John Cabot. Another competitor to Columbus
John Cabot
In Bristol it is almost impossible not to hear the name John Cabot. In addition to the monument dedicated to him to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of his voyage to the shores of American Newfoundland in 1497, the city has schools, shopping centers and numerous businesses that bear his name with the greatest pride, and a replica of his ship, The Matthew, launched launched in 1996, located in the harbor of Bristol Docks. This Italian navigator in English service is considered in Britain something of a local hero - the man who discovered the Northern Sea Route to America!
Replica of John Cabot's caravel "The Matthew" in Bristol harbor
Although John Cabot was not born in England, during the reign of the Tudors he led English naval expeditions that opened the northern sea route to the shores of America. Like his predecessor, Columbus, in 1497 he sailed west, but not from Andalusia, but from the English port of Bristol in the hope of finding a shorter route to the fabulous Asia, according to the ideas of Europeans, a country that was believed to be rich in gold , spices and other luxury items.
A month later, he discovered a “new land,” today known as Newfoundland in what is now Canada. Cabot is also credited with the rights to North America for England and the beginning of a century of English transatlantic travel - special period for English stories.
Special period
The second half of the XNUMXth century is a special period in the history of Europe, including the era of the Great Geographical Discoveries, the emergence of the Reformation era, which ultimately led to significant changes in the economic and social sphere of the then society and included almost all of Europe in the sphere of interests of the maritime states of Europe. Earth. It was an era in which the historical development of many modern nations was determined for several centuries to come!
Caravels that crossed the Atlantic Ocean
Let's see what these great maritime discoveries meant in general for Europe and England in particular.
Now we know all parts of the world, and it is very difficult to realize that a little over five hundred years ago a very large part of the world was completely unknown to Europeans. People's precise knowledge of geography at that time did not extend beyond Europe, the Mediterranean countries and the small West Coast of Africa.
The vast Asian continent was then completely unknown, except through rumors and amazing stories about distant and mysterious lands from the famous medieval travelers, the brothers Niccolo and Maffeo Polo from Venice, which they visited in the thirteenth century. The Atlantic was a “sea of darkness” for Europeans, and no one knew what lay beyond it, but the discovery of America soon made it the beaten path between the Old and New Worlds.
Kublai Khan presents the Polo brothers with golden passes (between 1410 and 1412, Gallica Digital Library)
The first quarter of the XNUMXth century was the beginning of the era of great geographical discoveries. Portugal and Spain, which had led crusades against the Moors in their lands for many centuries during the Reconquista, were now eager to discover new lands and convert pagan peoples to Christianity. Sailors of Portugal sailed east by sea around the west coast of Africa towards India, while Spain headed west in the opposite direction.
Portuguese voyages along the coast of West Africa
By the middle of the XNUMXth century, Portuguese sailors had already reached the mouth of the Gambia River in West Africa, and a year after Henry VII ascended the English throne, the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias moved much further south and rounded the Cape of Good Hope (Cape of Storms). .
Meanwhile, the famous navigator Christopher Columbus concluded that since the world was round, it would be easier to reach the treasures of India by sailing west rather than south, as the Portuguese had done, and in 1492 his three small ships sailed from Andalusia, to try their luck in the “sea of darkness.” And luck smiled on Columbus - he discovered the New World!
Christopher Columbus's first voyage (August 3, 1492 – March 15, 1493)
What was England doing while all this was happening?
She was not yet ready for any travel, nor for her “place in the sun” in the New World. She was first concerned about the Wars of the Roses (1455–1487), then about their devastating consequences. It was only during the time of Henry VII of the Tudor family that England began to take timid steps to enter into a race with Spain and Portugal and never turn back for several centuries.
And these timid steps began to be taken by John Cabot, an Italian merchant and navigator who proposed to Henry VII a project for discovering the New World by the northern route!
John Cabot
The man we know today as John Cabot was born in Italian Genoa (according to other sources, not far from Naples) around 1450 in the family of a merchant and had quite an Italian name - Giovanni Caboto. But by 1461, Cabot was already living in Venice, where he became a citizen, and around 1482 he married the Venetian Mattea, and they had three sons: Ludovico, Sansio and Sebastiano, who, looking ahead, rose to the rank of pilot. Major of Spain for trade with India.
