n 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.

And now we may pass on to the consideration of the second voyage; and
first among the writers, in order of time as also in order of importance,
is Peter Martyr of Anghiera, who published his _Decades of the New World_
in 1516. Sebastian Cabot had then been in Spain for four years, high in
office and in royal favor. Peter Martyr was his "familiar friend and
comrade," and tells the Pope, to whom these _Decades_ were addressed as
letters, that he wrote from information derived from Cabot's own lips.
Here, I venture to think, many of the writers on this subject have gone
astray; for the whole question changes. Martyr knows of only one voyage,
and that was beyond doubt the voyage of 1498; he knows of only one
discoverer, and that the man from whose lips he writes the narrative. The
landfall is far north, in a region of ice and perpetual daylight. At the
very outset the subject is stated to be "those northern seas," and then
Peter Martyr goes on to say that Sebastian Cabot furnished two ships at
his own charges; and that, with three hundred men, he sailed toward the
north pole, where he saw land, and that then he was compelled to turn
westward; and after that he coasted to the south until he reached the
latitud