Away Beyond the Virgin Rocks: A Tribute to John Cabot

Olaf Uwe Janzen is an associate professor of history at Memorial
University and reviews editor of The Northern Mariner.

This is one of several “Cabot” books released during the 500th
anniversary of John Cabot’s voyage across the Atlantic and arrival
somewhere in northeastern North America. The author, a retired teacher
and historian, has tested an extensive array of secondary sources
against the highly limited and ambiguous primary evidence in order to
argue that Cabot made landfall on the coast of Maine. In challenging the
view that Cabot first sighted land at Bonavista, Newfoundland, Parsons
is setting up a straw man, for no self-respecting historian today
embraces that theory.

Parsons’s seeming conviction that history should be able to prove
events one way or another causes him to go to extremes in building his
case. Arguments with which he disagrees are ridiculed and dismissed,
while alternative theories are often proposed without evidence. For
example, even though we are told that Cabot never returned from his 1498
voyage, Parsons claims that he explored the Chesapeake Bay region that
year. How would we know that? And how can Humphrey Gilbert’s voyage to
Newfoundland in 1583 be viewed as the culmination of English voyages of
discovery in the North Atlantic when Newfoundland wasn’t even
Gilbert’s destination when he first set out? Other statements—that
the English fishery at Iceland was based in the West Country; that
Bristol engaged in the fishery; that Newfoundland was known to fishermen
long before Cabot—are equally invalid.

Although Parsons is to be commended for his detailed study of the Cabot
historiography, his arguments are convoluted, repetitious, factually
suspect, and even illogical at times. Away Beyond the Virgin Rocks would
have benefited immensely from some rigorous editing before going to
print.