Great Exploration Hoaxes

Book by Roberts David

Chapter 1

Sebastian Cabot and the Northwest Passage

In 1508, Sebastian Cabot set sail from Bristol with three hundred men
in two ships. He crossed the Atlantic quickly, visited the great
fishing grounds of the Newfoundland Banks, familiar to Bristol men
for about a decade, and made a landfall. Cabot had more serious
exploratory ambitions, however, and soon pushed on toward the
northwest, coasting along the shores of Labrador. He found the
ice-clogged passage that would come to be called Hudson Strait,
drifted through it, and entered the open water of Hudson Bay, a full
century before Henry Hudson would "discover" it. Cabot wanted to push
on, but his men were on the verge of mutiny.

He turned back, sailed south past the Newfoundland Banks, and
continued along the coast of the present United States, still
searching for a westward passage through the American landmass. He
may have wintered along this coast. Having explored the Atlantic
shore all the way to the tip of Florida, he turned home, arriving in
Bristol in April 1509 to find that his monarch, Henry VII, had died
and a new Henry, who would turn out to be far less interested in
geographical discovery than his father, was on the throne. Though he
had not found a route to Cathay, Sebastian Cabot had completed the
most significant voyage yet undertaken by English ships.

Or had he?

The leading 20th-century Cabot expert, James A. Williamson, believes
that the 1508-9 expedition took place much as described above. But
there are strong grounds for concluding-and sound scholars who
argue-that Cabot's whole voyage was fictitious, that in fact he never
left England.

To a modern observer, it may seem incredible that the true facts
about a voyage of such importance remain so conjectural. Surely such
a pioneering venture would be bound to leave in its wake dozens of
authentic records, even eyewitness accounts. Surely no man, no matter
how clever, could fake a voyage that had supposedly involved three
hundred men under the patronage of the king of England.

The uncertainty about Cabot's Northwest expedition originates in two
sources. One is primarily historical. Although the Spanish, the
Portuguese, and the Italians took pains to chronicle their great
nautical voyages during the late 15th and early 16th centuries, on
the whole the English did not-until Richard Hakluyt began to collect
and publish firsthand accounts of his countrymen's discoveries in
1582. Before Hakluyt, English voyages were recorded mainly in the
memories of living seamen or in obscure Continental compendia of
knowledge. Many great deeds and adventures slipped irrevocably into
the dark hiding places of historical ignorance. Of the great mariner
John Cabot, Sebastian's father, on whose 1497 voyage England's whole
claim to North America rested, no portrait exists today, nor a single
scrap of his handwriting. By the middle of the 16th century the facts
of John Cabot's life had passed completely out of common memory.

The second cause of confusion surrounding Sebastian's Northwest
expedition lies in the very makeup of the man's character. Whether or
not the 1508 voyage was a hoax, Sebastian Cabot seems to have been a
thoroughgoing confidence artist. He managed to build successful
careers in both Spain and England as an adviser on northern
navigations mainly by fostering the illusion that he was the sole
possessor of vast funds of secret geographical lore. He seems to have
taken full credit for everything his father accomplished, letting
John Cabot's reputation dwindle to that of a mere merchant, while his
own burgeoned as the man who had discovered North America. At the
peril of his own life, he played the conflicting interests of Spain,
England, and Venice off against each other, entering into cabals and
intrigues in which he promised worlds but avoided delivering much of
real substance. He died on dry land with a comfortable pension, well
liked and reputable.

The 16th-century sources for Cabot's expedition-probably all the
evidence scholars will ever have upon which to base their
judgments-consist of some seventeen documents in Latin, Italian,
Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. They tend to be fragments
only, some mere offhand allusions a sentence or two long. They
contain among them so many mutual contradictions that there is no
possible way of reconciling their details in a coherent account of a
single voyage. By themselves, however, such discrepancies do not
amount to evidence against Cabot. Many of the documenters were sloppy
guardians of truth, and nearly all were writing down stories they had
heard third- or fourth-hand, sometimes at a remove of seventy years
from the events they describe. The closest thing we have to an
account by Cabot himself appears in 1556 in a volume of navigations
by a Venetian named Ramusio, who claims to have received a letter
from the navigator, which he was summarizing.

