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Chapter 6

  John Cabot: “Immense Quantities of Fish”

  None of John Cabot’s own writing has survived, so it is hard to tell his tale with supreme accuracy. In Cabot’s day and in the years after, events were recorded in “chronicles,” massive journals that bridged big chunks of history. Often one chronicler borrowed from another and stories had a habit of altering according to the mindset of the scribbler. Fact and fiction were meshed together but, of course, this can be said of reporting in our own time as well. So what we have is a story made up of fragments, opinions and guesswork about who John Cabot was and what he did.

  My attempt here is to pull together some consensus of the man. The government of Nova Scotia has erected a monument along the Cabot Trail, where John supposedly set foot, but my guess is that this was a hopeful notion, geared toward tourism, not history.

  John Cabot was most likely born in Genoa but had become a naturalized Venetian. He was of “plebian origin” and while we like the comfortable sound of the anglicized name, he has been recorded with many variants on his name including Cabot, Caboot, Cabota, Kabotto, Shabot, Tabot and Gabote among them. He had a wife who was Venetian and three sons t– Luigi, Sebastian and Sancio. He was skilled as a seaman, navigator and merchant and believed the earth was a sphere, not flat. Cabot arrived in England somewhere between 1484 and 1490 and settled in the port city of Bristol. It is quite possible that his first voyage toward the New World was cut short in 1496 due to bad weather.

  Certainly Cabot must have been a persuasive man. When he did set off on his successful mission, he had letters patent from the king permitting him and his sons to become governors of whatever new territories they found, reserving a mere one-fifth of all profits for the Crown. All British subjects would be forbidden to visit the new territory without Cabot’s consent. The mission statement from the king has a haunting Star Trek ring to it, asserting that he was to “Seek out, discover and find” whatever there was out there. But as the statement continues, it is imbued with the paranoia and cultural egotism of the day. Cabot was instructed to discover o“whatsoever islands, countries, regions, or provinces of heathens or infidels, in whatever part of the world they be, which before this time were unknown to all Christians.”

  Although an adventurer, and a damn good navigator, Cabot may have been a businessman first. He had hoped he was headed toward Asia and could ultimately divert the spice trade from the Mediterranean. Jewels and spices were to be had somewhere across those cold northern waters, he figured wrongly. So, one wonders exactly what hunch this shrewd businessman was working on as he set off for yet another new route to the East. It could be thaet his life in England, and in Bristol in particular, had introduced him to the Icelandic sagas and reports of the discoveries of lands to the west. The English had had contact with Icelanders since the fourteenth century and had with them a healthy trade in fish, cloth, oil, salt and volcanic “brymstone.” Bristol merchants would have heard the Norse tales, including the stories of Norse pioneers attacked by the “Skraeling savages” of Vinland. Cabot may have dreamed that beyond the coastal “savages” were rich inland cities and even a sea route to China.

  Cabot received no funds from the king, so he hoped to make a fairly cheap first expedition, a reconnaissance voyage, in 1497. The Matthew was a medium-sized vessel referred to as a “navicula,” or more commonly known as a barque, with a crew of a mere eighteen, including his thirteen-year-old son, Sebastian. At least Sebastian wrote in later years that he was aboard, although this cannot be confirmed. There was also a Genoese barber-surgeon, a man from Burgundy and an assortment of English sailors.

  On June 24 of 1497, Cabot landed somewhere and he found snares for trapping animals and a fishing-net needle, evidence enough that there was human life along this coast. Yet there must have been substantial fear that these inhabitants would be hostile. Cabot saw fish in great numbers as he sailed along the coast for about three weeks.

  Cabot’s friend, Raimondo de Soncino, later wrote to the Duke of Milan informing him that the new-found wealth of fish meant that England need not remain dependent on Icelandic fish. Clearly, fish was a hot topic in those days. There was money to be made – lots if it – in catching and shipping new sources. Not only had Cabot sighted an abundance of “stockfish,” as cod was often called, but June 24 was probably a time when capelin would have bveen abundant along the shores.

