[thacher] the CABOTIAN DISCOVERY 303 



"After this I made many other voiages, which T now pretermit, and 

 waxing old, I giue myself to rest from such trauels, because there are 

 no we many yong and lustie Pilots and mariners of good experience, by 

 whose forwardnesse I do reioyce in the fruits of my labours, and rest 

 with the charge of this office, as you see." 



Sebastian Cabot is here made to declare that his father died in or 

 ^bout the 3^ear 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, perhajw, 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 

 67|- 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 rights, 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 fiir 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 25" 

 but he might have said he came within 11° of it, or to Chesapeake bay. 



The last document we are to consider is the famous "Cabot map." 

 It was what geographers call a planisphere, or a globe projected on a flat 

 surface. It contains, like many of the earlier maps, legends descriptive 

 of the various parts of the globe. These legends are given first in Span- 



