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Explorers of Canada, Part I: Giovanni Caboto© David Newman
Mar 1, 2001
I've decided to write a series about the people who explored this land of ours, from John Cabot in 1497 to Vilhjalmur Stefansson in 1913. So here I present to you, the story of John Cabot, the first European (post Viking) to meet the shores of what is now Canada (or at least that is what is suspected)
Giovanni Caboto was born in Genoa, Italy in 1450 (or at least before 1453). He moved to Venice where he became a citizen in 1476. Venice was a city where the water was the most important and had a great reputation for its ships and seamen. By 1480, Giovanni was a great sailor, cartographer and navigator, and he had his own ship. He had done many trips eastward, to Mecca. There he learns that the spices actually come from further east. He then thinks about the idea of going to India from the west route (because unlike most movies show, they DID know the earth was round at that point). When he heard that Christopher Columbus, an Italian himself, was thinking of trying to get to India the same way, he had to find a way to get there first. He moved to Valencia in Spain. It is there that he discovered the news of Columbus' arrival to "Japan". Caboto leaves Spain and moves to Bristol, England, the countries biggest port. There he adopts the name John Cabot. In March of 1496, the King of England, Henry VII, commissions Cabot to go to India via the Atlantic under the banners of England. He leaves, in 1497, on a ship called the Matthew with a crew which (may have) included his sons Sebastian, Santius and Lewes. After thirty days, he reaches the coast of either Newfoundland or Nova Scotia. The details of his trips are not known very well. He returned to England, they say, without even touching Canadian soil. What he did see though, was that the lands were inhabited and that there was an unimaginable amount of fish. His expedition, although very brief, gives his name meaning in Bristol and the whole of England and he prepares for a second trip, in 1498. His son Sebastian did a few voyages back in 1506-1508. Sebastian claims he was there along with his father but he can very well be a liar. For Cabot, the expeditions were failures as he never made it to India, and it is probable that, if he survived the second voyage, he led a secluded life. England, at the time, was a weakish country and so expeditions to the new world had to wait, so the true powers of Europe, Spain, Portugal and France, could explore, more in detail, the new continent.
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