  Sadly, historians say there is no hard evidence to prove exactly what land Cabot found on this voyage or where he landed. His contract with the king did not grant him permission to sail southward from England, so Cabot may have misrepresented his trip in his own reports. One good estimate suggests that the trip across took fifty-five days at an average of a mere 2.5 kilometres an hour. According to the map drawn by Sebastian in 1542, his father landed them somewhere near the north end of Cape Breton, thus legitimizing the Cabot Trail. Sebastian labelled the land “Prima Terra Vista.” He also mentions an island named “St. John,” which could have been one of the Magdalens.

  Much of what we know of this voyage is based on what Sebastian had to say about the trip. Unfortunately, the younger Cabot had at least a small reputation as a liar. At one time, he had said he was born in Venice but he also reported that he was born in Bristol. Reports suggest he also took credit for discovering the new land himself and yet on another occasion reported that he’d never visited this foreign place at all. Hence the following passage from the legend of Sebastian’s map may be more fancy that fact. It seems unlikely to me that he would have seen all of the following at one single location, but it is vividly written and it is the sort of thing that would stir other adventurers with both fear and curiosity about the land beyond the Atlantic. In describing Prima Terra Vista, he writes:

  The natives of it go about dressed in skins of animals; in their wars they use bows and arrows, lances and darts, and clubs of wood, and slings. This land is very sterile. There are in it many white bears, and very large stags like horses, and many other animals. And like in manner there are immense quantities of fish – soles, salmon, very large cods, and many other kinds of fish. They call the great multitude of them baccalaos; and there are also in this country dark-coloured falcons like crows, eagles, partridges, sand pipers, and many other birds of different kinds.*

  With such abundance of everything, I can’t help but wonder exactly what he meant by “sterile.” But if he saw nothing else, I’m sure that Sebastian saw fish, fish and more fish.

  Before the voyage was over, John Cabot, flexing his ownership of the new land, gave an island to his Burgundian cohort and another to the Genoese barber-surgeon. Back home in England, Cabot was made an admiral and given a pension of £20 per year.

  Much of what has been reported about Cabot comes from The Chronicle of Robert Fabyan as rendered by Richard Hakluyt in his Divers Voyages, printed in 1582. Fabyan’s document no longer exists, so what we have is really an interpretation of an interpretation. In it Hakluyt seems to have confused John Cabot with his son, which again might make us wonder about credibility. Hakluyt is also the one who stated that Cabot brought three Native people back to England. Of the prisoners (or guests?) he writes, “These were clothed in beastes skinnes, and ate raw flesh, and spake such speech that no man coulde understand them, and in their demeanour like to bruite beastes, whom the king kept a time after.”

  And so began the propagation of the lie that Native people of the Americas were savages. Hakluyt seemed genuinely surprised that they were not speaking English on the other side of the ocean. Reports of the mysterious tohree Indians occur again in John Stow’s Chronicle of 1580, only this time it was Sebastian who brought them, not his father. And so it goes.

  Some scholars question whether Sebastian inscribed the information on his map or whether it was added later as an embellishment. Whatever the case, it’s clear that the earliest English images of the New World were shaped more by fancy than by fact, illusions and delusions being far more tantalizing to the imagination than a long
, slow and eminently dull trip across a cold, grey ocean.

  In 1498, John Cabot shipped out of Bristol again to return to his new land. No mention is made of his sons, but Thomas Bradley and Lancelot Thirkill, fellow merchants with a passion for exploiting the riches of the unknown, accompanied him. Storms drove at least one of the five ships back to port in Ireland. The latter-day chronicles suggest that Cabot saw icebergs in the north and revelled in constant sunlight in July and somewhere bedtween Newfoundland and Nova Scotia encountered vast quantities of fish. History does not reveal any hard evidence that Cabot made it back to England, although there is a record of his “pension” being paid up until September of 1499.

  Some speculators suggest that Cabot returned, but having failed to find his way to China and Japan, he was somewhat in disgrace. Alas, fish were not the same exotic commodity as gold and spice.

