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, medieval 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- 
ieval 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-Reals, 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. 
