Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Cabotian Discovery
Sebastian Cabot is here made to declare that his father died in or about the year 1493, in the early spring of which year Columbus brought back the news of his discovery. The two public royal grants disclose the falseness of this statement. But, if the son was trying to appropriate the glory of the father, it was more natural, or, perhaps, you will say, more unnatural for him to make his father die before the expedition was conceived than to share with him in the fame of its success. We have three statements from Sebastian Cabot, - the first given by the historian, Peter Martyr, his familiar friend, and published at the time it was made, in which he makes no mention of his father, and in which he does claim to have directed an expedition from a point far north in the new world to a point near our Chesapeake bay. At this period Sebastian was about forty years of age and in high office in Spain. In the second statement, made directly to Ramusio by letter but many years previous to 1553, Sebastian does not mention his father, but does claim to have made a voyage along and beyond this land of New France, into a latitude of 675 degrees. In the third statement, made to the Mantuan gentleman, Sebastian distinctly declares that his father died in 1493, and that he made the voyage of discovery and coasted from a region far north, at least 56 degrees, and, perhaps 67% degrees, as declared in the second statement, to a region southward, toward the equinoctial, to that part of the firm land which is now called Florida. This last statement was made when Cabot was an old man. Nowhere, and at no period of his life, does he acknowledge the part his father bore in the discovery. The grandson of Columbus brought suit against the crown of Spain to establish certain family r1ghts, and on the 31st day of December, 1535, Sebastian Cabot testifies that he did not know, of his own knowledge, if the mainland ex tended north from Florida to the region called Baccalaos. This is a pub lic record, and no gentleman from, Mantua can take away its weight. I have always thought this testimony partially corroborative of Cabot's claim to have gone as far south as the parallel of the straits of Gibraltar. He was called as an expert witness, it being evidently thought he knew the entire country. He could not say he had been as far south as but he might have said he came within 11 of it, or to Chesapeake bay.
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