If Cabot was thus employed, the omission of any mention of his name in the patents of 1501 and 1502 is in some measure accounted for; and, in support of the Bristol records, it may be mentioned that Navarette, in describing from the records in the Spanish archives the voyage of Hojeda, who sailed from Spain on the 20th of May, 1499, says,[60] “What is _certain_ is that Hojeda in his first voyage found certain Englishmen in the neighbourhood of Caquibaco.” [Sidenote: He enters the service of Spain, 1512.] When it is considered that Cabot did not enter a foreign service for many years after this period, and that he was the only man in England at that time fully competent to conduct an expedition to America, it is likely that the Englishmen Hojeda saw were no other than Sebastian Cabot himself with his exploring party. Having been stopped the year before by the failure of provisions while sailing southward, it is natural to suppose that he would in a new expedition resume his former search, till at length he reached that part of the coast where Hojeda met with the party of Englishmen, and where the “great discoveries” mentioned in the Bristol manuscript were no doubt made. It is, however, a remarkable fact that while the name of Amerigo Vespucci, the pilot who accompanied Hojeda, is now for ever associated with the whole of that vast continent, no headland, cape, or bay has preserved the memory of Sebastian Cabot. But the mysterious disappearance of his “maps and discourses,” which he had prepared for publication,[61] may account in a great measure for the name of Cabot having been unnoticed in connection with America, and may be adduced as a reason why doubts have so long existed as to his occupations between 1498 and 1512. Had these documents been preserved, they would assuredly have supplied abundant information on this point. Peter Martyr says,[62] that Cabot did not leave England until after the death of Henry VII., which occurred in 1509; and Herrera, the Historiographer of the king of Spain, records the additional fact that, in 1512, he entered the service of Ferdinand, who, anxious to secure the services of so distinguished a navigator, “gave him the title of his Captain, and a liberal allowance, and retained him in his service, directing that he should reside at Seville, to await orders.”[63]