COLUMBUS AND THE NORTH: ENGLAND, ICELAND, AND IRELAND David B. Quinn So many aspects of the life and activities of Christopher Columbus have come under intensive scrutiny that it is a matter of some surprise that certain areas have never been completely clarified. This, in many cases, is due to conflicting interpretations of the evidence and, in some, to idiosyncrasies of the writers. In still other cases, the evidence remaining is too slight for a clear solution to be possible. In such instances, attempts to obtain a solution have provoked controversy because they are, of their nature, tentative and incomplete. This is especially true of the years between Columbus's departure from Genoa and his decisive voyage of 1492. Of his earlier life Paulo Emilio Taviani and Jacques Heers(1) have written with some conclusiveness, but even they show a reluctance to define to what extent Columbus was a seaman before 1475 and how far a merchant. It is reasonable to assume that he was involved it both capacities. It is also reasonably clear that he was brought up as much a merchant as a seaman (in spite of his won and of Samuel Eliot Morison's assertions to the contrary).(2) His role in his expedition to Chios in 1475, for example, is best seen as that of a supercargo, engaged in fostering his family's trade in wool and woolen articles in a venture sponsored by two major trading families, the Spinola and the Centurione di Negro (we should probably use the word "clan" to describe their widespread ramifications). This association continued into the 1480s and may be considered one of Columbus's principal links with commerce in Genoa, in Portugal, and in Madeira as well as, it will be suggested here, intermediately, in the year 1477 in England, Iceland and Ireland. One question cannot, apparently, be answered at all - that is, when his interest in the written word began. Was he sufficiently educated in Genoa to launch him in the career of amateur scholarship which was to be the hallmark of his preparations and plans from the late 1470s at least and which remained with him during the collection and annotation of his library? The evidence, such as it is, seems to be against it.(3) Yet, as a merchant, he needed to be competent in reading materials relevant to the cargoes with which he was concerned and the bookkeeping and primitive accounting necessary for competence in this area. Was he concerned at all with tales which could have set him thinking of reaching out beyond the frontiers of Europe toward the East or West, beyond the limits of existing Italian enterprise? No answer can be yet given to this vital question. Form early in his life he would have been familiar with written sailing directions and portolan charts of the Mediterranean. Many of these were then extending their range much farther than the inland sea, first to mark out the routs of Genoese carracks and Venetian galleys to Flanders and England and then out into the Atlantic Ocean as more and more islands - real and imaginary - were added to the oceanic picture. But at what stage did Thule (Iceland) and Cathay enter his consciousness? This, too, is a question of consequence, more particularly in considering the exiguous evidence for his movements after he first landed on Portuguese soil. Thule, certainly, could early have come to his perception (if not precise knowledge), but Cathay only after 1477 at the earliest. These considerations are relevant to the nature and purpose of Columbus's northern activities shortly before he settled in Portugal. Like so much else, the circumstances of Columbus's arrival in, departure from, and return to Portugal between 1475 and 1477 are debatable. The conventional story is that he was a passenger in the Genoese trading fleet which left Genoa in the summer of 1476 and was dispersed and largely destroyed by Franco-Portuguese privateers off southwestern Portugal in August 1476; shipwrecked, he made his way directly to Lisbon, which he henceforth made his base. This view is controverted by Taviani, who regarded the trading fleet, equipped by the Spinola and Di Negro firms, which left Genoa on December 12, 1476, as being commissioned to pick up survivors from the disaster in Lisbon and bring them north to England or Flanders. Louis-Andre Vigneras, in a 1961 paper circulated to the Society for the History of the Discoveries, thought so too though perhaps Columbus and the rest were picked up at Lagos and did not necessarily make their way to Lisbon first.(4) Columbus would, in either case, have reached England in late March or early April. Genoese traders had long put into Southampton and London, as a valuable commerce flowed between Genoa and England - from Genoa in Mediterranean and oriental products, from England mainly in unfinished woven cloth - which would certainly have interested Columbus the trader. Dr. Alwyn A. Ruddock(5) has followed carefully the fortunes of the Genoese who traded with and settled in Southampton. Two who by 1476 had become naturalized - Antonio and Benedetto Spinola - would have been natural contacts for Columbus. Had his vessel gone on to London, there were other members of the clan with whom he could have made contact. Provisionally, since no local or royal customs accounts for 1476- 1477 exist for Southampton, it may be suggested (without any great conviction) that he landed there, at Southampton rather than London. The reason for this selection is that if he did what he afterward claimed to have done, he would have gone on to Bristol most easily from there and that Bristol, even if it did not have direct links with Genoa, had many with Portugal and, above all, would have carried him on one of its ships to Iceland, if his account of his experiences there, given in a very tired and inaccurate narration, it is to be accepted in any form. To explain these statements it is necessary to consider in a little detail English relations with Iceland at that time.(6) Toward the end of the fourteenth century, doggers (fishing vessels of 40 to 80 tons burden) were sailing from east coast ports, from Kings Lynn to Leith, to catch cod, which they brought wet-salted to English ports without paying duties and consequently leaving no record in the surviving customs accounts. They were soon followed by merchant vessels of usually 100 to 150 tons burden, which brought to Iceland sale, woolen cloth, wheat and other grains, timber, metal goods, and miscellaneous cargo. These goods were disposed of for stockfish (air-dried cod), coarse but warm Iceland cloth, and train oil at a trading mart at the Vestmannaeyjar Islands off the south coast. It seems that the doggers collected and sometimes stole air-dried cod from the isolated western settlements of Iceland as they made their way to and beyond the northwestern tip of the island, rounding Horn (the north cape) to the north coast, and they probably passed most of this stockfish to the merchant vessels on their way back along the southern Icelandic coast, where they may well have continued fishing. From 1424 onward, Bristol began sending merchant vessels to Iceland and engrossed an appreciable part of the trade at the mart off the southern islands. If Columbus wished to go to Iceland, he would have had to go on a Bristol vessel, and, if we accept the Iceland journey (the evidence for which demands critical inquiry), he must have done so. For much of the century the English held a monopoly of external trade with Iceland, but in the reign of Edward IV (1461- 1483) the Hanseatic Kontor at Bergen obtained from the king of Denmark a grant of exclusive trade with Iceland which affected English merchant vessels (but not doggers, over which there could be no control in Icelandic waters). Nevertheless, occasional royal licenses were granted to Bristol ships to go there, and it is clear that others went without royal permission and, it appears, with success, since English cloth was especially in demand. There is, however, something of a mystery about these Bristol ships that went to Iceland. A number can be traced in customs accounts setting out, laden very much as the east coast ships, though with Mediterranean additions through contacts with the Iberian lands (especially the Algarve), but the accounts contain few records of their return with Iceland produce, notably fish - the much-prized stockfish (bacalhau), or which the Portuguese never seemed to obtain enough.