I might here borrow the quaint phrase of Herodotus and say, “Now I have done speaking of” John Cabot.  He has, beyond doubt, discovered the eastern coast of this our Canada, and he has organized a second expedition, and he has sailed in command.  Forthwith, upon such sailing, he vanishes utterly, and his second son, Sebastian, both of his brothers having in some unknown way also vanished, emerges, and from henceforth becomes the whole Cabot family.  It behooves us, therefore, if we wish to grasp the whole subject, to inquire what manner of man he was.

Sebastian Cabot was born in Venice, and, when still very young, was taken to England with the rest of his family by his father.  He was then, however, old enough to have learned the humanities and the properties of the sphere, and to this latter knowledge he became so addicted that he, early in life, formed fixed ideas.  He is probably entitled to the merit of having urged the practical application of the truths that the shortest course from point to point upon the globe lies upon a great circle, and also that the great circle uniting Western Europe with Cathay passes over the north pole.  This fixed idea of the younger Cabot pervaded all his life and shows in all his reported conversations.  He adhered to it with the pertinacity of a Columbus, and, in his later life after his return to England, his efforts, which in youth were directed to a northwest passage, went out toward a northeast passage to Cathay.  John Cabot’s genius was more practical, as the second letter of Raimondo di Soncino shows.  His intention was to occupy on the second voyage the landfall he had made and then push on to the east (west, as we call it now) and south.  The diversion of that expedition to the coast of Labrador would indicate that the death of the elder Cabot and the assumption of command by his son occurred early in the voyage.  Sebastian Cabot seems to have been not so much a great sailor as a great nautical theorizer.  Gomara says he discovered nothing for Spain; and beyond doubt his expedition to La Plata cannot be considered successful, for it was intended to reach the Moluccas.  One fixed idea of his life was the course to Cathay by the north.  That idea he monopolized to himself.  He overvalued its importance and thought to be the Columbus of a new highway to the east.  Hence he may have underrated his father’s achievements as he brooded over what he considered to be his own great secret.  He theorized on the sphere and he theorized on the variation of the compass, and he theorized on a method of finding longitude by the variation of the needle; so that even Richard Eden, who greatly admired him, wrote as follows:  “Sebastian Cabot on his death-bed told me that he had the knowledge thereof (longitude by variation) by divine revelation, yet so that he might not teach any man.  But I thinke that the goode olde man in that extreme age somewhat doted, and had not, yet even in the article of death, utterly shaken off all worldlye vaine glorie.”  These words would seem to contain the solution of most of the mystery of the suppression of John Cabot’s name in the narratives of Peter Martyr, Ramusio, Gomara, and all the other writers who derived their information from Sebastian Cabot during his long residence in Spain.