claimed, for it is now ascer-
tained that Hans died five years before Sebastian
Cabot returned to England from Spain) was
once in the possession of Charles Joseph Har-
ford, esq., but about forty years ago it passed
into the hands of our countryman, Mr Richard
Biddle, at a cost, it is understood, of £500, and
was brought to this country. A fine copy, full
size, was taken, and is now preserved in the
galiery of the Massachusetts Historical Society,
the original having been destroyed some years
ago in the great fire of 1 litsburg.
KMMIWiMMiWM
mmmm
3«
By just so many pegs as we lower the hero of
Mr Nicholls, a corresponding allowance must
be debited to Dr Kohl and M. d'Avezac against
their estimates of Sebastian Cabot in the recent
volume of the Maine Historical Society. America
in rearranging and setting up her penates,
maet never forget Sebastian Cabot or
be ungrateful for his services, but
let the niche assigned to him by
Truth and History be ap-
propriate to his merits,
and not derogatory
to the honor of
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