Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/78

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the second patent, granted on the 3rd of July, 1498, by Henry VII., the original of which was found by Mr. Biddle in the Rolls Chapel, sets this question finally at rest. That document indeed only named the father, "John," but the previous patent was in the names of "John Cabot and his sons," and it does not follow that the discovery of the "Lande and Isles" is intended to be attributed to the personal action of the elder Cabot. However, though the continent of America was first discovered by an expedition commissioned to "set up the banner" of England, this in no way detracts from the honour justly due to Christopher Columbus, who had five years previously made known, for the first time, the existence of a world in the West. Although his great discoveries were confined to the West Indian Islands and to a portion of the South American continent, they revealed the important fact that rich lands, hitherto unknown, lay in a certain quarter of the globe, and could be reached with no extraordinary difficulty or danger by intrepid and skilful mariners. Again, as Columbus did not sight the continent of America until August 1498, in the course of his third voyage, he could hardly then have been igno-*

ships." All this shows the strong presumption that the first charter was granted after discoveries that Cabot had made previously on his own or his father's account. Mr. Nicholls also gives an engraving of a remarkable portrait of Cabot, then a very old man, and a copy of the unique map of his travels, dated 1544, preserved in the Bibliothèque at Paris. On this map it is stated in Latin and Spanish that John and Sebastian Cabot together discovered the New Land on June the 24th, 1494, and that Cabot himself "made this figure extended in plane" (i. e. the Map) in 1544. The street in Bristol where Canynge, and probably the Cabots, lived is still called 'Cathay.']
 * [Footnote: and next spring his Majesty means to send him with twenty