(7) Consequently, Morison's suggestion that if Columbus went to Iceland, he went in a Portuguese ship is fatuous: no Portuguese vessel had an entry to Icelandic commerce, and none is known to have gone there in the fifteenth century.(8) The hypothesis which would best explain the anomaly of Bristol ships not bringing all Iceland produce direct to Bristol is that they brought their stockfish and oil to the important Irish trading city of Galway and there transferred it to Portuguese vessels. Certainly, Bristol ships sailed down the west coast of Ireland from Iceland at this time (one was wrecked there in 1485). If this was the case, Columbus could easily have landed in Galway, as at some time he certainly did, and gone of from there directly to settle in Portugal. This does not entirely exclude the possibility that the Bristol ships carried their cargoes directly to Portugal, merely calling at Galway to dispose of some part and take on Irish exports. Columbus, in this case, need not have changed ships. But the suggestion of a break in the return voyage and a transfer to another ship appears the more likely. Columbus could have obtained some information on Thule from classical sources had he read Latin in 1475 or seen a manuscript copy of Ptolemy's Geographia, in which he could have found imprecise evidence of an island called Thule or have seen "Fixland" on some portolan charts of the earlier fifteenth century. But he could have found accurate information on the island only in England or in Norway. That he should have gone to England at all could reflect some commercial purpose alone, but it could also point more definitely in the direction of his having already formed some concept of exploring the Atlantic. He could have obtained such inspiration from a number of sources while still in Genoa, notably from his brother, Bartholomew, who is understood to have preceded him to Portugal. Bartholomew was a chart maker by profession and therefore well aware of the extensive discoveries the Portuguese had already made, culminating in the west in the exploration of the farthest Azores, 1,000 miles from Lisbon, in 1452-1453. He would have heard that the Portuguese had long been successfully probing southward along the African coast, financed partly by Genoese capital. Consequently, the idea of expanding Genoese knowledge of the northern ocean by a voyage to Iceland may have already occurred to him, as Traviani considered, before he left Genoa.(9) Although the Life of Christopher Columbus by his son Fernando Colon, was written well before the latter's death in 1539, the book was not published until 1571, and then in Italian in Venice, so that it cannot be wholly relied on textually. But the critical edition of the original does not point out any obvious errors in it, and we may take it and the excellent modern translation by Benjamin Keen, as being in most respects reliable.(10) In English Colon writes about Iceland as told to him by his father who is said to have stated: In the month of February 1477, I sailed one hundred leagues beyond the island of Tile, whose northern part is in latitude 73 degrees N. and not 65 degrees as some affirm, nor does it lie upon the meridian where Ptolemy says the West begins, but much farther west. And to this island, which is as big as England, the English come with their wares, especially from Bristol. When I was there, the sea was not frozen, but the tides were so great that in some places they rose twenty-six fathoms, and fell as much. This can only have been the statement of a man whose memory was failing and who was incapable of accurate recollection, as was true of Columbus in the years between his fourth voyage and shipwreck in 1504 and his death in 1506. It is also riddled with errors that it is possible for such a considerable authority as Dr. Ruddock to deny, in a cogent article, that he ever went to Iceland, though she is at a loss as to how he got his information otherwise.(11) Yet most authorities are prepared to accept it as represent in a voyage made by him and recalling after a period of more than a quarter century. The defects are obvious enough. No vessels were at that time sailing off the north coast of Iceland in February, even though the sea may have remained open, owing to the deflection of part of the North Atlantic Current into Denmark Strait. The fishing and trading season ran, at most, from May to September. No ships are known to have attempted to go as far as 300 miles north of the island at this time of for long after. Doggers did make their way around the northwestern cape but then sailed only a little way along the north coast.(12) The latitude of Horn is 67 degrees N., so the opinion of those the passage decries as saying that Iceland is in 65 degrees or thereabouts was not very far wrong. The placing of Iceland at 73 degrees N. is therefore some six degrees - over 400 miles - too far north, but this was not unusual even in sixteenth-century maps. The printed map of Sebastian Cabot of 1544 places the north coast in 74 degrees N.(13) As for longitude, the meridian of 20 degrees W. cuts through Iceland, though the longitude of the western part of the island lies somewhat farther west than that of Ferro (Hierro), the Ptolemaic first meridian at 20 degrees W. But since longitude could not be calculated at sea in that era, this is a minor matter. We do not know whether Columbus attempted to take latitude readings at this time: he was inaccurate in doing so later in his life. Iceland is not, of course, as large as England, although this is again a minor error for the period. What is true is that the English, especially Bristol men, did trade with Iceland, and this is probably the most correct statement in the passage and the most likely for Columbus to remember if he had gone there from Bristol. If we subtract all but the year date 1477 (even though February is wrong) and the Bristol connection, we have not much left, but it would be strange if Columbus had not been to Iceland and still claimed firmly to have been there and continued to be so dogmatic about the circumstances. Yet even his final statement about the tides, ranging up to twenty-six fathoms (or even fifty feet) is ludicrous, since the range is under twenty feet,(14) unless there was a submarine volcanic eruption (conceivable though most unlikely) or he was thinking of the Severn Bore (at its height some forty feet), as Ruddock had suggested.(15) We must therefore attempt to rewrite columbus's progress in 1477. After his arrival in Southampton or London, his land journey to Bristol would not have been unduly long of arduous, though the way was shorter and easier from Southampton. He would have boarded a Bristol trader in May, reaching the roadstead off the Vestmannaeyjar Islands in June. He would then have had to transship to an English east coast dogger and work around western Iceland. The dogger would have been fishing on the western shores and collecting air-dried cod from the isolated settlements, enabled to exist in tolerable weather conditions by the North Atlantic Current which kept the cold Arctic Current at bay for much of the year. Rounding Horn, the vessel would have had open sea to the north but would not fish far off the north shore. Columbus would have had to share the hard life of the fishermen on their small vessels, entirely unsuited to carrying passengers. He would have returned with them, perhaps late in August, or a little earlier if they intended to fish off southern Iceland as well, to meet again with the trading vessel he had come on. On this he would have sailed to Galway, where, if the practice was what has been suggested above, he would have transferred, along with the stockfish, and gone on to Lisbon, where he was to settle for much of the next few years. Strong support for this reading of Columbus's Iceland venture is given by the fact that his visit to Galway is attested in his own hand in a marginal note on his copy of Pierre D'Ailly's Imago mundi, which still survives. In translation it reads: "Men of Cathay have come from the west. [Of this] we have seen many signs. And especially in Galway in Ireland, a man and a woman, of extraordinary appearance, have come to land on two tree trunks [or timbers? or a boat made of such?]