by David Boyle
After Sebastian Cabot’s return from his failed Arctic search, exploration took a backseat in the new court of Henry VIII. The marriage with Catherine of Aragon had renewed the friendship between the English court and her father, Ferdinand. This and the pugnacious enthusiasm of the new young English king toward his French neighbors meant that some kind of attack on France was inevitable. Henry organized an ambitious expedition in June 1512 under Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset. The English troops were sent by sea to Gascony, with an agreement that Ferdinand would strike simultaneously, annexing the old kingdom of Navarre on the French border. But having done so, Ferdinand allowed the English to carry the rest of the burden of fighting. As it turned out, there was precious little of that either, but over two thousand English soldiers died of fever and dysentery.
Also on the expedition, feverishly working on maps of the French coast, was Sebastian Cabot. One of the only lasting effects of the abortive English invasion was that Sebastian continued the journey to Castile and stayed there, in the employment of the Castilian court, making maps in the Casa de Contratación. He was assiduous in his mapmaking, as he had been in London, and rose quickly, boasting rather inaccurately about his long experience in exploration. When Juan de Solís died in 1518, Sebastian was appointed to succeed him in Vespucci’s old position of pilot major. It was a job he held for nearly thirty years.
Seville was then the European capital of western navigation, so he had to be there. He spent most of his working life in the city, becoming friendly with some of the great writers of the age. He talked to Peter Martyr at length and became friends with him, and Peter Martyr was close friends with Vespucci’s nephew Giovanni. The problem was that Sebastian nursed a secret: the Hudson Strait, which he had seen in 1508 and which he still believed held the secret of the Northwest Passage that came to dominate his life. It made him careful with people, and so secretive that he was heartily disliked by his subordinates in Seville, and on his later expedition up the River Plate.
Sebastian had access to all the records of the Casa de Contratación, and must have had suspicions, which he also dared not name, about his father’s confrontation with Ojeda. He anyway preferred not to speak too much about his father’s exploits for fear that they would take away from his own. Perhaps he was afraid to remind his Castilian employers that the name of Cabot had once raised diplomatic fears that the English would beat the Spanish to Asia.
There was also a major problem for his ambitions. The Northwest Passage was his objective, but the Spanish would never organize an expedition there, for fear that it would bypass their own empire in the Caribbean. So throughout his period as pilot major, Sebastian was feeling his way toward some scheme to go back to the open sea he believed he had glimpsed beyond the New World. In 1521 he engineered a visit to England, where he contacted Henry VIII’s principal adviser Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, and convinced him secretly that the English should mount a new expedition for the Northwest Passage. The Merchant Venturers of London agreed to supply one ship and pay the crew, but they needed other investors in London, and here the scheme began to unravel. The drapers’ and mercers’ guilds held out, and we get a glimpse of the skepticism with which Sebastian was regarded in some London circles, complaining that he “was never in that land hym self.” Their definite refusal culminated in an apt proverb: “He sayls not surely that sayls by an other mannys compass.”
While he was in London, ostensibly on business for the Spanish court, he also put out feelers toward his native city of Venice, making a quiet contact through their representatives in England. But he returned to Seville without any reply from them, a deeply disappointed man.
Despite the knowledge of the Breton and Norman fishing fleets, now joining with the Basques, Portuguese, and English in the seasonal hunt for cod on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, France had been slow to join in the business of western exploration. They had been too concerned with the great game in Italy to look in the other direction. But the Renaissance was moving north to France, partly because of their invasions of Italy, and with it came a belated interest in the New World. Something about the Renaissance went hand in hand with a fascination for America, because the continent on the other side of the Atlantic became symbolic of human possibility.
The new French king, Francis I, was a Renaissance man in all senses. He founded the art collection that eventually became the Louvre, while his mother—also a collector of Renaissance painting—nagged him about getting involved in overseas exploration. It was he who commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to construct a mechanical lion to enliven the latest peace talks in Italy, following his recapture of Milan in 1515 and then lured him to France and became his close friend. The great artist lived in a manor house called Clos Lucé near the royal palace at Amboise, and when he died in May 1519, it was said that he died in the arms of the French king.
This new awareness of the Atlantic brought the French into conflict with the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided the world between Spain and Portugal. “Had our father Adam made them his sole heirs?” asked Francis, rhetorically, adding their monopoly on navigation to his quarrel with Charles V. He was determined to find his own shortcut to the spice islands, preferably outside the Spanish zone, and the obvious place to look was northwest. A powerful alliance of businesspeople and financiers in Dieppe, and silk importers in Florence, put together the funds for a French voyage of discovery. In 1524 the expedition sailed from Rouen led by the Florentine mariner Giovanni da Verrazzano.
Verrazzano was followed a decade later by Jacques Cartier, who had been one year old when Columbus first landed in the Americas, and who made three voyages, during which he founded the first French colonies in the Americas and coined the name “Canada” for the coast along the St. Lawrence River. The English claims to Newfoundland and its environs were allowed to lapse.
