England's first explorer of North America was a debt-ridden Venetian named Zuan
In 1497 a small Bristol ship called the Matthew reached the coast of North America, the first known European visit since the Norse reached Vinland. Its captain, known in England as John Cabot, was an Italian who had fled Venice owing money and failed to build a bridge in Seville.
Born around 1450, Giovanni Caboto signed himself Zuan Chabotto, the Venetian form of John. Both Gaeta and Castiglione Chiavarese claim him, and a Spanish envoy in London called him another Genoese like Columbus. He became a Venetian citizen in 1476, which required fifteen years of residence, and traded in the eastern Mediterranean; a 1483 record shows him selling a slave in Crete. He later claimed to have visited Mecca, though no evidence confirms it.
His finances collapsed in the late 1480s, and by November 1488 he had left Venice as an insolvent debtor. In Valencia his harbour improvement plans were rejected. In Seville he was contracted to build a stone bridge over the Guadalquivir, but the city council abandoned the project on 24 December 1494. After seeking backing in Seville and Lisbon for an Atlantic voyage, he reached England around mid-1495, aiming to find a northern route west to Asia.
Henry VII granted Cabot and his three sons letters patent on 5 March 1496, requiring voyages to sail from Bristol and giving the king a fifth of any profits. Bristol merchants had been hunting since 1480 for Hy-Brasil, a legendary Atlantic island, and historian Alwyn Ruddock later claimed Bristol sailors had found land across the ocean before Cabot. Frustratingly, she ordered her research notes destroyed when she died in 2005, and scholars are still retracing her evidence. One confirmed find: a Florentine banking house, the Bardis, advanced fifty nobles for the voyage in March 1496.
A first attempt that summer turned back amid bad weather, short supplies and a confused crew. The second, aboard the 50-ton Matthew with 18 to 20 men, left Bristol on 2 May 1497, sighted land on 24 June and was home by 6 August. Where he landed is uncertain; for the 500th anniversary, Canada and Britain named Cape Bonavista in Newfoundland, although other sites have been proposed.
Source: John Cabot