."(16) Even though the note is authentic, the use of Cathay must belong to the period of his acquisition of the Latin edition of Marco Polo, published about 1485, which he annotated extensively and which by then embodied his fully formed views on the western route to Cathay. His conclusions about the corpses of the man and woman and about their craft must have been made as much as seven or eight years after he had seen them at Galway. Speculation on what the bodies may have been had ranged widely; it seems least unlikely that they were Inuit (Eskimo) caught in their kayak (or conceivably umiak) in Davis Strait at the time of the great outrush of water and icebergs in July, so rapidly they did not decay completely before reaching land. Polar bears have been carried south of Newfoundland on icebergs which can reach 44 degrees N. before melting. Did Columbus think, however, in 1477 that these strange persons could have come from land beyond the ocean? This is impossible to answer, unless his dream of a western crossing is antedated to the period of his visits to England, Iceland, and Ireland, for which no clear indications can be given, apart form the fact that, if he made the risky and uncomfortable journey to northern Iceland, he was already concerned with exploration of the ocean rather than with commerce. What would Columbus have learned on a northern voyage? First of all, he would have experienced the great ocean in the Bay of Biscay on the 800-mile run from England to Iceland, and still more on his return to Portugal if this took place during the period of equinoctial gales. He could have considered in retrospect that he would never again attempt to penetrate such northern waters, however much they might have contributed to a belief in Asia's accessibility over the Pole or, indeed, opposite the British Isles, even though the latter possibility presented itself to him in the later 1480s. He would have learned of the strong eastward current and the westerlies which were to help his return in 1493, but, in the meantime, he would have confirmed their existence through his voyages to and from Madeira and West Africa. Even if he had come to believe there might be open water over the Pole - if he was prepared to maintain he had sailed 300 miles north of Iceland in open water, this is likely to have occurred to him - he cannot have avoided learning that a substantial landmass lay to the west of Iceland. The fishermen would have warn him that they must stick closely to the shores of Iceland, because to the west of Denmark Strait an ice-shrouded coast, East Greenland, could not be approached without great danger. There is not need to suggest that he learned of the medieval Greenland colony: Icelanders had lost interest in it after Norway took control of contacts with it in the late thirteenth century. He is still less likely to have heard of the Vinland sagas, even if they had been retained in folk memory, which is very doubtful, or had been written down in unintelligible language between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. But the bare fact that there was a great landmass in the west would remain in his consciousness, and he would have discredited any idea that Greenland was a peninsula of Europe, if he indeed believed in an open sea to the north.(17) If these considerations, or any of them, are relevant to his later plans and actions, the Iceland venture could have played a significant - if negative - part in the evolution of his later Grand Design. Columbus's continuing contacts with England, which are not unlikely to have taken place, even if evidence is lacking, are not clearly indicated in surviving documents, though he has a number of references to English products, particularly woolen cloth. Most versions of the Diario have him stating that he had been to England, but the Dunn and Kelley transcription throws doubt on this. The passage reads: "i y vi todo el Levante y ponente que dize por yr al camino de septentrionque en inglaterra."(18) This is translated as "I have seen all the east and west (which he says because of being on the north route to England)." The passage in parentheses would thus appear to be an interpolation by Las Casas, but the general statement would cover his northern voyages if not explicitly. The widely circulated The Log of Christopher Columbus, translated by Robert H. Fuson, contains the sentence "When I sailed to England with the Portuguese some years ago, I learned that the westerlies blow year-round in the higher latitudes and are as dependable as the easterlies, but in the opposite direction," which appears to have no obvious authority.(19) It is not stretching possibilities (and they are no more than that in our present knowledge) that Columbus had some contact with and influence on the Bristol men after his return to Portugal. They were in difficulty with their Iceland trade and were very shortly to attempt to find an alternative fishing ground to the west. In a passage in a Bristol document dating from 1480 of perhaps before, there are lists of islands derived from reasonably recent portolan charts, which Columbus may have provided for them, though the charts could also have been the product of their Portuguese trade.(20) These evidently stimulated projects for finding some suitable alternative land on which fish could be dried; the island of Brasil, often placed near Ireland, provided an obvious objective. To go over what we know about Bristol activities in 1480 and 1481 may not appear superfluous if they are tentatively suggested as being linked with the earlier contacts with Columbus. By 1480 Bristol preparations for a westward voyage were under way. There was a royal grant of June 18, 1480, to Thomas Croft (a Bristol customs official), William Spencer, Robert Straunge, and William de la Fount (the last three prominent in Bristol's trade with Portugal) "to trade for three years in any parts...with two or three ships, each of 60 tons or less." This had been interpreted, probably correctly, as a special license to search for new fishing grounds or islands in the ocean where fish could be dried. The permission was needed primarily because one of the collectors of customs, Croft, was not normally, as an official, allowed to take part in commercial activity. This group probably outfitted a vessel, partly owned by John Jay the younger (another active merchant), under an expert master named (apparently) Lloyd - the document with this information is defective - which left Bristol between July 15 and September in search of the Isle of Brasil but was forced by bad weather to put into an Irish port. The backers were not discouraged by this failure, and during the summer of 1481 they sent to sea two ships, George and Trinity, of which we only know that Croft owned an eighth share in each and that he provided forty bushels of salt, for a discovery and fishing expedition. If he had seven partners who provided equivalent amounts of salt, then the expedition was well equipped to bring home satisfactory cargoes of wet- or dry-salted cod. Unfortunately, once again, we have no information on the voyage except that the ships returned some time before September 24, 1481.(21) On that date Croft was called before an official commission investigation the working of the customs system; the commissioners evidently did not know of the license of June 1480. Charged with trading in spite of the limitations of his office, he could only say that the ships had not been engaged in trade in merchandise but were "to serch and fynd a certaine Ile callid the Isle of Brasile." This left wholly ambiguous the vital question of whether the shops had indeed "found" such and island. It can be argued, in view of a statement made much later to Columbus, that a discovery had been made long before. The problem, which had been argued pro and con since the report of the commissioners came to light in 1935, is whether a discovery was in fact made.