Biddle’s book marks an epoch in the controversy.  In truth, he seems to be the first who gave minute study to the original authorities and broke away from the tradition of Newfoundland.  He fixed the landfall on the coast of Labrador; and Humboldt and Kohl added the weight of their great learning to his theory.  Harrisse, who in his John and Sebastian Cabot had written in favor of Cape Breton, has, in his latest book, The Discovery of America, gone back to Labrador as his faith in the celebrated map of 1544 gradually waned and his esteem for the character of Sebastian Cabot faded away.  Such changes of view, not only in this but in other matters, render Mr. Harrisse’s books somewhat confusing, although the student of American history can never be sufficiently thankful for his untiring research.

The discovery in Germany by von Martius in 1843 of an engraved mappemonde bearing date of 1544, and purporting to be issued under the authority of Sebastian Cabot, soon caused a general current of opinion in favor of a landfall in Cape Breton.  The map is unique and is now in the National Library at Paris.  It bears no name of publisher nor place of publication.  Around it for forty years controversy has waxed warm.  Kohl does not accept the map as authentic; D’Avezac, on the contrary, gives it full credence.  The tide of opinion has set of late in favor of it, and in consequence in favor of the Cape Breton landfall, because it bears, plainly inscribed upon that island, the words “prima tierra vista,” and the legends which are around the map identify beyond question that as the landfall of the first voyage.  Dr. Deane, in Winter’s Narrative and Critical History, supports this view.  Markham, in his introduction to the volume of the Hakluyt Society for 1893, also accepts it; and our own honorary secretary (the late Sir John Bourinot), in his learned and exhaustive monograph on Cape Breton, inclines to the same theory.

I do not propose here to discuss the difficult problems of this map.  For many years, under the influence of current traditions and cursory reading, I believe the landfall of John Cabot to have been in Newfoundland; but a closer study of the original authorities has led me to concur in the view which places it somewhere on the island of Cape Breton.

At the threshold of an inquiry into the “prima tierra vista” or landfall of 1497, it is before all things necessary to distinguish sharply, in every recorded detail, between the first and second voyages.  I venture to think that, if this had always been done, much confusion and controversy would have been avoided.  It was not done by the older writers, and the writers of later years have followed them without sufficiently observing that the authorities they were building upon were referring almost solely to the second voyage.  Even when some occasional detail of the first voyage was introduced, the circumstances of the second voyage were interwoven and became dominant