Cabot, John

Cabot, John, the Anglicized form of Caboto, Giovanni (c.1450–98), Italian navigator. Very little is known of his early life but it is believed that he was born in Genoa and as a boy went to Venice where he was naturalized as a Venetian citizen. He appears to have commanded a merchant ship which traded to the Levant and on one of these voyages is said to have visited Mecca where he was amazed by the market there in spices, silk, and jewels. Being told that they came overland by caravan from Asia, and knowing that the earth was a sphere, he was seized with the idea that it would be quicker to bring them to Europe by sea if he could reach Cathay and Cipangu, the names by which China and Japan were known to Europeans in the 15th–17th centuries, by crossing the western ocean. Unable to convince the European courts to the extent of equipping an expedition, Cabot brought his family to London in 1484, and tried to persuade the more important merchants of Bristol that an attempt should be made to reach Cathay by sea. They agreed to take the risk of such a voyage but stipulated that he should first go by way of Brasil and the Isle of the Seven Cities, those mythical islands which were shown on all the medieval maps of the western ocean.

Before the expedition could be organized and dispatched, news was received in England of Christopher Columbus's voyage. The British merchants now decided that time should not be spent searching for either Brasil or the Isle of the Seven Cities, but that the expedition should go direct to Asia by sailing west. Letters patent were granted by King Henry VII in March 1496 to his ‘well-beloved John Gabote, citizen of Venice … to seeke out, discover and finde whatsoever isles, countries, regions or provinces of the heathen and infidels which before this time have been unknown to all Christians’. He set sail from Bristol in May 1497 in a small ship called the Matthew, manned by eighteen men. On 24 June Cabot sighted one of the northern capes of Newfoundland, on which island he landed, and took possession of it in the name of the king. On its return the ship passed over what are now known as the Grand Banks off the Newfoundland coast where the crew caught huge quantities of cod merely by lowering baskets into the sea. It was this discovery which led directly to the development of the Newfoundland fisheries.

On his return Cabot received £10 reward from the king for having discovered the ‘new island’ which he thought, and convinced the king, was off the coast of Cathay. He proposed to Henry VII that a new expedition could not only repeat the voyage but by sailing to the south after making the coast would surely reach Cipangu and thus make London the greatest trading centre in the world for the products of the East. Cabot, after the king's promise of a second expedition, made a visit to Seville and Lisbon in an effort to recruit men who had sailed with Columbus, but appears to have had little success. Henry VII issued new letters patent on 3 February 1498 giving Cabot the power to ‘impress’ six English ships for the voyage. However, only five were taken up; they were victualled for a year, and, in accord with the king's licence, Cabot, proceeding westwards from his last discovery until he reached the coast of Cipangu, was to set up a trading factory there for spices and silks.

This second expedition, of five ships and 300 men, sailed from Bristol in May 1498 and was never heard of again. For some 450 years it got somehow mixed up with a voyage made in 1500 by Jão Fernandez, known as Llavrador (farmer), to the east coast of Greenland, which was mistakenly named Labrador (after Fernandez) in the belief that it was a new discovery, and another in 1501 by Gaspar Corte Real, which seems to have visited Newfoundland or the mainland of America thereabouts. These two voyages appear to have become amalgamated and were held by some authorities to constitute Cabot's second voyage, from which they have him returning safely to Bristol and dying there shortly after. See also exploration by sea. Harisse, H. , John Cabot (1896).
Williamson, James A. , The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery under Henry VII (Hakluyt Society, 1962).