(22) The question, if land was found, is why subsequent voyages to fish and to dry fish on Brasil (wherever it was) are not known to have taken place. One suggestion is that they did take place but that the departure of fishing vessels would not normally have been noted in any official record. Another suggestion is that the voyage could have proved so long and dangerous that it was not repeated for nearly ten years but is quite likely to have been undertaken again in 1490 or 1491. The remaining answer, which has received perhaps the widest acceptance is that the expedition did not if fact find the island, even if the 1481 document allows the possibility that something was indeed found. It was not until late in 1497 or early 1498 that Columbus was reminded, as will be shown, that he had long known of such a discovery, in a letter whether the Iceland voyage of Christopher Columbus had any effect on Bristol activity at sea in the west remains doubtful, but the possibility cannot be entirely ruled out. The principal story of the long struggle by Columbus to get royal backing from the rulers of Portugal and Spain for his Grand Design of sailing to Copango and Cathay by the northeast trades from the Canaries, interspersed with ventures in the madeiras and in Guinea, has been told so often in such detail that his interest in the northern seaways emerges only in the interstices of his major project. Yet the return of Bartholomeu Dias from his rounding of the Cape of Good Hope, so far to the south, may well have prompted him to consider a voyage farther to the north, especially if he know (as is likely) of the Bristol ventures of 1480 and 1481. Clearly, Columbus and his brother set to work to get the English royal usurper, Henry VII, to sponsor some venture in latitudes westward from the British Isles in the lower fifties of north latitude. Bartholomew was to be the instrument, even though Christopher may have thought he himself might become the leader if the omens were favorable. Bartholomew was a cartographer, and Christopher could also compile and perhaps draw maps. In my view, they set about putting together from existing sources, only minimally modified, maps which would bring this project visually before the eyes of the ENglish monarch. Fernando Colon related that one of the maps was a world map to which was attached a Latin verse and an arrogant statement that Bartholomew Columbus "de Terra Rubra" laid it before the king of February 10, 1488/9.(23) Dr. John Pinsent, a well-known classicist, has been kind enough to give me a literal translation of the attached verse: Whosoever you are who desires to know the shores of lands (a learned and fitting picture which will fit all),. which Strabo affirms, and Ptolemy, Pliny and Isodore, not each, however, with a single opinion. Here also is depicted that zone of Spain, formerly unknown to the people, recently furrowed by keels, torrid, which at last is very well known to many. The citation of traditional sources for lands beyond the western boundaries of Europe, combined with a eulogy of what can only be the formal acquisition of the Canaries by Spain in the Treaty of Alcacovas in 1479, is scarcely likely to have caught the attention of the English king. The fact that it was cited in this way suggests that Bartholomew had the map returned to him after his first rejection by the English ruler. the second Columbian map, which is here dated 1489-1490, rather than later, now reposes in the Departement des Cartes et Plans in the Bibliotheque Nationale. This map was published by the maritime historian Charles de la Ronciere as La Carte de Christophe Colomb in 1924 as one that was presented to the Spanish monarchs outside the walls of Granada in 1491 and that helped get Columbus the hearing and concessions of which he was to make such dramatic use in 1492.(24) It soon became the focus for almost as much scholarly infighting as did the Vinland Map in 1965. It was attacked on the grounds that it did not favor in any way Columbus's western plans, that it was much later than 1491, that its mappemonde presented such a rounded picture of Africa that it could not have been completed until the return of Vasco da Gama from India in 1499, and so on. La Ronciere continued to maintain his thesis against all criticism, and his views have been rehearsed in milder form in 1984 and 1990.(25) The map is in three distance parts, first a mappemonde,(26) then on each side of it extensive quotations from d'Ailly's Imago mundi, and finally a sea chart of the eastern Atlantic from Iceland to the Congo (Diogo Cao's limit in the 1474 voyage) with a respectable view of western Europe, with no unique features, and also of West Africa, showing the castle at Mina and two creditable African figures, with an unusually full delineation of Iceland, but no indication of any discoveries in the west with a single exception.(27) The unique feature in the northwest, to which La Ronciere gave much of his attention, is the presence of three islands far to the west in the latitude of the British Isles. Below them is an inscription which La Ronciere revived with the use of chemicals, which almost obliterated it, but of which he gives a facsimile. This, if he had examined it critically enough, gave no support to the Grand Design, since Columbus based his geography on access to Cipango and, ultimately, Cathay on sailing westward in the higher twenties of north latitude, not the fifties. The extensive citations from d'Ailly are striking. La Ronciere was able to establish, in what appears to be an entirely convincing manner, that this group of extracts absorbed into its text an alteration, bearing on the Red Sea, derived from Columbus's marginalia and not found in the printed edition.(28) This is a very strong piece of evidence of a Columbus association which tended to get forgotten in the ensuing controversy. The crucial element which links the map with the visit of Bartholomew Columbus to England is the three islands and their inscription: "Here is the Island of the Seven Cities, now colonized by the Portuguese, where, the Spanish seamen say, silver is found in the sands" (in translation).(29) The great rectangular island of Antilia, which appeared on portolan charts from at least 1424, was also known as the Island of the Seven Cities, which from a Portuguese legend, recorded by Las Casas and appearing on Behaim's 1492 globe, represented the seven cities founded by the Portuguese who had fled under seven bishops from the Moorish invasion of 734 A.D. and had settled there. This island was said to have been seen by a Spanish ship in 1414; hence the silver sands.(30) What was unique for the fifteenth century is that Antilia was normally located on the charts in the latitudes of Morocco or the Iberian Peninsula, not in the fifties of north latitude. Why it should have been divided into three islands in this case is not clear, unless Christopher Columbus had some information that the English had already, at an earlier date, sighted three islands in this area.(31) Another feature of the map is that the Island of Brasil, usually but not invariably shown close to southwestern Ireland, is neatly placed midway between Ireland and the three larger islands, indicating a useful halfway house for island-hopping voyagers. Iceland, too, is fuller and better represented than in other fifteenth-century charts.(32) It is about the same size as England (see the 1477 Columbus description), shows the islands off the south coast where English trading took place, and contains a long inscription on how the English traded to Iceland with cloth and how, in the absence of tillage, the inhabitants depended on exchanging dried cod for wheat and flour to keep alive. This all fits with what has been suggested in regard to the visit of Columbus to Iceland in 1477, at least the parts he remembers best. If this reading of the map is correct, then the association with Bartholomew's search for a backer in England and France for a voyage to the west in hope of reaching the Island of the Seven Cities seems reasonably well established, more particularly as the best authority on mappemondes of this period identifies it as a Genoese type made between about 1490 and 1500, which would not exclude 1488-1489.