John Cabot and the Matthew

Olaf Uwe Janzen is an associate professor of history at Sir Wilfred
Grenfell College, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Very little is known about John Cabot or the details of his voyage
across the Atlantic in 1497. The celebrations observing the 500th
anniversary of that voyage have thus sparked much interest and
speculation. This book covers all the familiar basics: the sketchy facts
about Cabot’s life, the importance of Bristol in European maritime
trade, the shipping technology and the navigational methods of the time,
European perceptions of North Atlantic geography in the late 1400s, and
the international and diplomatic setting.

Like many of the current crop of publications about Cabot, this book
contains errors and misrepresentations. For example, the author believes
that Bristol was a major participant in the English cod fishery both
before and after Cabot; in fact, England’s cod fishery before 1500 was
centred not in Bristol but in Hull and other North Sea ports. Nor did
Bristol learn the Icelandic method of curing fish and pass it on to
Newfoundland, as Wilson claims. And while he is correct in arguing that
the Hanse seriously disrupted English trade with Iceland after 1450, the
English fishing industry there continued to thrive beyond 1500.
Wilson’s interpretative efforts are weaker still. With the flimsiest
of evidence, he proposes that Cabot’s 1498 follow-up voyage took him
to the Caribbean, where he was murdered by the Spanish adventurer Alonso
de Hojeda. Wilson argues that the famous La Cosa map of 1500 shows
details supporting this interpretation (La Cosa accompanied Hojeda in
1499). Such fanciful speculations mar what is otherwise a well-presented
and well-illustrated text.

Ironically, given that Breakwater Books co-published the book to
observe Newfoundland’s “Cabot 500” celebrations, Wilson believes
that Cabot made landfall in 1497 somewhere on the coast of Nova Scotia,
or possibly even that of Maine, sighting Newfoundland only from afar on
the homeward leg of that voyage.