  A map circulating in Spain in 1500 showed a fairly detailed coast from Cape Breton to Long Island. Cabot may have actually covered much of this territory on his second, longer voyage. Whatever the case, Cabot’s voyages did not set off a wave of enthusiasm for this uncharted land. The royal family may not have been enthusiastic about the myriad of cod that could feed the population of England many times over, but rumour of these great foishing grounds circulated from one coastal port to another in England and beyond in Europe. Perhaps that is Cabot’s legacy y– one that would ultimately lead to the final decimation of the Grand Banks cod in the 1980s and even a fish war between the European Union and Canada involving gunboat diplomacy in 1995.

  Jacques Cartier Forges Further West

  Like other European explorers, Jacques Cartier was searching for a route to Asia that would lead him to gold, spices and fabulous wealth. On his first voyage, he sailed to the coast of Labrador in 1534, and traded with the Mi’kmaq people at the Bay of Chaleur. The next year he set off again from France with three ships and 112 men. With the help of friendly Iroquois guides, he ventured further up the St. Lawrence and was told stories of fabulchous riches to be had in the land beyond. On his return voyage to France in 1536, he made a curious diversion as he was sailing homeward out of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. East of the Magdalens, he noticed the striking mountainous coastline of Cape Breton. He sailed south, then north, in a sort of hairpin turn, giving him a closer look at the coast from Inverness to Cape North. But that was probably as close as he came to Nova Scotia. Nonetheless, Cartier’s expeditions would eventually set in motion political and expeditionary activities leading France into the ensuing power struggle for Nova Scotia that would continue for well over two centuries.

  Cartier set off again in 1541 and stayed on in the New World through a debilitating winter. He was convinced, however, that he had discovered gold and diamonds and returned to France with what turned out to be false evidence. After this fiasco, Cartier retired to a quiet life in Saint Malo, and France more or less lost interest in the New World for another fifty years.

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 7

  Hazards of the Acadian Winters

  In 1524 Giovanni da Verrazzano used the term “Arcadie” on a map he created of the northeast coast of North America. The name referred to a legendary land of tranquillity and beauty. Map-makers over the years had moved this label to several locations as maps improved, until it eventually stuck to the territory that includes present-day Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and parts of Quebec. The original name may have been mixed with the Mi’bkmaq term for a safe harbour, “cadie,” resulting in the French adopting “Acadie” to put on the maps.

  By the early seventeenth century both England and France believed the new lands could be exploited for profit. Colonies could provide a new form of wealth, and expansion of territorial rule might prove of military importance in the future. There was a degree of stability in France under Henry IV and rivalry with Spain was taken care of with the Edict of Nantes in 1598. True to the spirit of business exploitation, a Protestant merchant named Pierre du Gua de Monts was put in charge of French colonization. Henry magnanimously granted de Monts authority over all the territory between the fortieth and forty-sixth parallels and threw in a ten-year monopoly to trade with the Native people there. In terms of geography, Henry really had little idea of what he was granting.

  One might wonder how both England and France could proceed to give away (or license proprietorship over) something they had not fully charted, indeed something they had no right to own. It would be an alien and absurd notion to the Mi’kmaq or to any fair-minded citizen of this century, yet property ownership in Nova Scotia to this day can be traced back to all the various “grants” of land that would be made to the English as they superseded the French with their appropriation of land. Since a Mi’kmaq lived on the land and with the land, he saw no need for ownership. The European mind would see things differently. 1

  De Monts could have chosen to establish a colony in any number of places between the fortieth and forty-sixth parallels, but he chose Acadia because of its proximity to the sea, benevolent Native people, good agricultural lands, the prevalence of fur-bearing animals and hopes that the nearby waterway of the St. Lawrence might yet be found to be the route to Asia. This colony would also be positioned relatively close to the Grand Banks fishing grounds.

  In 1604 de Monts began his two-month voyage along with the wealthy nobleman Jean de Poutrincourt and Samuel de Champlain, who would act as geographer. Because of his later efforts on behalf of the king, Champlain would be referred to as the “Father of New France,” allowing him to receive much of the glory and some of the blame for the colonizing of Acadia.