(33) Fernando Colon's and the later accounts by Oviedo and Las Casas do not convey a clear account of Bartholomew's progress.(34) Fernando says he was shipwrecked, intercepted by pirates, suffered an illness, and was impoverished - all of which made it impossible for him to have delivered the map first mentioned to Henry VII on February 10, 1489. Oviedo states that Henry and Bartholomew's application examined by a panel of learned men and that they advised rejection, with which Henry agreed. From there Bartholomew is said to have gone to France (Vigneras considered that one of the London Spinolas had close connections with the French regent Anne de Beaujeu and is likely to have given Bartholomew an introduction to her).(35) There he may have stayed awhile making charts, but in 1492, apparently, he returned to England. This time he was welcomed by the king, and his plan was accepted in principle. There is not hint of anything of this sort in the English records, but of Ayala's statement(36) that, from about 1490, the Bristol men were sending exploring vessels into the Atlantic once more is valid, it is just possible that Henry know of this and so changed his mind about Bartholomew's plan. The latter set out to bring the glad news to Christopher in spain sometime early in 1493 and in Paris learned from Charles VIII that Christopher had made his voyage and returned with news of his discoveries. There is no doubt that Bartholomew missed the second expedition of 1493 and reached Hispaniola later on another vessel. It must be said, however, that while the Paris Map is the best evidence of the character of Bartholomew's mission, the other details mentioned above, apart from his final misfortune in missing the second fleet, need to be taken with considerable caution.(37) At least, however, Christopher would have had a full account of his brother's mission well before the end of 1493. It is interesting and perhaps important for the attempted reconstruction of the northern interests of the Columbus brothers that Bartholomew, after he had been established as adelantado of Hispaniola, did not cease to concern himself with the idea of a route to Cathay by way of a much more northern approach that the Caribbean. According to a neutral observer, the Genoese gentleman adventurer Michele de Cuneo, writhing in October 1495, Bartholomew had prepared three vessels - two caravels and a fusta (built in Hispaniola) - for a voyage to northern latitudes in search of an alternative route to Cathay. Cuneo depicts christopher Columbus as being, by this time, disillusioned, after his inconclusive voyage along the south coast of Cuba, at having failed to find clear evidence that he had reached Asia. If so, he was becoming increasingly doubtful that the Caribbean was indeed the correct way to Cathay and was prepared to second his brother's efforts to embark on another, earlier-planned expedition by way of more northerly waters. Cuneo even said of the "Lord Admiral" (the way in which John Day was to address Columbus), "I am very much afraid we have to abandon everything" - a remarkable statement if true. Cuneo also appeared to believe that Bartholomew had already set sail and "will have sailed northward 500 leagues. He will find [ ], but he will also find greater storms and fouler weather than we ourselves have found. Even so 'The Lord Admiral' says he will find Cathay."(38) The extraordinary document (accepted by Morison as genuine) transports the two brothers back into the 1480s or even the 1470s, with the Grand Design in danger of being jettisoned. It indicates that Bartholomew was genuine in his attempts to involve Henry VII in westward voyaging and that his failure to do so had not put out of his mind the original plan of an approach to Asia in latitudes comparable with those of the British Isles. We have no further indication that he completed his preparations of that he ever set out on the voyage; indeed, there was much to involve both brothers in the affairs of the infant colony at this time. It is also significant that Christopher Columbus may have been sufficiently doubtful about the viability of an approach to Asia through the Caribbean that he was prepared to consider alternative approaches to finding Cathay. If we accept Cuneo's statements, we are in a position to strengthen the considerations which have already been brought forward for the authenticity of the Paris Map as a Columbus document, and we are perhaps even faced with the possibility that John Cabot's appearance in England was not wholly divorced from the plans and assumptions of the Columbus brothers before 1492. The next phase in this inquiry does, indeed, revolve round John Cabot. Cabot was of Genoese stock but went to live in Venetian territory and eventually became naturalized in 1476. He later claimed to have been involved in the Venetian spice trade in the eastern Mediterranean. (39) Ferdinand and Isabella learned of his arrival in England, describing, though not naming, him as "one like Columbus."(40) Ayala wrote, more than two years later, that he was "another Genoese like Columbus, who had been in Seville and at Lisbon seeking to obtain persons to aid him in this discovery."(41) Although we do not yet know the circumstances under which Cabot came to England, this statement strongly suggests that he had been either the rival or, alternatively, the direct associate of the Columbus brothers. Ayala does not say that he had applied to either John II or Ferdinand and Isabella for assistance, but tact may have kept him from reminding his masters that they too might remember this other Genoese-Venetian who had touted his plans before them, as Columbus had done. If these assumptions have any reality, it seems clear that Cabot had dropped out of the race; in the early 1490s a Juan Cabot de Montecalunya is found planning harbor works at Valencia and is not heard of there after early 1493.(42) It is widely accepted that this was the John Cabot who came to England. One theory is that he was in Valencia when Columbus was making his way to Barcelona to bring the news of his discoveries to the Catholic king. He could even have learned the news orally from Columbus if they were old associates or rivals, though this carries assumptions rather too far in the present state of our knowledge. It would have been logical for Cabot, having heard of Columbus's success in finding lands in the lower 20s of north latitude, to remember that, owing to the convergence of the meridians, a shorter voyage in higher latitudes might prove as easy and more productive. When precisely Cabot arrived in England is not yet known, but he established a household at Bristol with his wife, Mattea, and his three sons (we do not hear of any daughters). We know that he made an unsuccessful voyage, presumably after he had won the confidence of the Bristol men who were already experienced in ocean voyaging: this could have been in 1495 or 1496.(43) By early spring 1496 he had made his case at court, and on March 5, 2496, he and his three sons received a grant to discover, annex, and rule any lands they found not hitherto occupied by Christian people (a grant which has some similarities to the Capitulations made to Columbus in 1492).(44) The voyage of the small shop Matthew began on May 2, 1497, from Bristol, and land was sighted on June 24.(45) The vessel sailed northward until about July 20, mainly along the eastern Newfoundland shore between approximately 45 and 51 degrees North. It left Cape Bauld (or Cape Degrat) on July 20 or thereabouts, sighting the coast of Brittany in fifteen days and arriving at Bristol on August 6, so Cabot reached London by road in time to receive a reward for discovering the "new isle" from the king on August 10 or 11, followed by a substantial pension of December 13 following. It would be superfluous to recite these generally accepted details of the first discovery of North America, for which there is sound documentary evidence, unless there was a connection between Cabot's voyage and Columbus's. This association came by means of the Bristol merchant John Day (he was also and originally a freeman of London named Hugh Say,(46) having presumably taken the new name in order to qualify as a freeman of Bristol as well), who had been trading with Spain since at least 1492. When he first associated with Columbus is not yet known, but it seems that after Columbus returned from his second voyage on June 11, 1496, he and Day were soon in contact. Columbus was a disappointed man, as he appears to have been already in the autumn of 1495.