John Cabot, Runaway Venetian Debtor: The Matthew and Ruddock's Lost Notes

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John Cabot was born Giovanni Caboto in Italy around 1450 and signed Venetian documents as Zuan Chabotto. In the 1470s and 1480s he traded spices in the eastern Mediterranean, claimed to have visited Mecca, sold an enslaved person in Crete and built houses in Venice, until by November 1488 he was an insolvent debtor and fled with his wife Mattea and three sons. In Spain he pitched a harbor for Valencia, where creditors sought his arrest, and in 1494 spent five months on a bridge over the Guadalquivir at Seville before the city scrapped his design. After Columbus returned in 1493, Cabot took a western route plan to London, where Florence's Bardi family put up 50 nobles.

Henry VII's letters patent of March 5, 1496, let Cabot claim lands for England but required him to sail from Bristol so the Crown could collect a 20 percent share. Bristol merchants sought the island of Hy-Brasil and its red dye wood. A 1496 voyage turned back in storms and a mutiny, but on June 24, 1497, the 50-ton Matthew reached land in present-day Canada. Cabot was rewarded with 10 pounds and later a 20-pound pension, and in May 1498 he sailed with five ships and vanished from the record.

• The Matthew carried 18 to 20 men, including Bristol investor William Weston and a Genoese barber surgeon.
• The landing party went no farther than a crossbow shot inland, planted English, papal and Venetian flags and returned to the ship.
• The John Day letter, likely sent to Columbus, reported Cabot's voyages to Spain.
• Historian Alwyn Ruddock spent 35 years on the 1498 fleet and ordered her notes destroyed at her death; she believed friar Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis founded a mission in Newfoundland.
• Lancelot Thirkill, slated for the 1498 voyage, was alive and paying taxes in London by 1501.