[LINK] "Did English reach New World first?"

[rfmcdonald]

The latest installment of the story of John Cabot, the Italian explorer in service to the English Crown who made the first documented trips to what is now Canada--likely Newfoundland--made the narrative all the more interesting. The suggestion that Cabot was drawing Bristol seafarers' recently-acquired knowledge of lands on the other side of the Atlantic sounds plausible, to be sure--the Grand Banks, with their once-rich cod fisheries, may have attracted fishermen from western Europe from as early as the mid-15th century.

The Italian-born Cabot is known to have sailed from England in search of the New World three times between 1496 and 1498. He is believed to have reached Newfoundland aboard the Matthew in 1497, but Cabot disappears from the historical record after his return voyage to North America in 1498, and is generally presumed to have perished during that expedition.

[. . .] University of Florence history Prof. Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli, working closely with two British researchers and funded largely by a Canadian benefactor, has now pieced together the full story of Cabot's Italian financing and published his findings in the scholarly journal Historical Research.

At the heart of Guidi-Bruscoli's discovery is a long-overlooked accountant's notation in records held by a Florentine archive detailing a loan of "nobili 50" - 50 nobles sterling or about 16 English pounds - to "Giovanni Chabotte vini-ziano" (John Cabot of Venice) "a trovare il nuovo paese" (to find the new land).

Historians have traditionally described the sailor's voyages, despite Cabot's Italian heritage, as a purely English enterprise. But "despite the brevity of the entry" in the record book maintained by the Bardi banking family of Florence, "it opens a whole new chapter in Cabot scholarship, introducing an unexpected Europe-an dimension and posing new questions for the field," Guidi-Bruscoli writes.

Among the questions posed are two particularly significant ones: Did Cabot already know about "the land" he was supposedly setting off to find? And is it possible that other sailors from England, where Cabot had moved to pursue his dream of overseas exploration, had previously visited "the new land" of North America - perhaps even before Christopher Columbus's voyage to the Caribbean Islands in 1492 and that epoch-making "discovery" of the New World?

Remarkably, the answer to both questions may be yes, says University of Bristol historian Evan Jones, one of the British scholars working with Guidi-Bruscoli and founder of the Cabot Project research initiative, funded in large part by Canadian philanthropist Gretchen Bauta of the Weston family retail dynasty.

The clue, says Jones, is the ledger's reference to Cabot's goal being "the" new land rather than the indefinite "a" or some other less precise phrasing.

"I think we can be pretty certain that 'the new land' doesn't refer to the land Columbus had found - given that the royal patent Cabot was granted was pretty clear about excluding these territories," said Jones. "So, I think the reference must indicate that the Bardi believed that Cabot was going off to discover/rediscover a land already known about. The use of 'new' suggests it was a land which had been found relatively recently - so this can't be a reference to the Norse voyages."