(47) Hispaniola and been colonized, but his half- hearted attempt to get his crew to accept that the south coast of Cuba, which he largely traversed (though not rounding Cape San Antonio), was not the Golden Chersonese (Malay Peninsula) of the classical maps still disturbed him. He had gone more than a thousand miles westward since his first landfall in 1492 without finding even Cipango, let alone Cathay. It is not certain whether Columbus had one or more meeting with Day in 1496. He may, indeed, have gained from Day news of what the Bristol men were doing, more especially as Bartholomew still hankered after a voyage in relatively northern latitudes. They obviously had discussed the sources on which Columbus had relied in preparing his Grand Design. It might seem that Columbus had some information about Cabot's plans at Bristol and asked Day when he was there to send him a fuller report. This Day was able to do, not too long after Cabot's successful return after finding a continental shore only some 1,800 miles west of Ireland. Day had been in Bristol and, returning to Spain, was able to report to columbus what he had learned.(48) He did not name Cabot, as presumably this was not necessary, but he gave a most valuable account of the voyage, indicating that the shores traversed lay between the latitudes of Dursey Island in the southwest of Ireland and the mouth of the Garonne, approximately latitudes 45 degrees and 51 degrees North. He was thus reporting the existence of a major landmass of perhaps continental dimensions westward from Bristol. (Cabot was busy proclaiming that he had reached Cathay.) This was a blow to Columbus, although no native people had been seen and only a few primitive artifacts brought back to establish that the land was inhabited. The Bartholomew venture had been vindicated, even though the nature of the land discovered remained unclear. Writing to Columbus, Day also indicated some of the sources he had discussed with him previously. One was Marco Polo, the latest edition of which (almost certainly the Venetian one of 1406) he brought as a present. Columbus, however, possessed the Latin edition of 1484 or 1485, which he extensively annotated and which is still in extant.(49) The other source mentioned was a manuscript entitled "Inventio Fortunata" which Day had earlier promised Columbus he would bring but which he had forgotten and left in England, clear indications of detailed discussion of sources still of interest to Columbus. The reference to "Inventio Fortunata" presents some problems. One manuscript, of which we have many later mentions, though no complete copy survives, deals with the assumed travels of an English friar, Nicholas of Lynne, to Greenland in the fourteenth century.(50) It is less likely to have been of interest to Columbus than another manuscript he is said to have used, with the same or a similar name but which appears, from what little we know of it (it has also disappeared), to have dealt with islands and perhaps lands lying in more southerly reaches of the Atlantic. Oviedo and Fernando Colon both refer to it as "Inventio Fortunata." Oviedo's reference applies to St. Brendan, the supposed first discoverer of the Canary Islands, and Fernando's to "Juventius Fortunatus" (probably an imprecise reference to the same manuscript), who, he says, "tells of two floating islands supposed to lie to the west and farther south than the Cape Verdes, well to the south of the Canaries." The identification is difficult to resolve on the evidence available, so that which of the two manuscripts Day intended to bring to Spain remains in doubt.(51) It may well be that Day's material, together with his report of the discovery of what appeared to be a mainland only 1,800 miles from Ireland, could have suggested to Columbus that the Caribbean into which he had sailed so far might lie about halfway between two landmasses, one to the south to balance the northern landmass reported to have been found so much nearer Europe by Cabot. Day may thus have influenced the intended course of the third voyage. It is known that Columbus first of all continued on it but he later adjusted it toward the north. (In his first voyage, he altered direction to the southwest; adherence to his original course would have led to the discovery of North America.) His revised course brought him along the northern shore of South America, still in the Caribbean. His wonder at the size of the Earthly Paradise located by him in modern Venezuela (though a mere island in the place of Borneo on the mappemondes or on the Paris Map) revived his belief in the potential of the Caribbean and was to govern his activities on his fourth voyage. These considerations, however, belong to the main story of Columbus's explorations, while the Day letter is chiefly important for the rather casual statement toward the end: It is considered certain that the cape of the said land [Cabot's Cape] was found and discovered in the past [en otros tienpos] by the men from Bristol who found "Brasil" as your Lordship knows. It was called the Island of Brasil, and it is assumed and believed to be the mainland that the men from Bristol found.(52) This crucial statement by a responsible and critical reporter indicates firmly that Columbus was aware of an English discovery of an island (or land) across the Atlantic prior to the 1497 voyage. This could refer to a discovery made in 1481 or to one made between 1490 and 1494; either would reinforce the indications, slight as they are, that Columbus had maintained continuous touch with Bristol initiatives for a long period, most likely from his first relationship with them in 1477. If this is so, it adds an important facet to what we know of Columbus's contacts during the period in which his own Grand Design was in process of gestation. There appears to be no reason to discard it. Yet every effort had been made to deny its validity. Dr. Ruddock assumes that a sighting had been made of land to the west many years before Columbus's time, during a period when exceptionally favorable weather conditions brought a fishing boat easily all the way west to North America, and back again, but that this had been forgotten in the mists of time and was only recalled dramatically when Cabot's voyage established that land did indeed lie within reach in the west.(53) This seems to stretch the meaning of en otros tienpos, which merely means "in the past" or "in a past time," beyond reasonable limits. Morison, in his lordly fashion, brushed the reference aside as Bristol gossip picked up by Day - "the usual post-discovery yarn."(54) The last word on this issue cannot be written until we know more about the relationship between Cabot and Columbus and the circumstances which brought the former to Bristol. The chain of circumstances strung together on the links between Columbus and the north between 1476 and 1498, at the outside limits, depends on some good evidence (notably if the Paris Map is recognized as a Columbus document) - especially the statement of prior knowledge of a Bristol discovery by Columbus before Cabot's successful voyage - but there remain weak elements in the chain. Fernando Colon is, as so often, doubtfully reliable, while the weight to be placed on statements by Oviedo and Las Casas, long after the event, defy accurate assessment. Nonetheless it can be maintained, with at least a strong show of probability, that the sequence was in some related manner similar to, if not identical with, that put forward in this essay. At the very least, Columbus's contacts with the north should not be ignored or shrugged aside as of no significance. ENDNOTES David Beer Quinn is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Liverpool. He is grateful to Professor Norman J. W. Thrower, who presided over a 1989 seminar at the University of California, Los Angeles, where an earlier version of this article was discussed. 