In August 1519, five ships under the Portuguese captain Ferdinand Magellan sailed from Sanlúcar de Barrameda on the mouth of the Guadalquivir, in search of the elusive southwest passage. Magellan had been to India with Almeida but had been accused of trading illegally with the Moors, and other misdemeanors, and was sent home. Most of the charges were dropped, but he was told he would not be employed again, and had therefore offered his services to the Spanish. He evaded a Portuguese squadron sent to intercept him, battled down the coast of South America, and finally located a passage through what are now known as the Magellan Strait, at the tip of what is today Argentina. He found out for himself the vastness of the Pacific Ocean and was killed in a tussle with locals on the beaches of the Philippines in April 1521, but his ship Victoria did finally circumnavigate the world. The questions that had been set by Columbus and Cabot were finally answered.
But at the beginning of the voyage, at the height of a storm off the coast of what is now Uruguay, Magellan is said to have shouted at his crew: “We cannot go back here, because this is as far as Vespucci arrived. We have to go beyond.”
When the Victoria arrived back in Spain in 1522, under the command of his Spanish deputy Juan Sebastián Elcano, Sebastian Cabot was extremely worried. Revealing the existence of a Northwest Passage to foreign powers, as he had done, was one thing. But doing so secretly when Spain now had proven access to a rival southwest passage might look treasonable. He lived in terror that his mission to London was going to be revealed. If only he had not been so foolhardy as to mention the matter to the Venetians.
Some months later he was horrified to be approached in Valladolid by the Venetian ambassador, who brought a letter from the council in Venice asking for more details of his plan. As Sebastian read the letter, he went pale, begging the ambassador: “I earnestly entreat you to keep the thing secret, as it would cost me my life.”
The news did not leak. Sebastian’s secret was safe, for the time being. In fact, the emperor Charles V thought highly of him, and in 1526 asked him to lead a Spanish expedition to search for a more convenient southwest passage, convinced that Vespucci’s original exploration of the
River Plate had not gone far enough. The expedition was not a success. Sebastian irritated his subordinates by his secrecy and could not summon up the considerable willpower required to prosecute the expedition as determinedly as he needed to, perhaps because his heart lay farther north. He lost his flagship and was forced to send another of his ships, the Trinidad, under the command of his deputy, the Englishman Roger Barlow, home across the Atlantic to get reinforcements.
The reinforcements were never sent, Barlow was sent home by the English ambassador Sir Thomas Boleyn, and still Sebastian delayed.* Once more he faced dissension among the crew, furious at his indecision, and he returned without having discovered a new route to the Pacific. When he finally got there, he faced a judicial inquiry into the failure of the voyage and was sentenced to banishment in Morocco. As so often happened, the sentence was never carried out.
Sebastian was becoming increasingly aware of the instability of his position. If he led an expedition and found any of these elusive passages, he would have been showered with wealth. But if he failed to find one, he would have been barred from further work in either Spain or England. He had married again, Catalina de Medranao from Seville, but it was clear there was little future in Spain for him, and even that future was likely to be unpredictable. He clung to Seville for fear of what would happen to his property there if he left, never wholly honest with anyone about his plans or his past. The first volume of history by the Venetian historian Giovanni Battista Ramusio described meeting a Mantuan man who had seen Sebastian some years before. Sebastian was said to have boasted that he knew a shorter way to the Indies and had also sailed all the way down to Florida in 1496. It seems to have been a half-remembered conversation, and confused Sebastian’s voyage of 1508 with his father’s earlier expeditions. This is the basis of the story, which has endured, that Cabot claimed his father’s discoveries. Ramusio may just have been remembering a distant conversation rather inaccurately.
In any case, Sebastian was now very careful. His father’s story was sensitive in Spain: if John Cabot had been attacked by Alonso de Ojeda, his son would have uncovered the evidence in Seville. And since he spent most of his life desperately talking up his own qualifications for further expeditions, it seems to have been convenient, if not to actually claim he made the 1497 voyage himself, then to simply omit his father’s name. Perhaps he retained some animus toward his father after the 1498 voyage, or perhaps he never really forgave him for failing to return. Sebastian spread confusion by being the first to accuse Vespucci of falsely claiming to have discovered the New World. Sebastian Cabot and Vespucci shared a common propensity for self-promotion and exaggeration, and this may have irritated Sebastian particularly. In any case, Vespucci was dead and that made it difficult for him to reply.
His reputation was then growing in England and, in 1547, the English privy council sent the money for him to come home. Without telling his Spanish employers, Cabot quietly left Seville, never to return, but pursued by furious demands that he should be extradited back there. So Sebastian found himself back in Bristol. It was a very different place than the city he had left four decades before. Protestantism had swept through. The old abbey was now Bristol Cathedral. There were no monks for the mayor to battle with, and the merchants were unexpectedly reticent about their style of religion. The Cabots soon moved again, to London, where Sebastian was given the title of grand pilot and a salary to go with it. He spent a good part of the next few years engaged in a wild scheme to send an Anglo-French expedition up the Amazon to take Peru from the rear, endless lawsuits in Seville and Venice to secure his family’s property, and investing in voyages to Barbary and Guinea.
