The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery under Henry VII

R.A. Skelton, James A. Williamson, James A. Williamson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317039518
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire antique

The voyages of John and Sebastian Cabot and their English contemporaries were made, for the most part, in search of a westward passage to Asia, and they resulted in the revelation of North America. The evidences are printed here, with an indication of their origins. Some are obscure in meaning, incomplete in statement, or mutually contradictory; and we are left with the certainty that important documents have existed or may now exist, which are still unknown. Dr Williamson interprets the evidence we have. Parts of his undertaking are in the nature of detective work and he does not claim that his solutions are final, which would be impossible in the face of new evidence that may at any time occur. Cabot study is a continuing mental adventure. The maps are an important category of the evidence. Mr R.A. Skelton of the British Museum has contributed a treatment of them, authoritative in its explanations, and a valuable admonition on what can and cannot be expected of the material. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volume first published in 1962.

INTRODUCTION

I

KNOWLEDGE OF THE ATLANTIC IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

IN THE fifteenth century there was an increasing European consciousness of the Atlantic as an ocean containing valuable undiscovered islands, and bounded by a farther continental shore which must be that of Eastern Asia. These ideas had been growing among entirely independent groups of people, of whom some had little knowledge of the others.

There were the students of classical geography, professional scholars and nearly all churchmen, who wrote for one another and generally betrayed little interest in the achievements of actual discoverers. There were the mariners of the Western European ports to whose minds the legendary stories of Atlantic islands carried an impression of lost realities awaiting rediscovery. There were the men of the north who knew that their ancestors had sailed westwards to Iceland and Greenland, which their colonists still occupied, and to lands in lower latitudes to the south-west. There were Englishmen, fishermen who sailed yearly to the Iceland coast, and Bristol merchants who traded regularly with Iceland and perhaps occasionally with Greenland, and began to make experimental voyages towards finding the shadowy western coasts where fishing might be good. There were Portuguese who discovered the Azores and the nearer African islands, and who traded with England and particularly with Bristol; and Castilians, their rivals in the Canaries and on the African trading coast. In most of these enterprises there were Italians and Flemings serving as individuals, and for a time Frenchmen as a group seeking to colonize the Canaries. Finally, there were two all-European lines of thought that indirectly stimulated Atlantic enterprise: the hope that in the non-Moslem parts of Asia allies might be found against the conquering Turk; and the mercantile ambition inspired by the great land-travellers of the thirteenth century who brought to European knowledge the hitherto unknown cities and coasts of Eastern Asia.

The mapping of the world and methods of charting and navigation made steady progress in the latter half of the Middle Ages, but it was left to the fifteenth century to produce the one implement without which all Atlantic knowledge must have remained speculative—the ship in which to cross the ocean and come home again. The weatherly three-masted ship of the culminating century, able to make good a course within seven or even six points of the wind, was something that previous generations had not possessed. The earlier single-masted cog could no doubt have made Columbus’s passage to the Caribbean, but it is also likely that she would never have come back.

The leading concept of the classical geographers, that the earth is a sphere with climates in zones of decreasing warmth from the equator to the poles, persisted through the Middle Ages and was increasingly prominent towards their close. There were flat-earth dissidents from this doctrine, but they were never preponderant and had disappeared by the fifteenth century. The fathers of the Christian Church for the most part allowed the spherical earth, and their succeeding commentators elaborated its details. In doing so they produced system and definition rather than new theory. They harmonized physical geography with Christian doctrine, whose discipline led them to perpetuate errors that might otherwise not have attained prominence. They were much concerned with the proportions of land and water on the earth’s surface and with the question of the antipodes to the southward of the equatorial zone. On the first head they exaggerated the proportion of dry land and diminished that of the ocean. On the second they argued that the sun’s heat rendered the equator impassable by human beings, with the consequence that the antipodean regions were unattainable and could not be inhabited by the stock of Adam. Bede in the eighth century affirmed the spherical earth, as did Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus in the thirteenth, when also Vincent of Beauvais made an encyclopaedic collection of geography in his Speculum Mundi. The academic scholars of the Middle Ages first salvaged such fragments of classical learning as had not perished in Western Europe, and later, by contact with learned Arabs who had preserved much more which might otherwise have been lost, recovered important works from the eastern or Byzantine half of the ancient Empire. By the early fifteenth century much astronomical work of value to explorers had come into the limited circulation of the learned world. At that juncture the rediscovery of some late copies of the maps attributed to Ptolemy of Alexandria provided a stimulus to persons who had never before seen maps of so practical and veritable a nature, and in fifty years it spread effectively among the secular scholars who grew prominent as a class in the later fifteenth century.

Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, who wrote early in that century, is important less for the substance of his work than for its fortune after his death. For it came into print in the second half of the century, and so helped the scholars’ learning to make contact with the minds of Columbus and other men of action. The substance was not original or new. In its remarks on the land-and-water question, and by consequence on the breadth of the Atlantic, d’Ailly’s Imago Mundi was a repetition of Bacon’s thirteenth-century Opus Majus, which itself was, in this respect, a recension of the early fathers of the Church and of one or two Arab authorities who drew upon Greek works which had not then returned to Western Europe. The achievements of medieval explorers, and of Marco Polo the greatest of them, do not appear in the Imago Mundi, which was a revival of classical knowledge current a thousand years before. The Ptolemaic maps were rediscovered only while d’Ailly was already at work.

The maps had an enormous influence, for they were copied in manuscript volumes and were printed in several editions from 1477, and they shaped the geographical mind of the last generation of the century. Ptolemy’s Asia indeed extended no farther east than Malaya, but by that time the work of Marco Polo was increasing its circulation and yielding a rich description of China and the eastern archipelago. Marco Polo, although he influenced cartographers in the fourteenth century, made less impression on the academic geographers; but already there was a lively interest in unknown lands, as the partly fictitious Travels of Sir John Mandeville indicate. In the fifteenth century the manuscript copies of Marco Polo multiplied, and the work was also printed long before the century’s close. The general result was to build up in the minds of some merchants, scholars, travellers and seamen the conception of the Atlantic ocean as a link between Western Europe and Eastern Asia, the two ends of the tripartite land-mass known to Europeans and consisting of the three contiguous continents of Europe, Africa and Asia. The number of individuals who thought deeply of this concept was probably few, but its existence among educated men ensured that when the leaders in action explained their plans it was to hearers who understood what they were talking of. The principle of the westward passage from Europe to Asia was conceded, although, say in 1480–90, there was still much doubt and disbelief that it would be practically possible. The unbelievers were in fact justified, for it is certain that no expedition at that time could have made the voyage from Europe west to China across an open ocean in which no large land intervened.

The work of Marco Polo attained its full influence in the second half of the fifteenth century. Not only did it bring the wealth of China and the commerce of its seas into European consciousness, but it described Japan in exciting terms. Marco had seen China for himself, but he had not seen Japan, which he reported very inaccurately by hearsay gathered from the Chinese. He mentioned no latitudes, but he gave the impression that it was a large island lying a good deal to the south of what we know is the true position, and some 1500 miles from the coast of China. The cartographers created a tradition of an oblong island, its main axis running north and south, placed partly within the tropics. Marco said that it was extraordinarily rich with gold and pearls. To the south of Cipango and extending towards China was a great archipelago of spice-bearing islands. Such was Japan or Cipango, the richest land of Asia and the nearest to Western Europe. Marco Polo was the first European to write of it. To the men of Cardinal d’Ailly’s world, the churchmen-scholars of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Marco, an unlearned merchant-traveller, was unimportant. But the expanding mind of the fifteenth century found his writings supremely interesting.

The condition of Atlantic knowledge and doctrine in the last quarter of the century is illustrated by the Toscanelli correspondence¹ and the globe of Martin Behaim. The first shows that in 1474 there was living in Florence a physician who applied his mind to the westward voyage. He was Paolo Toscanelli, who some time before had been visited by Fernão Martins, a canon of Lisbon travelling in Italy. Martins listened to Toscanelli’s ideas on the westward passage and reported them to Afonso V of Portugal, who asked him to get a written statement. Toscanelli complied with the Portuguese request in a letter dated June 1474, accompanied by a map. His statement amounted to this, that the great city of Quinsay in China would be found in the latitude of Lisbon at a westward distance of 5000 sea miles. But on this voyage, by deviating from the direct course, it would be possible to refresh at the island of Antillia, about 1500 miles from Europe, and at Cipango, about 3500 miles. The Portuguese evidently found such a project unattractive and did not follow up the information; but a few years later Christopher Columbus got wind of it and wrote to Toscanelli. He replied by sending to Columbus a copy of the letter and map which he had previously sent to Lisbon. None of the originals of these documents has been preserved, but Ferdinand Columbus had in his possession copies of the letters sent to his father by Toscanelli, and included them in his history of his father’s life. The map is lost, although reconstructions have been attempted.