1.Paulo Emilio Taviani, Cristoforo Colombo: La genesi della grande scoperta, 2 vols. (Novara, It., 1974), I, I; Jacques Heers, Christophe Colomb (Paris, 1981). 2.Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus 2 vols. (Boston, 1942), I, 26-32, and The European Discovery of America, vol. I: The Southern Voyages, A.D. 1492-1616 (New York, 1974), 12-13, the latter being more modest in its emphasis. 3.Piergiorgio Parroni, "Surviving Sources of Classical Geographers," in Louis Rey et al., eds., Unveiling the Arctic (Fairbanks, Alas., 1984), 252-258. 4.Taviani, Colombo, I, 89-90; Vigneras, "Columbus and Portugal," paper presented to the Society for the History of Discoveries, 1961, 2. 5.Ruddock, Italian Merchants and Southampton, 1270-1600 (Southampton, Eng., 1951), is the only full account of Genoese relations with an English port. For the two Genoese settled in Southampton in the 1470s see pp. 116-117. 6.This account of Icelandic trading and fishing is largely based on Geoffrey Jules Marcus, The Conquest of the North Atlantic (New York, 1981); Marcus was able to use materials in Icelandic. On the English side it is supplemented by E. M. Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers, 2nd ed. (London, 1974), I, 89-90; Taviani, Colombo, II, 108-122, treats Columbus's Iceland venture seriously even though he lacked specific information on the trade and fishery. 7.David Beers Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481-1620 (New York, 1974), 51-55, and North America from Earliest Discovery to First Settlements: The Norse Voyages to 1612 (New York, 1977), 53; James A. Williamson, ed., The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery Under Henry VII (Cambridge, 1962), 175-177, and, negitively, from Carus-Wilson, ed., The Overseas Trade of Bristol: In the Later Middle Ages (Bristol, 1937), passim. 8.Morison, Admiral, I, 34, was very positive that Columbus's voyage to Iceland "was probably an otherwise unrecorded attempt of some enterprising Portuguese captain to combine a profitable trade in bacalhau...with Arctic exploration." In his European Discovery, Southern Voyages, 15, he asserts without qualification that "this Portuguese ship could have sailed beyond Iceland to Jan Mayed Land" - a most improbable conclusion. 9.Taviani, Colombo, I, 89-90 10.The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by his Son Ferdinand, ed. and trans. Benjamin Keen (New Brusnwick, N.J., 1959. The Iceland passage is on p. 11. The book was first published as Fernando Colon, Historie...dell'ammiraglio D. Christoforo Colombo...Nuova di lingua spangnole tradotte...dal s. Alfonso Ulloa (Venice, 1571). The standard modern edition is Rinaldo Caddeo, ed., Le historia della vitae e dei fatti de Cristoforo Colombo. per d. Fernando Columbo suga figlia. 2 vols. (Milan, 1930). 11.Ruddock, "Columbus in Iceland," Geographical Journal, CXXVI (1970), 177-189, and also Antonio Rumeu de Armas, Hernando Colon (Madrid, 1973), 425-442. Ruddock substitutes "southern" for "northern" and "50 feet" for "twenty-six fathoms" in the translation. Taviani, Colombo, I, 89, considers that Columbus not only went to Iceland but left Genoa with the intention of going there. He placed the call at Galway on the outward voyage. 12.The Historical Atlas of Canada, ed. R. Cole Harris (Toronto, 1987), plate 22, indicates the route followed by the English doggers around western Iceland and, rounding Horn, some little way along the north coast. 13.Kenneth Nebenzahl, Atlas of Columbus and The Great Discoveries (Chicago, 1990), 106-107. The sole surviving copy of this printed map is in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. 14.Morison, European Discovery, Southern Voyages, 15; Taviani, Colombo, II, 110. 15.Ruddock, "Columbus in Iceland." 16."[Home]nes de Catayo versus oriens venierunt. [n]os vidimus multa notabilia, et [spe]cialiter in Galvei Ibernie virum et [uxo]rem in duobus lignis areptis ex mirabili [pers]ona," Cesare de Lollis, ed., Raccolta...Columbiani, 14 vols. (Rome, 1894), I, pt. ii, 290; David B. Quinn, Alison M. Quinn, and Susan Hillier, eds., New American World, 5 vols. (New York, 1979), I, 134. 17.The currency of such views on Greenland in the fifteenth century is illustrated in R. A. Skelton, Thomas E. Marston, and George D. Painter, The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation (New Haven, Conn., 1965), 172-179. Taviani, Colombo, I, 105-106, considered the Iceland voyage to have had a profound effect on the experience and thinking of Columbus. 18.Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, The Diario of Christopher Columbus (Norman, Okla., 1988), 252-253. 19.(Camden, Me., 1987), 58. 20.Skelton, "English Knowledge of the Portuguese Discoveries in the Fifteenth Century. A New Document." Congresso Internacional de Historia de Descobrimentos (Lisbon), Actas, III (1962), 365-374. 21.Carus-Wilson, Overseas Trade of Bristol, 218-289, 157- 158, 161-165, prints all the extant customs accounts for Bristol in this period and other relevant documents, including those on the English voyages of 1480 and 1481, which are also in Quinn et al., eds., New American World, I, 91-92. 22.D. B. Quinn, "The Argument for an English Discovery of America Between 1481 and 1494," Geographical Journal, CXXVII (1961), 277-285, which refers back to Quinn, "Edward IV and Exploration," The Mariner's Mirror, XXI (1935), 275-284. 23.Life of Columbus, trans. Keen, 36-37, is paralleled in Bartolome de las Casas, Obras Escogidas, ed. Juan Perez de Tudela and Emilio Lopez Oto, 5 vols. (Madrid, 1957-1958), I, 108-109. The mappamundi, which both claimed to have seen, had attached to it a Latin verse and a rather vainglorious statement of its presentation to Henry VII by Bartholomew Columbus on February 10, 1488/9. The verse reads: Terrarum quincumque cupis feliciter oras Noscere, cincta decens docte pictura docebit, Quam Strabo affirmat, Ptolemaeus, Pliny, atque Isidore: non una tamen sententia quisque. Pingitur hic etiam nuper sulcata carinis Hispania zona illa, prius incognita genti, Torrida, quae tandem nunc est notissima multis. Bartholomew's description of himself as "de Terra Rubra," which has puzzled many scholars, is simply a latinized form of his mother's maiden name, Fortanarosa (see Emiliano Jos, "El Plan y la Genesis del descubrimientos Colombino," Cuadernos Colombinos, I [1979-1980], 36). Taviani, Colombo, II, 260, maintains that Christopher Columbus, not Bartholomew, was designed to lead the expedition from England. No clear indication that this was so has been found. 24.(Paris, 1924), in French and English and with both monochrome and colored reproductions. The most accessible, and best, color reproductions are in Nebenzahl, Atlas of Columbus, 22, 24-25. The map is in Bibliotheque Nationale Cartes et Plans Res. Ge AA.562. 25.Morison, Admiral, I, 134, summarily rejects it. A strong attack on La Ronciere was made at the time by Albert Isnard in Revue des Questions Historiques, CII (1924), 317-335, to which La Ronciere made a careful response, ibid., CIII (1925), 297-321. He repeated his interpretation in "portolans et planispheres conservees a la Bibliotheque Nationale," Revue d'Histoire Economique et Sociale, XL (1967), 10-11. The Christopher Columbus connection is maintained in somewhat less uncompromising terms by his daughter, Monique de la Ronciere (a distinguished cartographer in her own right), and Michel Mollat du Jourdin in Sea Charts of the Early Explorers (New York, 1984) and also by Nebenzahl, Atlas of Columbus, 23; Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 60-68. 26.The likelihood of the map being the product of the Columbus chart-making business in Seville is strengthened by the classification of it as a map of Genoese type belonging to the last decade of the fifteenth century in Marcel Destombes, Mappemondes A.D. 1200-1500 (Amsterdam, 1964), 185. 