VOYAGES OF THE CABOTS IN 1497 AND 1498. 63 



ami he has organized a second expedition, and lie has sailed in command. Fcirtliwith, ii]i<iii 

 such sailing, he vanishes utterl}' and his second son, Sebastian, hoth of his l)rothers having 

 in some unknown way, also vanished, emerges and from henceforth liecomes the whole 

 Cahot family. It behooves us, therefore, if we wish to grasp the wliole subject, to inquire 

 what manner of man he was. 



Sebastian Cabot was born in Venice, and, when still very young, was taken to England 

 with the rest of his family by his father.^' He was then, however, old enough to have 

 learned the humanities ^- and the properties of the sphere, and to this latter knowhidge lie 

 became so addirtcd that he, early in life, f)rmeil tixed ideas. He is probably entitled to the 

 nuTit of having urged the practical a[i[ilication of the truths that the sliortest course, ti'om 

 point to point u[ion tlie globe, Ues u[ion a great circle ; and also that the great circle uniting 

 western Europe with Cathay passes over the north pole. As a matter of fact the shortest 

 line from England to Japan is by Spitzbergen. We know that as a barren fact ; because 

 we know also that the Polar sea is, for practical [lurposes, impassable ; but that Chabot did 

 not know. He could not learn it from the properties of the sphere and he had not learned 

 it in the way of experience. At first it was a very promising route of sailing to India. 

 Robert Thorne, an English merchant living at Seville, points out, in 1527, in representations 

 made privately' to the English king, that there is no more reason to suppose the sea to be 

 impassable at the north from cold than there had lieon to suppose it impassalde at the 

 ecpiator from heat. All authorities had concurred in the existence of a southern zone of 

 intolerable heat, and sailors had even brought home reports of having encountered a boiling 

 sea.*-' This had been shown by recent discoveries to be false, and why should not the same 

 authorities be also wrong in their theories of a frozen zone !" So reasoned Robert Thorne 

 who lived at Seville when Sebastian Cabot held there a high position as grand pilot of 

 Spain, and thus insisted Sebastian Cabot from his youth to his extreme old age, and this 

 fixed idea of his became also the fixed idea of the English people ; so that they have 

 scarcely recovered from it within our own recollection. Biddle and Nicholls laud him as 

 the "discoverer of great circle sailing and founder of the English mercantile marine." The 

 English marine existed before him, but England owes to him the initiation of the long 

 weary struggle with the frozen ocean which for three centuries has strewn the Arctic wastes 

 with the bodies of her noblest sailors; from Sir Hugh Willoughby who perished with all 

 his gallant crew on the shores of Lapland in 1554, the first fruits of great circle sailing by 

 the north, to Sir John Franklin who perished almost in onr own days. Nordenskiold in 

 the Vega in the two years of 1878-9 made the passage Cabot dreamed of in his later years 

 to Japan by way of Spitzbergen, that passage upon which Sir Hugh Willoughby sailed in 

 1554, and now in this very year ÎTansen has thrown himself into the ice pack in the hope of 

 drifting across the Polar ocean. 



This fixed idea of the younger Cabot pervaded all his life and shows in all liis reported 

 conversations. He adhered to it with the pertinacity of a Columbus and, in his later life 

 after his return to England, his eftbrts which in youth were directed to a northwest passage 

 went out towards a northeast passage to Cathay. John Cabot's genius was more practical, 

 as the second letter of Raimondo di Soncino shows. His intention was to occupy on the 

 second voyage the landfall he had made and then imsh n]\ to the cast (west as we call it 

 now) and south. The diversion of that expedition to the coast of Labraddr wunld indicate 

 that the death of the elder Cabot and the assumption of command by his son occurred early 