Cabot's English service ended abruptly in 1512 when, on a visit to
Spain, he was invited by King Ferdinand to enter the Spanish marine
as a capitán de mar. He did not serve an English king again until
1548, when Edward VI appointed him as a maritime adviser to the
Admiralty. The long hiatus is no doubt responsible for the absence of
any English sources for the 1508 expedition until the last years of
Cabot's life, when a man named Richard Eden, who claimed to know the
aged pilot, recorded a few skimpy details of that voyage. In 1555
Eden was writing at a distance of forty-seven years from the alleged
embarkation from Bristol; and if he did receive the story from
Cabot's lips, he may have been listening-so his detractors would
insist-to an old man who had never been a reliable source aggrandize
a myth of his own deeds that he had spent a lifetime concocting.

Faced with the fragmentary nature of the Renaissance sources and the
unlikelihood that new evidence will turn up, the modern student is
reduced to choosing among scholars' portraits of Sebastian Cabot.
Surprisingly, because of the extreme variation among those portraits,
this effort amounts to a fascinating pastime. Thanks to the labors of
James A. Williamson, any student can read the original texts of the
seventeen sources translated into English. Williamson in fact invites
the reader to decide for himself about Sebastian Cabot (see
Bibliography).

The full range of judgment can be comprehended by looking at the
likenesses that three scholars, each the leading expert of his day,
have unveiled for our scrutiny. Richard Biddle, a Pittsburgh lawyer,
was the first man to try to assemble all the known documents bearing
on Cabot; his 1831 Memoir represents the pinnacle of Cabot idolatry.
In the last decade of the 19th century, the indefatigable Frenchman
Henry Harrisse issued a stream of memoirs and monographs on Cabot,
the general import of which was to debunk the explorer as a wholesale
fraud. In our own century, James A. Williamson has spent over thirty
years studying the controversy, and his works represent the effort,
to use his own metaphor, to steady the pendulum of Cabot's
reputation. Williamson acknowledges the navigator's shady and dubious
sides, but expresses faith in the reality of the bold Northwest
expedition.

Biddle's Cabot. It would not be fair to hold Richard Biddle
responsible for exaggerations that only subsequent scholarship has
corrected. The "rediscovery" of John Cabot was a triumph of
late-19th-century research, and crucial documents have been unearthed
as recently as 1956. To the Pennsylvania lawyer in 1831, John Cabot
was merely a merchant sailor from Venice who had settled in Bristol,
and to whom, with his three sons, in 1496 Henry VII had issued a
patent for the discovery of lands "unknown to all Christians." Biddle
took it for granted that Sebastian Cabot was the man who had
discovered the mainland of North America in 1497. Whether or not the
father even went on the voyage was a question Biddle briefly
entertained, concluding that if John Cabot was on board, it was
"merely for the purpose of turning to account his mercantile skill
and sagacity."

Thus by 1508, in the American scholar's view, Sebastian Cabot was
already an accomplished and experienced mariner, whose "simple, but
bold proposition" of 1497 had actually represented his first attempt
to find a northwest route to Cathay. When Biddle turns his mind to
the 1508 expedition, then, he harbors not the slightest suspicion
that the journey may have been a hoax. The only question is just how
far Sebastian actually penetrated along the Northwest Passage. His
answer is, well into Hudson Bay. To buttress this conclusion, it is
an easy matter for him to discover that the 16th-century sources that
give Cabot the most northerly latitude at the point where he turned
around, notably Ramusio and the Englishman Richard Willes, also
happen to have been the work of the soberest chroniclers. The sources
that limit Cabot's penetration to more southerly latitudes were the
work of historical hacks, or of interested parties such as "Spaniards
. . . jealous of the reputation of Cabot."

The most specious piece of Biddle's reasoning springs from a vague
similarity between the earliest source for Cabot's voyage, a Latin
text by Peter Martyr from 1516, and a very recent traveler's account
of the terrain around Hudson Bay. Only six years before Biddle was
writing, Captain Edward Parry, as part of the Admiralty's vigorous
new attack on the Northwest Passage, had led an expedition that
attempted the route by pushing into the northwest corner of ...