27.See Vigneras, "La Busquede del Paradiso y las Legendarias Islas de Atlantico." Cuadernos Colombinos, VI (1976), 45-50. The text in Las Casas, Obras Escogidas, I, 48-49, parallels that on Martin Behaim's globe of 1492 (E. G. Ravenstein, Martin Behaim, His Life and His Globe [London, 1908]). 28.In a passage on the Red Sea, Pierre d'Ailly, Imago mundi (de Lollis, Raccolta, I, pt. i, 408), wrote "ad usque as terminus Indie sex ammo integro navigateur." In a marginal note (postille) Columbus wrote "mare Rubrum est sex menses navigacionis et ibi annus vsque ad Indiam." The map, in the extensive extracts from d'Ailly inscribed at the sides of the mappemonde, has, in this passage, "de ibi annum usque ad Indiam." Textually, as La Ronciere pointed out forcibly, this indicates that the extracts were taken from the Columbus copy of d'Ailly and that the transcriber copied Columbus's version, including "de ibi" by mistake from the marginal note. This has never recieved the attention it deserves and is a strong point in the attribution of the map to the Columbus brothers. The mappemonde is not consistent with the Fra Mauro map brought to Lisbon in 1458 or 1459 (and not now extant), but it is very like a version of it updated to the 1480s when many additional portolans had modified the Atlantic picture in particular. The main chart, in its lefthand side (to the East) has much significant detail on West Africa, including two realistic figures of Africans and the castle on Mina, which Christopher Columbus had visited (see Morison, Admiral, I, 53-54, and Paul E. H. Hair, "Columbus from Guinea to America," History of Aftica, CVII [1990], 113-129). 29."Hec septem Civitatum insula vocatur nunc Portugallensium efecta, vt gromite citantur Hispanorum in qua reperiri inter arenas argentum pennibetur" (La Ronciere, La Carte de Christophe Colomb, 27). Gromite was the lowest grade of seaman on Iberian shipping at that time. It can mean a ship's boy or a sweeper, and its inclusion, rather than another word for seaman, is surprising. 30.The Legend of the Seven Cities is recorded on the Behaim globe and in Las Casas, Obras Escogidas, I, 48-49. 31.The division of the Island of the Seven Cities into three separate islands is not found elsewhere. It may have been intended to emphasize the originality of the project to Henry VII. On the other hand, in the mappemonde, while the island appears considerably west of Ireland, it is given the rectangular shape characteristic of Antilia on portolans from 1424 onward. 32.Iceland is depicted rather more fully and accurately (including the islannds off the south shore where trading with foreign vessels took place) than even any of the 16th century maps cited by Haraldur Sigurdsson, "Some Landmarks in Icelandic Cartography Down to the End of the Sixteenth Cintury," in Rey et al., eds., Unveiling the Arctic, 389-401. The description is only matched by that on Behaim's globe of 1492 (Ravenstein, Martin Behaim). This might seem to add weight to the Columbus association of the map, together with the description noted below. 33.Destombes, Mappemondes, 185. 34.Gonzales Fernandez de Oviedo, Historia general y matural de las Indias, de. Juan Perez de Tudela, 5 vols. (Madrid, 1959), I, 21; trans. Quinn et al., eds., New American World, I, 135-136. 35.See note 4. 36.See note 3. 37.Collated from the sources in note 9 above, together with Las Casas, Obras Escogidas, I, 117. 38.Morison, ed. and trans., Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (New York, 1963), 227. 39.Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages, 190-195, and Quinn et al., eds., New American World., 91-102, print all that is at present known about the Cabot voyages. 40.Ferdinand and Isabella to Rodrigo Gonzalez de Puebla, Mar. 28, 1496 (Quinn et al., eds., New American World, I, 94), notes the arrival in England of "one like Columbus." This indicates that the Spanish sovereigns had knowledge of Cabot's arrival in England before the end of 1495. Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages, 202-203; Quinn et al., eds., New American World, I, 101-102. 41.Pedro de Ayala to Ferdinand and Isabella, July 25, 1498, Quinn et al., New American World, I, 101. Williamson, Cabot Voyages, 228. 42.From M. Ballesteros-Gaibrois, "Juan Caboto en Espana," Revista de Indias, IV (1943), 607-627, translated in Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages, 196-199. 43.Information on the first voyage is at present available only in Day to Grand Admiral (Christopher Columbus), Quinn et al., eds., New American World, I, 98-99. See also note 46 below. 44.The 3 sons were Lewis (Ludovico), Sebastian (Sebastiano), and Sancio. Nothing further is known about the first and third of these. Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages, 203,-205, 207, 217; Quinn et al., eds., New American World, I, 93-94. 45.Nothing is known of the course of the 1497 voyage apart from the Day letter and Sebastian's statement in his notes in Spanish and Latin on the 1544 world map. These were reprinted separately, probably in Antwerp, as Declaratio chartae novae navigatoriae Donmini Alnirantis. The copy in the Henry E. Huntington Library, sig. B2r, reads: "Terran hanc olim nobis clausam aperuit Ioannes Cabotus Venetus, necnon Sebastianus Cabotus eius filius, anno ab orbe redempto 1494, die uero 24. Iulij hora quinta sub diluculo, quam terram primum uisam appellarunt, & Insulam quandam magnam ei oppositam, Insulam diui Ioannis nominarunt, quippe quae solenni die festo diui Ioannis aperta fuit." The Spanish legend on the map contains the same errors - 1494 for 1497, and July for June - but is little less compressed. It is given in Henry Harrisse, John Cabot, the Discoverer of North America, and Sebastian, His Son (London, 1896), 432-433: "No. 8. Esta tierra fue descubierta por Ioan Caboto Veneciano, y Sebastian Caboto su hijo, anno del mascimiento de nuestre Saluador Iesu/Christi de M.CCCC.XCIIII, a ueinte y quatro de Iunio, por la mammama, ala qual pusieron nombre sant Ioan, por auer sido descubierta el mismo dia..." This is the basis for the English translations in Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages, 207, and Quinn et al., eds., New American World, I, 95. Morison, European Discovery, vol.I, Southern Voyages, A.D. 500-1600 (New York, 1971), 178, regards Cape Degrat as Cabot's first landfall, takes him from there south to Placentia Bay, on the south coast of Newfoundland, and then back to his starting point for his departure. This interpretation had found little support. 46.Ruddock, "John Day of Bristol and the English Voyages across the Atlantic before 1497," Geographical Journal, CXXXII (1970), 222-223. 47.This statement is strongly supported by Cuneo's letter of about Oct. 1495, cited in note 36. 48.Archivo General de Simancas, Estado de Castilla, leg. 2, fol. 6 (now Autografos 103). It was first published by Vigneras in Spanish as "New Light on the 1497 Cabot Voyage to America," Hispanic-American Historical Review, XXXXVIII (1957), 226-228. Another English translation in "The Cape Breton Landfall: 1494 or 1497," Canadian Historical Review, XXXXVIII (1957), 226-228. Another translation is in Morison, European Discovery, The Northern Voyages, 206-209. Vigneras's latest study was "Etat present des etudes sur Jean Cabot," Congresso Internacional de Historia des Descobrimentos (Lisbon), Actas, III (1962), 664-666. It is discussed in detail from a different aspect in Quinn, Discovery of North America, 5-23, 93-111. 49.This survives in the Columbian Library, Seville. 50.T. J. Oleson, "Nicholas of Lynne," Dictionary of Canadian Biography, I (Toranto, 1966), 678-679. 51.Life of Admiral Christopher Columbus, ed. Keen, 11. 52. Quinn et al., eds., New American World, I, 99 (which used tiempos rather than the tienpos of the original). The Spanish text of the crucial portion is: "Se presume cierto averse fallado e descubierto en otros tienpos el cabo de la dicha tierra por los de Bristol que fallaron el Brasil come dello tiene noticia Vuestra Senoria la qual de dezia la Ysla de Brasil e presumese a creese ser tierra firma la que fallaron los de Bristol." The letter is reproduced in facsimile in Geographical Journal, CXXVII (1961), between pp. 284 and 285. 53.See note 39. 54.European Discovery, Northern Voyages, 208, n. 9.