In early 1496, a Venetian sea captain named Giovanni Caboto appeared in the southern English port city of Bristol. He had no money, but carried a warrant from King Henry VII to obtain a ship and sail on a voyage of trade and discovery.
England would call him John Cabot, and from 1496 to 1498 — less than a decade after Christopher Columbus — he set sail three times for the New World. The first voyage was aborted, but on the second he made landfall in what is now Newfoundland and claimed North America for England and the Roman Catholic Church.
That much is known. But of his third voyage there is nothing. He left Bristol and apparently vanished — slaughtered by enemies, taken by disease or swallowed by the sea.
And that is not the only enduring mystery about Cabot. Who helped him? Who bankrolled him? Did he really disappear?
But scholars first had to untangle another mystery: the authenticity of spectacular claims made by Alwyn Ruddock , a historian at the University of London who had researched Cabot for more than half her life.
Dr. Ruddock several times promised a book, but never wrote it. Instead, before she died in 2005 at 89, a childless widow, she ordered her executor to destroy her research. Seventy-eight bags of papers were shredded and incinerated, leaving scholars astounded.
Fascinating stuff.
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/history/research/cabot.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... z20i524feW
The new discovery shows that the first European to set foot in North America since the Viking Leif Ericsson in the 11th Century was financed by a loan of 50 nobles (£16, 13s, 4d) from the Bardi banking house.
Just like Columbus, the Engish voyages were financed by the great Italian merchant banks of the era, receiving the loan in 1496.
John Cabot - also known as Zuan Caboto or Giovanni Chabotte due to his Venetian birth - made two voyages, one in the summer of 1496, one in 1497.
On the second journey, he landed in Newfoundland.
The entry itself is also curious in that the reference to ‘the new land’ implies that the money was given so that Cabot could find a land that was already known about.