Moving to Venice, the main trading center of the entire Mediterranean region, he began to engage in trade in what is now called the Middle East, and during his commercial travels, which took him to the shores of Arabia, he often heard about countries rich in spices lying far away. East. At a young age, he read about the fabulous Chinese cities in the works of the Venetian merchant Marco Polo and wanted to see them with his own eyes, hoping to reach them by sailing west across the Atlantic.
It appears that his terrible experiences with Arab traders likely influenced Cabot's decision to find a new sea route to the East that would allow European merchants to trade directly with the Far East rather than with Arab intermediaries.
In Spain
In 1488, Cabot, experiencing financial difficulties, left Venice with his family as an insolvent debtor, since he owed a large sum to the Venetian banks.
Where the Cabot family initially went is not entirely clear from the surviving records, but by 1490 John Cabot was already in Valencia, Aragonese, where he proposed his plans for improving the harbor to the city government. But Cabot's proposals were rejected by the Valencian authorities, and in 1494 he moved to Seville, where he was hired to build a permanent bridge on the Guadalquivir River.
How he built this bridge is unclear, but what is certain is that in December 1494, a group of prominent citizens of Seville, dissatisfied with the lack of any progress in building the bridge, despite the funds provided to Cabot, met and decided that he should be expelled from the city. ..
Map of John Cabot's movements in Europe
Note. In 1492, news of Columbus's success arrived and a great race of naval exploration began, in which Cabot, inspired by the discoveries of Bartolomeu Dias and Christopher Columbus, began trying, but unsuccessfully, to persuade the royal courts of Spain and Portugal to finance his planned voyage west across the Atlantic. .
However, neither Spain nor Portugal were interested in John Cabot's projects. The Portuguese were the first to pave the way to Asia, sailing along the entire western coast of Africa and rounding the Cape of Good Hope. And when Columbus returned in triumph from his first transatlantic voyage in 1493 (he had reached the Caribbean, but thought it was part of Asia), the Spaniards also thought they had found a way to the east.
According to the Treaty of Tordesillas* 1494, ratified by Pope Alexander VI, these two Pyrenean kingdoms divided the entire non-European world into two for exploration and colonization, with a north-south border that crossed the Atlantic Ocean and the eastern part of modern Brazil.
Demarcation lines dividing the possessions of Spain and Portugal
In England
After the failure of the Seville bridge project, Cabot disappears from historical records. But in March 1496 he reappeared, this time as commander of a proposed voyage westward under the flag of King Henry VII of England.
How did this happen?
Arriving in England, Cabot approached the Italian community in London and the Venetian merchants of the port of Bristol, the busiest in England, where he settled with his family. His plan was to reach Asia by sailing west across the North Atlantic, which he estimated would be shorter and faster than the southern route discovered by Columbus. And in England he received the support that was denied him in Spain and Portugal.
Italian bankers based in London agreed to invest money in his project. The merchants of Bristol did the same. They had previously sponsored exploration of the North Atlantic as far back as the early 1480s in search of possible trade opportunities, leading some historians to believe that sailors from Bristol may have reached Newfoundland and Labrador before Cabot arrived there.
At that time, Bristol, like Venice, was another place with a rich maritime history, and intrepid fishermen and explorers were already venturing from there to Iceland and Greenland in search of greater fish catches. Cabot was eager to follow them and sail even further to the West, for, like most sailors of that period, he believed that, by crossing the North Atlantic, he might well find what later became known as the northwest passage to Asia with its lucrative exotic goods such as silk and spices. And this route would be much shorter and safer than any route known at that time.
Note. Bristol, with its access to the Atlantic, was the most logical place to sponsor English voyages across the Atlantic in the late XNUMXth century and England's most prosperous sea trading port, second only to London in importance.
Its prosperity was based on its role as an intermediary in a complex trade network linking Iceland, north-west Europe, the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean, and the wealth and energy of more than two hundred Bristol merchants was invested in the trade. And all this, along with the city's location on the very Atlantic coast, gave its traders a powerful advantage in acquiring and accumulating the necessary geographical knowledge and maritime technology.
The key product in Bristol's trading network was Icelandic fish, which was in great demand throughout continental Europe. But starting around the second half of the 1400s, Bristol traders began to experience harassment in Iceland, making it difficult for them to acquire these fish. Of those researchers who support the opinion that the Bristol merchants already knew about Newfoundland before Cabot's voyage there, there is a strong opinion that this very oppression forced them to look for new sources for acquiring fish.
