INTRODUCTION 7 



controversy for many years. The question where John 

 Cabot had his landfall in 1497 depends almost wholly on 

 the interpretation of the old maps. The fact that these 

 charts were drawn to magnetic meridians, and not like our 

 maps to the true meridian, sometimes alters the lie of a 

 coast or the direction of a course by over 45. Apart 

 from this, also, mediaeval reckonings were often far astray. 

 Chronometers had not yet been invented, and it was only 

 on rare occasions that longitude could be reckoned with 

 the least degree of accuracy. Determinations of latitude 

 were fairly correct when made on dry land, but made 

 from the deck of a vessel with the imperfect instruments 

 of that period they were liable to be wrong. Consequently, 

 it is very difficult to be sure of the course to which a med- 

 iaeval mariner held. It used to be thought that in 1497 

 John Cabot's landfall was on Labrador. It is now cer- 

 tain that wherever his landfall was, it was not there. Prob- 

 ably it was on the shores of Cape Breton Island. 



It was on his second voyage, in 1498, that Cabot touched 

 at Labrador. A Canadian scholar, Mr. H. P. Biggar, in 

 his Voyages of the Cabots and Corte-Reds, has attempted 

 a brilliant reconstruction of this voyage. He thinks 

 that Cabot explored first the coast of Greenland, and that 

 then he sailed south along the coast of Labrador. He 

 attempts even to identify the places which Cabot de- 

 scribes; Hamilton Inlet, for instance, and the Strait of 

 Belle Isle, which Cabot took to be a deep bay. Cabot 

 seems to have done some bartering with the Indians, for 

 the Corte-Reals three years later found the natives in 

 possession of a broken gilded sword and a pair of ear-rings, 

 both apparently of Venetian manufacture. 



