To return again from this long digression to the volumes of Hakluyt in which he has brought together his various authorities relating to the voyages of the Cabots, one is impressed with a feeling of disappointment that he makes no attempt to reconcile their apparent glaring discrepancies,—that is to say, as to the different dates given in them to the voyage of discovery, and the variation in the different degrees of latitude reached; while no opinion is expressed as to the comparative agency of John or Sebastian Cabot, or the question as to whether there was more than one voyage,—I mean a second immediately following the first which was of discovery. In the general catalogue prefixed in 1600 to the third volume of his larger work, he refers to these several “testimonies” as proving a voyage of discovery in 1497, while in reality no one of them proves that date, bearing in mind that the date in the extract from Adams’s map was in this later reprint inserted by him on some evidence not found in his volumes,—the truth being that all these testimonies, taken as a whole, refer probably to two if not three voyages, as we have already seen.[92] I do not forget that these volumes of Hakluyt contain other interesting documents relating to Cabot,—namely, the record of the pension granted by Edward VI., dated Jan. 6, 1548-49, of £165 13_s._ 6_d._, to date from the preceding Michaelmas Day (September 29); the Ordinances and Instructions compiled by Cabot for the intended voyage for Cathay, May 9, 1553; his appointment in the charter of the Muscovy Company, Feb. 6, 1555-56, as its governor; the story of his presence on board the “Serchthrift” at Gravesend on the 13th of April, 1556, about to sail on a voyage of discovery to the northeast, where the venerable man “entered into the dance himself.”[93] I have already referred to a volume of Chytræus, containing the Latin legends on Sebastian Cabot’s map, which was published about this time,—the first edition in 1594, a second in 1599, and a third edition in 1606. We can hardly suppose that Hakluyt ever saw this book, at least in the earlier editions, as he could hardly have failed to incorporate the inscriptions into his larger work. The date 1494 given in the 8th Legend as the year of the discovery of the new lands, and the same date incorporated in Hakluyt’s folio of 1589 from Adams’s map, gave currency to its use to a limited extent.[94] But Hakluyt’s larger work of 1598-1600 quite superseded in use his previous books, and Chytræus was probably rarely seen or consulted; yet Mr. Biddle, who never could have seen Chytræus or Hakluyt’s folio of 1589, could never understand why later writers, like Harris and Pinkerton, adopted that date.