However, there are some objections to this opinion - first of all, Bristol was a center of trade, not fishing, and Bristol merchants bought and sold fish caught by others, and the English themselves, who fished off the coast of Iceland, were mainly based in Hull - on the east coast North Sea of England, and not at all in Bristol.
Thus, Bristol merchants who sponsored sea voyages to the Atlantic in the second half of the 1497th century were much more likely to seek new markets and trading partners. Well, looking ahead, it should be noted that Bristol merchants showed very little commercial interest in Newfoundland after Cabot sailed there in XNUMX and were in no hurry to invest their funds in further exploration of the Atlantic.
In addition, Cabot was convinced that Christopher Columbus had not discovered anything more important than a few small islands during his voyage in 1492, and the fact that a huge continent lay between Europe and Asia was not yet known, so Cabot believed that the best sea route to Asia lies much further north than Columbus explored, and that is where he wanted to go.
Note. Although there is no documentary evidence, there is an assumption that John Cabot could have embarked on a second voyage with Columbus. Most of the names of the more than 1 people who accompanied Columbus on this voyage were not recorded, and Cabot could well have been among the naval engineers on the 000 ships of this voyage, which, according to Columbus's plan, were to build a port complex on the territory of Hispaniola discovered by him (modern . Haiti).
If Cabot actually sailed with Columbus, then Henry VII certainly had some reason to trust this Venetian to travel with the money of the English treasury to the other side of the Atlantic, and this, by the way, helps explain why Henry VII hired Cabot, a foreigner with a dubious past and an absence known maritime knowledge to undertake such an expensive and dangerous journey.
To keep up with Portugal, which circumnavigated Africa, and Spain, which at one time supported Columbus, King Henry VII of England issued patents to Cabot and all his sons to search for islands and countries in the west, east and north, in the hope of a British monopoly in trade, which could be installed. And if Cabot's predictions about a new northern route to India had been correct, he would not have been the only one to profit - King Henry VII was also due a 20% share of the expedition.
Patent granted to John Cabot by King Henry VII to search for islands and countries in the west, east and north
Everyone believed that India, China and Japan were rich in gold, precious stones, spices and silks and, if the coveted Asia ended up where Cabot imagined it, it would make England the largest trading center in the world for goods from the East. The goal was not only to find a northwest route to Asia, but also to find any new lands not yet known to Europeans and to establish profitable trade with the indigenous peoples Cabot might encounter.
Despite royal support, the expedition was largely financed by an Italian bank in London and merchants from Bristol, presumably with similar expected dividends at the conclusion of this voyage. And Cabot managed to convince the king that England did not need to stand by and idly watch as the Spaniards freely colonized the New World. And the king said the following: “He wanted to help England so passionately that I simply could not refuse him.”
So, on March 5, 1496, King Henry VII issued a letter patent to John Cabot and his sons, allowing them to explore unknown lands, with the following wording:
“Let it be known and demonstrated that we have given and granted... to our beloved John Cabot, citizen of Venice... free power, right and license to sail to all parts, regions and coasts of the eastern, western and northern seas, under our banners and flags, with five ships or vessels, of whatever capacity and quality they may be, and with such number and such sailors and persons as they shall desire to take with them in the said ships, at their own discretion, the proper costs and charges to find, discover and to explore any islands, countries, regions or provinces of the heathen and infidels, in whatever part of the world they may be found, which were hitherto unknown to all Christians.
It was a legally binding document that allowed John Cabot to sail under the English flag.
Let me give an interesting quote from an article by Yu. G. Akimov, Professor of the Department of American Studies at St. Petersburg State University, Doctor of Historical Sciences, about the first Portuguese voyages to North America:
“...At the same time, there are quite widespread claims that back in the first half of the 1470s - that is, about 20 years before Columbus - Portuguese sailors not only visited the North Atlantic, but also possibly reached the east coast of North America, which in the following decades entered the orbit of the Iberian kingdom. It is significant that the key figure here is Joao Vaz Corte-Real, the father of the famous navigators brothers Gaspar and Miguel Cortirial.*, who explored the east coast of modern Canada in 1500–1502...
Based on this, it is concluded that Corte Real Sr. and, possibly, Omen are the actual discoverers of North America, since the “New Land of Cod” should be understood as the Canadian island of Newfoundland, near the east coast of which the famous Great Newfoundland Bank is located - the richest place for fishing, and primarily the cod fishery. It is widely known that in the XNUMXth century the Portuguese (and not only them) called this island “Cod Land...”
