ABSTRACT
Historians and geographers of continental Europe in the sixteenth century—Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French and German—wrote between them a number of short notices of the discoveries made by Sebastian Cabot under Henry VII. These notices either gave no date for Sebastian's voyage, or gave mutually contradictory dates, 1496, 1498, 1508, so that no certainty on the point was obtainable from them. During the same century there were no narrative accounts by learned writers of the voyages of John Cabot, with the solitary exception of the Eighth Legend on the Paris Map of 1544, which does not appear to have made any impression on the historians. The late nineteenth-century historians accepted the story and fathered it on to the voyages of John Cabot, for which they used it as true evidence. The Sebastian Cabot narratives do indicate a voyage to the north-west, and that alone is proof that they do not relate to the voyage of 1498.
