Elizabethan Sea Dogs | Page 4

the waters of northeastern North America and were even
then beginning to raise questions of national rights that have only been
settled in this twentieth century after four hundred years.
Following the coast of Greenland past Cape Farewell, Sebastian Cabot
turned north to look for the nearest course to India and Cathay, the
lands of silks and spices, diamonds, rubies, pearls, and gold. John
Cabot had once been as far as Mecca or its neighborhood, where he had

seen the caravans that came across the Desert of Arabia from the fabled
East. Believing the proof that the world was round, he, like Columbus
and so many more, thought America was either the eastern limits of the
Old World or an archipelago between the extremest east and west
already known. Thus, in the early days before it was valued for itself,
America was commonly regarded as a mere obstruction to
navigation--the more solid the more exasperating. Now, in 1498, on his
second voyage to America, John Cabot must have been particularly
anxious to get through and show the King some better return for his
money. But he simply disappears; and all we know is what various
writers gleaned from his son Sebastian later on.
Sebastian said he coasted Greenland, through vast quantities of
midsummer ice, until he reached 67° 30' north, where there was hardly
any night. Then he turned back and probably steered a southerly course
for Newfoundland, as he appears to have completely missed what
would have seemed to him the tempting way to Asia offered by Hudson
Strait and Bay. Passing Newfoundland, he stood on south as far as the
Virginia capes, perhaps down as far as Florida. A few natives were
caught. But no real trade was done. And when the explorers had
reported progress to the King the general opinion was that North
America was nothing to boast of, after all.
A generation later the French sent out several expeditions to sail
through North America and make discoveries by the way. Jacques
Cartier's second, made in 1535, was the greatest and most successful.
He went up the St. Lawrence as high as the site of Montreal, the head
of ocean navigation, where, a hundred and forty years later, the local
wits called La Salle's seigneury 'La Chine' in derision of his
unquenchable belief in a transcontinental connection with Cathay.
But that was under the wholly new conditions of the seventeenth
century, when both French and English expected to make something
out of what are now the United States and Canada. The point of the
witling joke against La Salle was a new version of the old adage: Go
farther and fare worse. The point of European opinion about America
throughout the wonderful sixteenth century was that those who did go

farther north than Mexico were certain to fare worse. And--whatever
the cause--they generally did. So there was yet a third reason why the
fame of Columbus eclipsed the fame of the Cabots even among those
English-speaking peoples whose New-World home the Cabots were the
first to find. To begin with, Columbus was the first of moderns to
discover any spot in all America. Secondly, while the Cabots gave no
writings to the world, Columbus did. He wrote for a mighty monarch
and his fame was spread abroad by what we should now call a monster
publicity campaign. Thirdly, our present point: the southern lands
associated with Columbus and with Spain yielded immense and most
romantic profits during the most romantic period of the sixteenth
century. The northern lands connected with the Cabots did nothing of
the kind.
Priority, publicity, and romantic wealth all favored Columbus and the
south then as the memory of them does to-day. The four hundredth
anniversary of his discovery of an island in the Bahamas excited the
interest of the whole world and was celebrated with great enthusiasm in
the United States. The four hundredth anniversary of the Cabots'
discovery of North America excited no interest at all outside of Bristol
and Cape Breton and a few learned societies. Even contemporary Spain
did more for the Cabots than that. The Spanish ambassador in London
carefully collected every scrap of information and sent it home to his
king, who turned it over as material for Juan de la Cosa's famous map,
the first dated map of America known. This map, made in 1500 on a
bullock's hide, still occupies a place of honor in the Naval Museum at
Madrid; and there it stands as a contemporary geographic record to
show that St. George's Cross was the first flag ever raised over eastern
North America, at all events north of Cape Hatteras.
The Cabots did great things though they were not great men. John, as
we have seen already, sailed out of the ken of man