Based on this, it is concluded that Corte Real Sr. and, possibly, Omen are the actual discoverers of North America, since the “New Land of Cod” should be understood as the Canadian island of Newfoundland, near the east coast of which the famous Great Newfoundland Bank is located - the richest place for fishing, and primarily the cod fishery. It is widely known that in the XNUMXth century the Portuguese (and not only them) called this island “Cod Land...”
First voyage (1496)
Cabot's first voyage began from Bristol on May 2, 1496, but no first-hand evidence survives of Cabot's first attempt to sail west. The only thing historians know is that it was a failure: severe storms ruined the voyage and ultimately forced his ship back to the port of Bristol. There is also an opinion that, in addition to strong storms, the return was affected by a lack of provisions and a crew mutiny.
Unfortunately, all we know about Cabot's maiden voyage is contained in a letter from John Day, an English merchant in the Spanish trade, to Christopher Columbus. It states that "he [Cabot] set out on the same ship, he had disagreements with the crew, he didn't have enough food, he encountered bad weather and decided to turn back».
Note. If we talk about the first English voyages in the North Atlantic, then we cannot fail to mention the first known voyage of the English merchant John Day, which occurred in 1480, when two Bristol ships "George" and "Trinity" went in search of a certain island called Brazil, a legendary place , whose name comes from a Gaelic word meaning "blessed" or "lucky". John Day's ships carried salt, which suggests that the purpose of this voyage was, after all, to buy fish.
Second voyage (1497)
However, Cabot was determined to make another voyage and, undeterred by the challenges of his first voyage, he set out again on May 20, 1497, on his only ship, The Matthew of Bristol, a 24-meter (78-foot) three-masted caravel. The 50-ton Matthew was not built specifically for the expedition and had previously participated in maritime trade (and would do so again after Cabot's voyage). Caravel-class ships were light, fast, maneuverable and did not require a large crew, making them an ideal choice for exploring unfamiliar waters.
The aforementioned John Day, a merchant from Bristol, wrote that Cabot had only one ship of fifty tons and twenty crew, plus provisions for seven or eight months, which makes the Matthew a relatively small ship. It is possible that among the members of the caravel's crew were his son Sebastian and two Bristol merchants.
The three-masted caravel "Matthew", on which John Cabot set off on his second voyage. Copy
It is generally accepted that it must have sailed along the Bristol Channel to Ireland and then north along the west coast of Ireland before emerging into the Atlantic.
Crossing the Atlantic over the next five weeks, he landed somewhere on the coast of North America on June 24, 1497 - most likely reaching what is today Cape Breton Island* (Nova Scotia, Canada), he then headed north, exploring the coastline of what he called "New Fundamental Land", which is today the island of Newfoundland, in eastern Canada. However, the exact location of the explorer's first landfall and subsequent stops with the exact coastal route are unknown and are highly controversial among historians.
Excerpt from "The Departure of John and Sebastian Cabot from Bristol on their First Discovery, 1497." Oil on canvas, Ernest Board, 1906
Cabot himself thought he had reached the east coast of Asia, probably Japan, then known as Chipango. Wherever he landed in the New World, he would become the first European in North America since the Vikings. Then the royal banner of Henry VII, the banners of the Pope and St. Mark of Venice were raised. At Cabot's landing site there was clear evidence of indigenous habitation, such as old fires, simple tools, and tree carvings, but no people themselves were visible.
Note. The beginning of European colonization of America is usually dated to 1492, the year of Columbus's first voyage. However L'Anse aux Meadows* in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador is much older. Dating to around 1000 AD, it is the only known location of an Icelandic sailors' village in North America outside of Greenland. L'Anse aux Meadows remains the only widely accepted example of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact.
Settlement L'Anse aux Meadows. Site located in Newfoundland proving the earliest presence of Europeans in North America
Historians have long debated what exactly Cabot was exploring, and the most authoritative account of his journey is a letter from a London merchant named Hugh Say, written in the winter of 1497–1498, but not discovered in Spanish archives until the mid-1950s. This letter, written in Spanish, was addressed to the "Great Admiral" of Spain, who was probably Columbus himself.