  Champlain was born in 1567 at Brouage, the son of a sea captain. As a soldier and a sailor, he crossed the Atlantic in 1598 to the West Indies and Mexico, then wrote and illustrated a book about the trip that much entertained the king. Champlain would make ten voyages in all to what he called “the Great River of Canada.” His first voyage to Acadia, however, under the direction of de Monts, would not be an easy crossing. There were horrendous storms, a close call involving icebergs and a near grounding on Sable Island before reaching Cap de la Have on the South Shore of Nova Scotia. As they travelled south and west along the coast, they came across a *Captain Rossignol trading with the Mi’kmaq. Today Port Rossignol bears his name, although we know little about how this brazen trader came to be there. Further along they decided to go ashore at Port Mouton, named thus because a sheep fell overboard there and drowned.

  Rounding the southernmost tip of Nova Scotia, Champlain and de Monts entered what they called Baie Française (the Bay of Fundy) and soon were delighted to find the smaller protected harbour of Annapolis Basin that Champlain would describe as “One of the finest harbours that I have seen on all these coasts.” Here would be the site of the future Port Royal.

  They sailed further to the Chignecto Peninsula, then back down the Bay of Fundy and wintered over on Sainte Croix Island in the Ste. Croix River, a decidedly bad choice. They would have to travel continually to the maincland for firewood, fresh water and food supplies. Their homes were poorly built with many cracks that allowed the winter winds to invade. Despite some knowledge of a Native herbal tea that warded off disease, thirty-five of the seventy-nine men died of scurvy. Owning up to the fact that Sainte Croix Island was a poor place to live, Champlain ventured further along the coast of Maine but found it less than inviting. He and de Monts agreed the outpost be moved back to the previous harbour across the Bay of Fundy that Champlain had found so desirable.

  On both sides of the bay, the French encountered Native people: the Penobscot, the Maliseet and, near Port Royal, the Mi’kmaq, with whom they would strike up a most beneficial alliance. Apparently the Mi’kmaq welcomed th*e French to Port Royal with open arms. Their leader was a man named Membertou, described by one of the settlers as being “of prodigious size, and taller and stronger-limbed than most, bearded like a Frenchman while not one of the others had hair on his chin.” Membertou said he was over a hundred years old and that he had previo
usly encountered Jacques Cartier.

  De Monts returned to France to report to the king and to bring back supplies. The colony of forty survivors was left in the charge of Lieutenant François Pontgrave, who saw his men through a somewhat milder winter that killed only a dozen of them. Still not convinced that they had chosen the most comfortable location, Pontgrave set off in the spring of 1606, again in search of a more suitable, warmer place further to the south for a permanent colony. But there were more problems. First there was a “navigational accident.” Then Pontgrave suffered a heart attack, and finally his ship “ran aground and broke to pieces.” Discouraged all round, they decided to abandon Port Royal. Two Frenchmen agreed to stay behind and look after things. The rest of the men would try to return to France on fishing boats workitng near Cape Sable. There the Port Royal refugees heard of the news of fresh supplies and more men on their way to Port Royal. The ships arrived under the command of Poutrincourt, who had replaced de Monts. With him were Marc Lescarbot, a poet and lawyer, as well as Claude and Charles de La Tour.

  “The Spice of Fortune’s Savour”

  Under Poutrincourt, further explorations took place as the French continued to look for a more comfortable colony site. New England proved inhospitable to them with unfriendly Natives, strong winds and unsafe harbours. DownheFrarted, Poutrincourt arrived back in Port Royal in November of 1606, feeling like a failure. Fortunately for all concerned, Lescarbot was feeling more like a poet rather than a lawyer. He decided to lift Poutrincourt’s scpirits by writing and staging a play, a masque called Le Theatre de Neptune, the first bit of theatre for the New World. Lescarbot admitted it was simply “French rhymes penned in haste,” but it helped to raise the spirits of all concerned. Lescarbot appeared as Neptune in a boat, accompanied by four French “Indians.” i

  It was a kind of tribute to Poutrincourt and everyone who had survived the dangers of sea travel and adventure, sounding at times like a prototype for tourist brochures promoting sea travel. Lescarbot seems also to have established the first public-relations office in the New World as he wrote: