Great Exploration Hoaxes Paperback - 2001

Excerpt

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 Hudson
Bay. Biddle turns to Parry and finds:

Very little snow was now lying upon the ground, and numerous streams
of water rushing down the hills and sparkling in the beams of the
morning sun, relieved in some measure the melancholy stillness which
otherwise reigned on this desolate shore.

Three hundred and seventeen years earlier, in the same latitude,
according to Peter Martyr (as Englished by Hakluyt), Cabot had "found
monstrous heaps of ice swimming on the sea, and in manner continual
daylight; yet saw he the land in that tract free from ice, which had
been molten by the heat of the sun." Such evidence convinces Biddle
that the two sailors must have visited the same place. (In other
exploration controversies, comparisons like this one are a favorite
resort of the credulous.)

Biddle's enthusiasm seduces him into building a model hero. The
epithets with which he decorates Cabot again and again are
"enterprising and intrepid," "accomplished and enthusiastic." The
1508 decision to turn back south, then, was a simple matter of nerve
versus cowardice, of "the dauntless intrepidity that found a new
impulse in perils before which his terrified companions gave way."

The full flavor of Biddle's idolatry may be tasted in his handling of
Cabot's 1526-30 Spanish expedition to the La Plata River in South
America, the only voyage we can be sure Sebastian actually led. The
accounts by which we know about this expedition are those of Cabot's
underlings and financers, who filed lawsuits against their former
commander and tried to have him arrested when he got back to Spain;
thus our view of it may be one-sided. But it is hard not to picture
the La Plata venture as a four-year disaster. Stimulated by the
successful circumnavigation performed by one of Magellan's ships,
Charles V put Cabot in command of an expedition "for the discovery of
Tharsis, Ophir, and Eastern Cathay." The plan was to explore the
coasts of South America in search of a more northerly passage to the
Pacific than the one Magellan had found.

Soon after reaching Brazil, Cabot let himself be distracted by
Portuguese rumors of great treasures of gold and silver in the
interior. He apparently gave up any intention of searching for the
passage to Cathay and concentrated much of his next three years on
fortune-hunting up the La Plata. As a result of the switch in plans,
several of Cabot's officers threatened revolt. Even before he had
reached the mouth of the river, he had put the troublemakers under
arrest; then he set them on shore, although some were sick with
fever, and sailed away, leaving them to die. (The officers managed to
befriend the natives and eventually made their way to the Portuguese
settlements to the north.) In the harbor near Santa Catalina, Cabot's
flagship ran upon a submerged rock. Later allegations reported that
the commander was the first man to abandon ship, which so demoralized
the crew that the vessel ended up a complete wreck.

Cabot pushed up the La Plata and its tributaries, building forts as
he went. Chasing a rumor of gold, he led his men westward up the
Paraguay River, despite failing provisions and hostile natives. When
a few Indians approached the straggling band of Spaniards and offered
to show them where they could find food, Cabot dispatched thirty men
to follow the guides, who led them into an ambush in which they were
all killed or wounded.

In 1528 Cabot sent one of his ships home to request a relief
expedition. Upon its arrival in Seville, the merchant backers of the
expedition decided at once they wanted nothing more to do with Cabot.
The king, steadfastly loyal, ordered a relief expedition at his own
expense; but his instructions apparently were never carried out.
Meanwhile Cabot had housed his men in a new fort on the Paraná River.
While he was away, Indians attacked and burned the fort, killing most
of its defenders. The native victory encouraged further attacks, and
even though he had retreated with the remainder of his force to the
coast, in the following months Cabot lost another thirty men while
they were out fishing or foraging for roots. Late in 1529 the
survivors decided to flee for Spain, which they did not reach until
the following July.

Cabot returned to face seven years of judicial inquiry. It took the
scribes of the Council for the Indies three months simply to draw up
the accusations and interrogations brought against the commander by
his former subordinates. After two years Cabot was found guilty of
maladministration and disobedience. He was sentenced to four years'
banishment to Morocco as well as heavily fined. For some reason
(perhaps the loyalty of Charles V) the banishment was never put into
effect, and, amazingly, Cabot was allowed to continue in his office
as pilot-major of Spain.

George Parker Winship, a scholar otherwise sympathetic to the
explorer, sums up the La Plata expedition by remarking that Cabot
"discovered only one thing-that he was not qualified for the
leadership of a maritime adventure." Yet Biddle sees it differently.
The La Plata voyage was a four-year conspiracy against a brave man, a
"dark treachery" enacted by opportunistic and cowardly subordinates.
He finds that some of the incriminating testimony "has that air of
vagueness so characteristic of falsehood," yet discovers in the same
documents proof of Cabot's "remarkable gentleness of deportment" and
the "affectionate attachment" binding his men to him.

Media reviews

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