The letter reported that Cabot went ashore in the area of southern Labrador or northern Newfoundland, and then moved southeast along the entire coast until he reached the Avalon Peninsula (a peninsula in the southeastern part of Newfoundland), after which he began his return home.
John Cabot's voyage in 1497
It further follows from the letter that the crew members found a snare for catching game and a needle for making nets. Cabot believed (erroneously) that the land may have contained cultivated land, referred to in Hugh Say's letter as "tierras labradas", which may have been the origin of the name Labrador. Say also stated that there was no doubt that the land on whose coast Cabot was located was Brazil, a legendary island believed to have existed somewhere to the west of Ireland.
It was also reported that Cabot had discovered a huge new fishery, and in December 1497 the Milanese ambassador to England reported that he had heard Cabot claim that the sea there was "teeming with fish, which can be caught not only with a net, but also in baskets lowered from with the help of a stone." That fish, of course, was cod, and its abundance on the Grand Banks would later lay the foundation for Newfoundland's modern fishing industry.
So, on August 6, 1497, almost exactly five years after Christopher Columbus first set sail for the New World, his Venetian rival John Cabot sailed his tiny ship, the Matthew, back down the River Avon to the English port of Bristol and to the sound of church bells. who called over the harbor, went to London to inform the king news about his extraordinary discovery on the other side of the Atlantic. According to him to the king, Columbus failed - instead of the coveted China, Columbus's expeditions actually stopped on some remote and wild islands, very far from the Chinese coast.
Arriving in England, Cabot argued that his naval expedition, one ship with a crew of less than twenty people, had now found the real route to China in a completely different place and that Bristol should now become a new trading point in place of Venice and Genoa, which were beginning to lose their importance. In London, he was rewarded by the king with ten pounds sterling (equivalent to about two years' wages of an ordinary laborer or craftsman) for discovering a new island off the coast of China.
Immediately upon Cabot's arrival in London, Columbus's agents began reporting to Spain about his every move. For example, Cabot then had correspondence with the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci, the first man who, a little later, would correctly interpret the geography of all these geographical discoveries, the man after whom the new continent would eventually be named!
But at this moment the king's attention was increasingly attracted to the Cornish rebellion led by Perkin Warbeck*, and as soon as this rebellion was suppressed, and his throne was again secure, the king thought again of Cabot, who had already begun to plan his next expedition across the Atlantic. In September Henry VII rewarded Cabot with £2, and in December a handsome pension of £20 a year followed from the king. Well, in February of the following year, King Cabot was already issued a new patent for sea travel, which helped him prepare for the third expedition.
Third voyage (1498)
Having awarded Cabot a royal pension and renewed his patent, the king gave him additional rights for the next voyage, which included the ability to charter up to six ships of up to 200 tons. And although this voyage was supposed to be organized at Cabot's expense, the king also personally invested his funds in one of the ships preparing to sail. It should be noted here that, despite Cabot's reports from his 1497 voyage about large quantities of fish in the newly discovered lands, no preparations were made to catch them.
The third voyage was, rather, a commercial enterprise - a consortium of English merchants assembled a fleet of five ships and filled them with trade goods, but this time, in order to please the pope and present this voyage as a charitable work, several Italian monks were taken as missionaries, including a certain Augustinian monk Giovanni de Carbonari*. The purpose of this expedition was to discover Japan, for which he was instructed to continue his journey west from Newfoundland.
Cabot, with five ships, 300 men and a year's worth of supplies, left Bristol in May 1498, possibly stopping at Greenland (undetermined) and reaching Newfoundland once more, perhaps even going as far south as the Chesapeake Bay (in Maryland and Virginia, USA) or even to the Caribbean. There are no further records of Cabot and his crew, and the fate of the expedition is unknown. The most common belief is that the expedition either died at sea or that Cabot eventually reached North America but was unable to return.
It is quite possible that it was during this third expedition that Cabot died, but the exact circumstances of the death of the crew are unclear, all that is known is that he is now disappearing from history.
Curiously, there is speculation by some modern researchers, in particular one of the leading experts on John Cabot, the British historian of the Age of Discovery Alvin Ruddock, who has suggested that Cabot himself returned to England around 1500, but then disappeared from the historical record, only because his third voyage turned out to be either a commercial failure or his invasion of the controlled, according to the Treaty of Tordesillas* Spain's Caribbean Islands was a pretext for war with Spain, which the British authorities wanted to hush up. Archival records show that Cabot's royal pension was paid in 1498 and 1499...