The importance of all this to our present subject is that it shows the learned making contact with the men of action. There is no reason to believe that Toscanelli kept his conclusions secret: he was ready to impart them to anyone interested. There were probably other men discussing the same ideas, which could have been already familiar in Italian geographical circles. The Toscanelli plan was typical rather than exceptional. It shows us the acceptance by a new generation of learned men of the discoveries of Marco Polo; the addition of eastern China and Japan and the Archipelago to Ptolemy’s Asia, greatly extending its longitude and bringing it nearer to Europe; and the entry of one who was to be a great explorer into the calculation of ‘Can it be done?’

The globe of Martin Behaim gives graphic form to the new concepts. Behaim was a German from Nuremberg who travelled to Portugal, displayed some knowledge of geography, and was admitted to the official circle which advised on oceanic projects. He married in the Azores and perhaps took part in an unsuccessful voyage to seek for new lands west of them. He returned to Nuremberg, and there in 1492 constructed the globe which has perpetuated his memory. It is the oldest terrestrial globe now surviving, and owes some of its importance to that, and to the fact that it was completed in the year in which Columbus first crossed the Atlantic. Its outlines are possibly based on a printed world-map by Henricus Martellus, c. 1489, and convey a general impression of contemporary thought. It shows Antillia just within the tropic zone and south of the westernmost Azores, Cipango stretching from about 30° N down to 8° N, and Marco Polo’s Quinsay in the Chinese province of Mangi almost on the tropic line. All this was in accordance with Columbus’s ideas, except that he reduced the east-west distances and so made his project look more feasible. For the Atlantic problem the interest of the Behaim globe is that it expresses a view held by a large school of thought. Neither Columbus nor John Cabot ever saw this globe, but its Atlantic is in broad principle their Atlantic.

In the sixth and following centuries there was navigation of the northern waters by Irish seafarers, including monks and hermits who sought islands whereon to live a solitary life. Their discoveries were among the Scottish islands and north to Iceland. Their records are legends with a substratum of truth, composed mainly from the spiritual aspect and without much basis in geography. For this reason it became possible in the later Middle Ages to transfer the islands concerned from the North to the Atlantic west of Europe, and even farther south. Some thirteenth-century maps showed St Brandan’s Islands roughly in the position of the Canaries. From the mid-fourteenth century nautical charts laid down a chain of islands on the meridian of Madeira and running north from about the latitude of Tangier to that of Finisterre. Each island bears a particular traditional name, and below the group there is generally written Insule Sancti Brandani. This may indicate a fourteenth-century discovery of the eastern Azores; and the ‘false Azores’, so located, remained on the charts to the end of the fifteenth century. At the western edge of the charts, from 1424 onwards, cartographers drew the large oblong island of Antillia, extending north and south like Marco Polo’s Cipango. Antillia was wholly a creation of the map-makers, who commonly identified it with the legendary island of the Seven Cities, supposed to have been colonized by refugees fleeing from the Moslem conquest of the Peninsula in the eighth century.¹ A Portuguese crew were said to have found the Seven Cities towards the middle of the fifteenth century, and to have landed and conversed with the inhabitants. The discovery, if it really took place, was possibly an early sighting of one of the Azores, which, however, were uninhabited until the fifteenth-century Portuguese began to colonize them. It was a persistent cartographers’ belief that not far west of Ireland lay the Island of Brasil, which is marked in various fifteenth-century maps and generally placed close to the Irish coast. It appears as an island of the St Brandan’s type, not nearly so extensive as Antillia or Cipango.

The lively belief in so many imaginary islands, coupled with the actual discoveries of the Canaries, Cape Verdes and Azores (whose nine units were revealed between 1431 and 1460), caused the Portuguese ocean seamen to be alert for new finds. It was easy even for experienced men to mistake a cloud-formation for land and to report a discovery that might seem worth following up. The Portuguese kings generally rewarded a discoverer with the captaincy of any island he might find and colonize, with sufficient privileges to make his enterprise worth while. In the last decades of the century the Portuguese were intent upon the opening of the seaway round Africa to Southern Asia; and there is no clear evidence that their westward enterprises were directed to Asia as an ultimate goal. They knew of the concept but did not adopt it. Toscanelli sent the plan to Lisbon in 1474. Columbus put it to King John II in 1484 and was rejected. The reason was scientific: the best calculations of longitudes—and those of Columbus were not the best—made the oceanic distance between Europe and Asia too great for an attempt to be practicable.

In the ninth century adventurers from Norway found their way to Iceland and began to colonize it, dispossessing the Irish settlers who were already there. In about 985 Icelandic ships sighted Greenland, and Eric the Red led a party of colonists to occupy it. There were two main settlements, the East and the West, both lying west of Cape Farewell, the southern point of Greenland. The east side of Greenland, nearest to Iceland, was not colonized owing to the per...