Being in England relieved his main fear. Nobody might listen, but at last he could speak freely about what he believed the shape of the world to be. There was no fear of arrest, no looming fear of a Moroccan exile. But it was hard to quite shake off his lifetime habit of affecting the deliberate air of one who keeps secrets, and he did not trust people to know the full truth about his own past. Only this time, the aura of mystery seemed to work in a way that it never did when he was a younger man. “The people of London set a great value on the captain’s services, and believe him to be possessed of the secrets of English navigation,” wrote the German ambassador to London about him.
Sebastian grew an impressive forked beard and became a respected figure in navigatory circles. He became a governor of the Muscovy Company, dedicated to searching for northeastern passages along the northern coast of Siberia, as well as northwestern ones. As late as 1550 he was applying for a reissue of his original 1496 patent from the boy king Edward VI, Henry VIII’s sickly son. Our last glimpse of Sebastian is as an old man in 1555, coming on board a small ship on the Thames called the Serchthrift before it sailed in search of an Arctic passage to the East via Siberia.
The 27 being Munday, the right Worshipfull Sebastian Cabota came aboord our Pinnasse at Gravesende, accompanied with divers Gentlemen, and Gentlewomen, who after that have viewed our Pinnasse, and tasted of such cheere as we could make them aboord, they went on shore, giving to our mariners right liberall rewards: and the good olde Gentleman Master Cabota gave to the poore most liberall almes, wishing them pray for the good fortune, and prosperous successe of the Serchthrift, our Pinasse. And then at the sign of the Christopher, hee and his friends banketted, and made me, and them that were in the company great cheere; and for very joy he entered into the dance himself, amongst the rest of the young and lusty company.
It was no simple journey—Sir Hugh Willoughby’s expedition had frozen to death on the coast of Lapland the previous year—and Sebastian was then about seventy-one. Around this time also, he was painted, holding a globe and a pair of dividers, the very model of an ancient mariner. But it was again a difficult time to be prominent in English society. Two years later Philip II, Charles V’s son and Isabella and Ferdinand’s great grandson, was in England, effectively including England in his vast empire by marrying Queen Mary, and was setting about the business of rolling back Protestantism. He was King of England for fourteen months and during that time he briefly canceled Sebastian’s pension.
Sebastian died sometime toward the end of 1557. Characteristically, one of the last statements he made on his deathbed was that the ability to measure longitude—Vespucci’s great claim—had been revealed to him by God.
Of all the main players in this story, Sebastian Cabot lived the longest, except for one: Bartholomé de las Casas. When Las Casas died in July 1566, there truly was a New World, with Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I on their respective thrones. Francis Drake was already sailing the Spanish Main. Walter Raleigh—who would found the abortive Virginia colony at Roanoke—was then twelve years old, and William Shakespeare was two. A different world, but within living memory of Columbus’s first landfall.
II
“All hail, and welcome, nation’s of the earth
Columbia; a greeting comes from every state.
Proclaim to all mankind the world’s new birth.”
PROFESSOR JOHN KNOWLES PAINE,
“Columbia March,” 1892
Columbus died a wealthy man, despite his protests, but in some obscurity. The expansion of the empire in the Indies was going ahead with extraordinary energy without him. He was not from any of the Spanish nations, so his privileges—and the long-running legal actions by his family—were resented for different reasons by the Spanish establishment and the colonists. When the historian Francisco López de Gómara said in 1552 that the discovery of America was the greatest event since the birth of Christ, he did not give Columbus the credit.
The court cases had also confused the history. The Pinzón story and the sale of many of the key documents by Columbus’s grandson Luis confused the picture still further. What revived interest in Columbus was the need for a founding hero by the revolutionary leaders of what was about to become the United States, and this was satisfied to some extent by a new concept: “Columbia.” This referred to an ideal
ized state of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and it was used first in the Boston Gazette in 1775 by Mercy Warren, the wife of a revolutionary general. It was taken up by the first known African American poet, Phyllis Wheatley, in a poem that included the lines: “Fixed are the eyes of natives on the sails / For in their hope Columbia’s arm prevails.”
General Washington liked it, and Tom Paine reprinted it in his Pennsylvania Gazette. Columbia was emerging as an idea, associated increasingly with Columbus himself, of rebellion in the name of intellectual and political liberty. When a friend of Jefferson and Madison, Joel Barlow, wrote his Columbiad in 1787, it included Columbus dying in prison and vouchsafed a vision of the grandeur of America to come. Columbus was, in fact, beginning to be regarded as a figure like Galileo, a kind of proto-Protestant, who had defied both church and accepted wisdom by sailing into the unknown. He was therefore a fitting hero of the new revolutionary nation. Jeremy Belknap explained in his “Ode to Columbus and Columbia,” for the third centenary in 1792, that Columbus had rebelled against a world where “Black superstition’s dismal night / Extinguished Reason’s golden ray.”