Note. An extant map drawn up by Spanish cartographer Juan de la Cosa in 1500—one of the earliest European maps of the Americas—included coastline details with English place names, flags, and the notation “sea discovered by the English.” The map suggests that Cabot's journey may have taken him as far south as modern New England and Long Island.
Aftermath
Although Cabot's voyage in 1497 was so poorly documented, it still became the basis of England's claim to North America, although there were no immediate practical consequences of Cabot's voyage at first.
The purpose of these voyages was to provide trade opportunities with Asia, and not at all new fishing grounds, in which neither Cabot, nor the king, nor the merchants who financed his expeditions were interested. And instead of trading with Asia, Cabot and his Bristol financiers discovered that the path to fabulous Asia was blocked by a huge landmass, which would later be called America...
Italian explorer John Cabot became famous for the discovery of Newfoundland and played an important role in the development of transatlantic trade between England and America, and whatever he did, it was all done in the name of the English crown...
Well, in conclusion
The story of one of John Cabot's sons, Sebastian Cabot, is connected with the epic of his father and the history of the exploration of North America by Europeans. It is believed that he was on board the ship Matthew, but the only supporting evidence for this is a 1544 map showing parts of North America, which bears the inscription: “This land was discovered by John Cabot, a Venetian, and Sebastian Cabot, his son.”
Much later, in 1508–1509, supported by the interests of the merchants of Bristol, Sebastian Cabot explored the territories north of those discovered by his father John in 1497–1498 in search of a route to Asia, but he was unable to obtain further support in England neither from the Bristol merchants nor from the new king Henry VIII, and as a result, from 1512 to the late 1540s, Sebastian was in the service of the king of Spain. He then returned to England, becoming head of the Moscow Company, whose goal was to find a northeast passage to Asia around northern Russia. He probably died in 1557.
Monument to John Cabot in Bristol
Information
*"Matthew". Before Cabot's voyage in 1497, little was known about this ship, and when it was built is unclear. Judging by the reports of the time, the Matthew was an ordinary merchant ship transporting goods between Bristol, Ireland and the Bay of Biscay. Sources describe it as a "small ship" with a cargo capacity of 50 tons, which meant the ship could carry 50 barrels of Bordeaux wine below deck.
*Treaty of Tordesillas. Agreement of June 7, 1494 between Spain and Portugal on the division of spheres of influence in the world. This dividing line ran approximately halfway between the Cape Verde Islands (Portugal) and the islands visited by Christopher Columbus on his first voyage. According to this treaty, the lands in the east would belong to Portugal, and the lands in the west would belong to Spain.
*Gashpar (1450–1501) and Miguel (1448–1502) Cortirials. The sons of the Portuguese navigator João Cortirial, who in 1472 discovered the “New Land of Cod” (Terra do Bacalhau) far to the west of the Azores, with which some identify modern Newfoundland. In 1501, they apparently reached Labrador and Greenland in three caravels.
*Cape Breton Island (Cape Breton Island). An island located northeast of the Nova Scotia Peninsula in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The area of the island is 10 square meters. km.
*L'Anse aux Meadows. A site located in Newfoundland that provides evidence of the earliest presence of Europeans in North America. This Viking village, consisting of eight turf buildings on a timber frame, was first discovered in the 60s. Carbon dating of this Viking site confirmed that these structures existed between approximately 990 and 1050 years.
*Perkin Warbeck (Perkin Warbeck/1474–1499). Pretender to the English throne during the reign of King Henry VII. Claimed to be the youngest son of King Edward IV.
*Giovanni de Carbonari. An Augustinian monk and diplomat from Milan who served as envoy to the court of King Henry VII in London. He is known to have sailed with John Cabot during his expedition to North America. He may have founded a mission settlement and the oldest and only medieval church in North America in Newfoundland and Labrador.
References:
1. I. P. Magidovich, V. I. Magidovich “Essays on the history of geographical discoveries.”
2. Yu. G. Akimov “Current problems of modern English studies.”
3. Yu. G. Akimov “Portuguese sailors in the North Atlantic at the end of the XNUMXth century.”
4. Evan T. Jones "Henry VII and the Bristol expeditions to North America."
5. Peter Firstbrook "The Voyage of the Matthew: Jhon Cabot and the Discovery of North America."
Information