riters attribute everything to John Cabot;
others would put him aside and award all the credit to his second son,
Sebastian. The dates even of the voyages are disputed; and very learned
professors of history in Portugal do not hesitate to declare that the
voyages are apocryphal, the discoveries pretended, and the whole question
a mystification.

Nevertheless, solely upon the discoveries of the Cabots have always
rested the original claims of the English race to a foothold upon this
continent. In the published annals of England, however, no contemporary
records of them exist; nor was there for sixty years in English
literature any recognition of their achievements. The English claims rest
almost solely upon second-hand evidence from Spanish and Italian authors,
upon contemporary reports of Spanish and Italian envoys at the English
court, upon records of the two letters-patent issued, and upon two or
three entries lately discovered in the accounts of disbursements from
the privy purse of King Henry VII. These are our title-deeds to this
continent. The evidence is doubtless conclusive, but the whole subject of
western discovery was undervalued and neglected by England for so long
a period that it is no wonder if Portuguese savants deny the reality of
those voyages, seeing that their nation has been supplanted by a race
which can show so little original evidence of its claims.

It is not my intention to wander over all the debatable ground of the
Cabot voyages, where every circumstance bristles with conflicting
theories. The original authorities are few and scanty, but mountains of
hypotheses have been built upon them, and too often the suppositions of
one writer have been the facts of a succeeding one. Step by step the
learned students before alluded to have established certain propositions
which appear to me to be true, and which I shall accept without further
discussion. Among these I count the following:

1. That John Cabot was a Venetian, of Genoese birth, naturalized at
Venice on March 28, 1476, after the customary fifteen years of residence,
and that he subsequently settled in England with all his family.

2. That Sebastian, his second son, was born in Venice, and when very
young was taken by his father to England with the rest of the family.

3. That on petition of John Cabot and his three sons, Lewis, Sebastian,
and Sancio, letters-patent of King Henry VII were issued, under date
March 5, 1496, empowering them,