John Cabot, it would seem, was a Genoese who settled in Venice. There he was admitted to the rights of citizenship. He married a Venetian lady, and in Venice probably his three sons were born and passed their childhood. He travelled on the sea, visiting the coasts of Arabia, and forming, it may be, schemes to discover a new route to the far East. He came to England, having previously attempted to gain support for his projected voyages in Spain and Portugal, and he took up his residence in either London or Bristol. The exact date of his arrival in this country is unknown; but, either shortly before or shortly after he came, Columbus crossed the Atlantic for the first time in 1492. The news gave a stimulus to other would-be discoverers, and encouraged the Kings of Europe to further their plans. Hence Cabot and his sons obtained their patent in 1496. It was little that King Henry VII gave to the Italian sailors. Their voyages were to be made 'upon their own proper costs and charges,' and in return for his licence, the King was to receive a fifth of the profits. The enterprise was countenanced but not supported by the state, and the English Government in these early days, as in the times which came after, left the work of discovery and colonization in the hands of private adventurers. Bristol was the port of departure, and a Bristol book contains the following notice of the voyage:--'In the year 1497, the 24th of June, on St. John's day, was Newfoundland found by Bristol men in a ship called the _Matthew_.'[28] John Cabot and Sebastian his son probably both sailed in the _Matthew_, and they commanded a crew of English sailors. The voyage {19} was a short summer venture, beginning in May and ending with the close of July or the beginning of August. America was seen and touched, the land-fall being either the northern end of Cape Breton island, or the coast of Labrador, or Cape Bonavista in Newfoundland. The English flag was planted on American soil, but no exploration took place; nothing was achieved but the one great fact of discovery. In the following February, new letters patent were issued--on this occasion to John Cabot alone; and a second time, in the summer of 1498, the ships started from Bristol. Again, it is conjectured, both father and son were on board; and this time the North American coast seems to have been skirted from the region of icebergs and the banks of Newfoundland as far south as the Carolinas. In reference to this second voyage, Sebastian Cabot wrote that he sailed 'unto the latitude of sixty-seven degrees and a half under the North Pole,' and 'finding still the open sea without any manner of impediment, he thought verily by that way to have passed on still the way to Cathaio which is in the East.'[29] The way to the East, however, was left unopened, to tantalize after-comers, and to be a kind of 'will o' the wisp,' leading men on to barren shores and Arctic seas, though the