ROUGH SEAS A 19th-century engraving depicts John Cabot on his second voyage, reaching what is now Newfoundland in 1497. His first voyage was aborted, and his third was a mystery, with Cabot thought to have perished at sea.
By GUY GUGLIOTTA
In early 1496, a Venetian sea captain named Giovanni Caboto appeared in the southern English port city of Bristol. He had no money, but carried a warrant from King Henry VII to obtain a ship and sail on a voyage of trade and discovery.
England would call him John Cabot, and from 1496 to 1498 — less than a decade after Christopher Columbus — he set sail three times for the New World. The first voyage was aborted, but on the second he made landfall in what is now Newfoundland and claimed North America for England and the Roman Catholic Church.
That much is known. But of his third voyage there is nothing. He left Bristol and apparently vanished — slaughtered by enemies, taken by disease or swallowed by the sea.
And that is not the only enduring mystery about Cabot. Who helped him? Who bankrolled him? Did he really disappear?
But scholars first had to untangle another mystery: the authenticity of spectacular claims made by Alwyn Ruddock, a historian at the University of London who had researched Cabot for more than half her life.
Dr. Ruddock several times promised a book, but never wrote it. Instead, before she died in 2005 at 89, a childless widow, she ordered her executor to destroy her research. Seventy-eight bags of papers were shredded and incinerated, leaving scholars astounded.
Now an important piece of the Ruddock riddle has been solved. In 2010, an international team of scholars working together in what is called the Cabot Project came upon a set of 514-year-old Italian ledgers that Dr. Ruddock had found decades earlier but which had disappeared from view. They showed that in the spring of 1496, Cabot received seed money for his voyages from the London branch of a Florentine banking house called the Bardi.
The explorer was long thought to have been financed by merchants in Bristol. But the new findings, published this spring in the journal Historical Research, demonstrate that he was staked at least in part by the same Italian financiers who helped his illustrious contemporaries like Amerigo Vespucci, Vasco da Gama, Bartolomeu Dias and, of course, Columbus.
“The entries are tremendously important, because in one step they bring the Cabot voyages into line with the others,” said the project’s leader, Evan T. Jones, a maritime historian at the University of Bristol. “Italian merchant capital was very important to all of them.”
Just as important, he said, the ledgers provide the most convincing proof for Dr. Ruddock’s claim that she found about 25 Cabot documents never before seen by modern scholars. “She wasn’t making anything up,” Dr. Jones said.
His own detective work began nearly seven years ago, shortly after he read Dr. Ruddock’s obituary in The Guardian. Her decision to have her papers destroyed “left me shocked and sickened,” he said. “I decided to find out if there was any wiggle room.”
There was. Dr. Ruddock had had a book contract with the University of Exeter Press. They had no manuscript, the editors told him, but there was a file of correspondence. He was welcome to inspect it.
It contained a 1992 book proposal in which Dr. Ruddock outlined an incredible tale, largely untold. The proposal was both deliberately vague, masking sources from colleagues and competitors, and deliberately provocative, promising important new revelations.
In 2007, Dr. Jones analyzed the proposal in an article in Historical Research. Dr. Ruddock had described how Cabot, long thought to be a penniless drifter, was closely connected with London’s influential Italian émigré community. He enlisted the help of a papal diplomat, Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis, to wangle a charter from Henry VII.
Her most tantalizing assertions concerned the third voyage, in 1498, about which nothing is known. She claimed that Cabot had not disappeared.
Instead, her proposal said, Cabot left Bristol with five ships carrying Italian friars, including Carbonariis, intent on establishing a mission in the North Atlantic lands that he had visited the previous year.
The friars disembarked on the Newfoundland coast, Dr. Ruddock said, to build a church and establish a religious colony. This momentous new information, if true, meant that Cabot and Carbonariis had founded the first European Christian settlement in North America.
And Cabot did not vanish. Instead, he sailed south along the North American coast, claiming everything he saw for the British Crown. According to Dr. Ruddock, he was the first European to see what is today the United States.
Dr. Ruddock said in her outline that Cabot finally reached the coast of South America, where he ran into one of Columbus’s captains, probably Alonso de Ojeda, who warned him off. The Caribbean was a Spanish pond at the time, and Henry VII was trying to get Ferdinand and Isabella to marry their daughter to his son, the Prince of Wales.
Cabot turned back and reached Newfoundland in early 1500, Dr. Ruddock said, then returned to Bristol, where he died four months after his arrival.
While all of this is plausible, much of it is not yet documented. Yet the Cabot Project — with a big assist from serendipity — has filled in many of Dr. Ruddock’s blank spaces, and her assertions have proved out so far.
In 2010, a colleague told Dr. Jones that he had made a lucky find on Amazon: Dr. Ruddock’s personal copy of the seminal work on Cabot, James A. Williamson’s “The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery Under Henry VII,” published in 1962.
Dr. Jones traced the seller, Lisa Shanley, who had bought Dr. Ruddock’s modest house in Hampshire and was selling off the contents of its library. She was aware of the Ruddock story and invited Dr. Jones and his colleague Margaret Condon for a visit.
Dr. Ruddock’s study was still intact — including a shoe cupboard she had used for documents, the sticky labels still affixed to its pigeonholes. One of them read, “The Bardi firm, of London.”
“We knew from Ruddock’s notes that an Italian banker had supported the voyage, but didn’t know which one,” Dr. Jones said. Now they did. He got in touch with Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli, an economic historian of the late Middle Ages who had already scouted family archives in Florence looking for Dr. Ruddock’s sources without success. Now, given the Bardi name, he was able to find company records in the archives of the Guicciardini, another prominent Florentine family. (The curator, a Guicciardini family member, was too young to remember Dr. Ruddock.)
“There was a reading room and a big back room with the shelves neatly organized,” Dr. Guidi-Bruscoli said. Bardi’s London office periodically sent its ledgers home, and each book had a title and a date. Dr. Guidi-Bruscoli opened the relevant ledger and there it was:
“John Cabot, of Venice, on 27 April [1496], is debited for 10 pounds sterling, paid in cash ... so that he could go and find the new land.” A second entry recorded an additional payment of 6 pounds, 13 shillings and 4 pence.
There is no obvious reason the Bardi Company would give even a paltry 16 pounds — enough for a month at sea — to somebody like Cabot, but “my best guess,” Dr. Jones said, is that the bank was trying to curry favor with Carbonariis, whose diplomatic duties included collecting taxes for the Vatican and using the Italian banks to send it to Rome.
“He’s somebody you really want to keep sweet, if you’re a banker,” Dr. Jones said. “My guess is that he liked Cabot and steered the Bardi to him. The Bardi jumped on it, because the friar could do other great things for them.”
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