Nova Scotia (7 page)

   
John Cabot was most likely born in Genoa but had become a
naturalized Venetian. He was of “plebian origin” and while we like
the comfortable sound of the anglicized name, he has been recorded
with many variants on his name including Cabot, Caboot, Cabota,
Kabotto, Shabot, Tabot and Gabote among them. He had a wife who was
Venetian and three sons t– Luigi, Sebastian and Sancio. He was
skilled as a seaman, navigator and merchant and believed the earth
was a sphere, not flat. Cabot arrived in England somewhere between
1484 and 1490 and settled in the port city of Bristol. It is quite
possible that his first voyage toward the New World was cut short
in 1496 due to bad weather.

   
Certainly Cabot must have been a persuasive man.
When he did set off on his successful mission, he had letters
patent from the king permitting him and his sons to become
governors of whatever new territories they found, reserving a mere
one-fifth of all profits for the Crown. All British subjects would
be forbidden to visit the new territory without Cabot’s consent.
The mission statement from the king has a haunting
Star Trek
ring to it, asserting that he was to “Seek out,
discover and find” whatever there was out there. But as the
statement continues, it is imbued with the paranoia and cultural
egotism of the day. Cabot was instructed to discover o“whatsoever
islands, countries, regions, or provinces of heathens or infidels,
in whatever part of the world they be, which before this time were
unknown to all Christians.”

   
Although an adventurer, and a damn good navigator, Cabot may
have been a businessman first. He had hoped he was headed toward
Asia and could ultimately divert the spice trade from the
Mediterranean. Jewels and spices were to be had somewhere across
those cold northern waters, he figured wrongly. So, one wonders
exactly what hunch this shrewd businessman was working on as he set
off for yet another new route to the East. It could be thaet his
life in England, and in Bristol in particular, had introduced him
to the Icelandic sagas and reports of the discoveries of lands to
the west. The English had had contact with Icelanders since the
fourteenth century and had with them a healthy trade in fish,
cloth, oil, salt and volcanic “brymstone.” Bristol merchants would
have heard the Norse tales, including the stories of Norse pioneers
attacked by the “Skraeling savages” of Vinland. Cabot may have
dreamed that beyond the coastal “savages” were rich inland cities
and even a sea route to China.

   
Cabot received no funds from the king, so he
hoped to make a fairly cheap first expedition, a reconnaissance
voyage, in 1497. The
Matthew
was a
medium-sized vessel referred to as a “navicula,” or more commonly
known as a barque, with a crew of a mere eighteen, including his
thirteen-year-old son, Sebastian. At least Sebastian wrote in later
years that he was aboard, although this cannot be confirmed. There
was also a Genoese barber-surgeon, a man from Burgundy and an
assortment of English sailors.

   
On June 24 of 1497, Cabot landed somewhere and he found
snares for trapping animals and a fishing-net needle, evidence
enough that there was human life along this coast. Yet there must
have been substantial fear that these inhabitants would be hostile.
Cabot saw fish in great numbers as he sailed along the coast for
about three weeks.

   
Cabot’s friend, Raimondo de Soncino, later wrote to the Duke
of Milan informing him that the new-found wealth of fish meant that
England need not remain dependent on Icelandic fish. Clearly, fish
was a hot topic in those days. There was money to be made – lots if
it – in catching and shipping new sources. Not only had Cabot
sighted an abundance of “stockfish,” as cod was often called, but
June 24 was probably a time when capelin would have bveen abundant
along the shores.

   
Sadly, historians say there is no hard evidence to prove
exactly what land Cabot found on this voyage or where he landed.
His contract with the king did not grant him permission to sail
southward from England, so Cabot may have misrepresented his trip
in his own reports. One good estimate suggests that the trip across
took fifty-five days at an average of a mere 2.5 kilometres an
hour. According to the map drawn by Sebastian in 1542, his father
landed them somewhere near the north end of Cape Breton, thus
legitimizing the Cabot Trail. Sebastian labelled the land “Prima
Terra Vista.” He also mentions an island named “St. John,” which
could have been one of the Magdalens.

   
Much of what we know of this voyage is based on what
Sebastian had to say about the trip. Unfortunately, the younger
Cabot had at least a small reputation as a liar. At one time, he
had said he was born in Venice but he also reported that he was
born in Bristol. Reports suggest he also took credit for
discovering the new land himself and yet on another occasion
reported that he’d never visited this foreign place at all. Hence
the following passage from the legend of Sebastian’s map may be
more fancy that fact. It seems unlikely to me that he would have
seen all of the following at one single location, but it is vividly
written and it is the sort of thing that would stir other
adventurers with both fear and curiosity about the land beyond the
Atlantic. In describing Prima Terra Vista, he
writes:

The natives of it go about dressed
in skins of animals; in their wars they use bows and arrows, lances
and darts, and clubs of wood, and slings. This land is very
sterile. There are in it many white bears, and very large stags
like horses, and many other animals. And like in manner there are
immense quantities of fish – soles, salmon, very large cods, and
many other kinds of fish. They call the great multitude of them
baccalaos; and there are also in this country dark-coloured falcons
like crows, eagles, partridges, sand pipers, and many other birds
of different kinds.*

   
With such abundance of everything, I can’t help but wonder
exactly what he meant by “sterile.” But if he saw nothing else, I’m
sure that Sebastian saw fish, fish and more fish.

   
Before the voyage was over, John Cabot, flexing his ownership
of the new land, gave an island to his Burgundian cohort and
another to the Genoese barber-surgeon. Back home in England, Cabot
was made an admiral and given a pension of £20 per
year.

   
Much of what has been reported about Cabot comes
from
The Chronicle of Robert
Fabyan
as rendered by Richard
Hakluyt in his
Divers
Voyages
, printed in 1582.
Fabyan’s document no longer exists, so what we have is really an
interpretation of an interpretation. In it Hakluyt seems to have
confused John Cabot with his son, which again might make us wonder
about credibility. Hakluyt is also the one who stated that Cabot
brought three Native people back to England. Of the prisoners (or
guests?) he writes, “These were clothed in beastes skinnes, and ate
raw flesh, and spake such speech that no man coulde understand
them, and in their demeanour like to bruite beastes, whom the king
kept a time after.”

   
And so began the propagation of the lie that
Native people of the Americas were savages. Hakluyt seemed
genuinely surprised that they were not speaking English on the
other side of the ocean. Reports of the mysterious tohree Indians
occur again in John Stow’s
Chronicle
of 1580,
only this time it was Sebastian who brought them, not his father.
And so it goes.

   
Some scholars question whether Sebastian inscribed the
information on his map or whether it was added later as an
embellishment. Whatever the case, it’s clear that the earliest
English images of the New World were shaped more by fancy than by
fact, illusions and delusions being far more tantalizing to the
imagination than a long, slow and eminently dull trip across a
cold, grey ocean.

   
In 1498, John Cabot shipped out of Bristol again to return to
his new land. No mention is made of his sons, but Thomas Bradley
and Lancelot Thirkill, fellow merchants with a passion for
exploiting the riches of the unknown, accompanied him. Storms drove
at least one of the five ships back to port in Ireland. The
latter-day chronicles suggest that Cabot saw icebergs in the north
and revelled in constant sunlight in July and somewhere bedtween
Newfoundland and Nova Scotia encountered vast quantities of fish.
History does not reveal any hard evidence that Cabot made it back
to England, although there is a record of his “pension” being paid
up until September of 1499.

   
Some speculators suggest that Cabot returned, but having
failed to find his way to China and Japan, he was somewhat in
disgrace. Alas, fish were not the same exotic commodity as gold and
spice.

   
A map circulating in Spain in 1500 showed a fairly detailed
coast from Cape Breton to Long Island. Cabot may have actually
covered much of this territory on his second, longer voyage.
Whatever the case, Cabot’s voyages did not set off a wave of
enthusiasm for this uncharted land. The royal family may not have
been enthusiastic about the myriad of cod that could feed the
population of England many times over, but rumour of these great
foishing grounds circulated from one coastal port to another in
England and beyond in Europe. Perhaps that is Cabot’s legacy y– one
that would ultimately lead to the final decimation of the Grand
Banks cod in the 1980s and even a fish war between the European
Union and Canada involving gunboat diplomacy in
1995.

Jacques Cartier Forges Further
West

Like other European explorers,
Jacques Cartier was searching for a route to Asia that would lead
him to gold, spices and fabulous wealth. On his first voyage, he
sailed to the coast of Labrador in 1534, and traded with the
Mi’kmaq people at the Bay of Chaleur. The next year he set off
again from France with three ships and 112 men. With the help of
friendly Iroquois guides, he ventured further up the St. Lawrence
and was told stories of fabulchous riches to be had in the land
beyond. On his return voyage to France in 1536, he made a curious
diversion as he was sailing homeward out of the Gulf of St.
Lawrence. East of the Magdalens, he noticed the striking
mountainous coastline of Cape Breton. He sailed south, then north,
in a sort of hairpin turn, giving him a closer look at the coast
from Inverness to Cape North. But that was probably as close as he
came to Nova Scotia. Nonetheless, Cartier’s expeditions would
eventually set in motion political and expeditionary activities
leading France into the ensuing power struggle for Nova Scotia that
would continue for well over two centuries.

   
Cartier set off again in 1541 and stayed on in the New World
through a debilitating winter. He was convinced, however, that he
had discovered gold and diamonds and returned to France with what
turned out to be false evidence. After this fiasco, Cartier retired
to a quiet life in Saint Malo, and France more or less lost
interest in the New World for another fifty
years.

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Hazards of the Acadian
Winters

In 1524 Giovanni da Verrazzano used
the term “Arcadie” on a map he created of the northeast coast of
North America. The name referred to a legendary land of
tranquillity and beauty. Map-makers over the years had moved this
label to several locations as maps improved, until it eventually
stuck to the territory that includes present-day Nova Scotia, New
Brunswick and parts of Quebec. The original name may have been
mixed with the Mi’bkmaq term for a safe harbour, “cadie,” resulting
in the French adopting “Acadie” to put on the maps.

   
By the early seventeenth century both England and France
believed the new lands could be exploited for profit. Colonies
could provide a new form of wealth, and expansion of territorial
rule might prove of military importance in the future. There was a
degree of stability in France under Henry IV and rivalry with Spain
was taken care of with the Edict of Nantes in 1598. True to the
spirit of business exploitation, a Protestant merchant named Pierre
du Gua de Monts was put in charge of French colonization. Henry
magnanimously granted de Monts authority over all the territory
between the fortieth and forty-sixth parallels and threw in a
ten-year monopoly to trade with the Native people there. In terms
of geography, Henry really had little idea of what he was
granting.

   
One might wonder how both England and France could proceed to
give away (or license proprietorship over) something they had not
fully charted, indeed something they had no right to own. It would
be an alien and absurd notion to the Mi’kmaq or to any fair-minded
citizen of this century, yet property ownership in Nova Scotia to
this day can be traced back to all the various “grants” of land
that would be made to the English as they superseded the French
with their appropriation of land. Since a Mi’kmaq lived on the land
and with the land, he saw no need for ownership. The European mind
would see things differently. 1

   
De Monts could have chosen to establish a colony in any
number of places between the fortieth and forty-sixth parallels,
but he chose Acadia because of its proximity to the sea, benevolent
Native people, good agricultural lands, the prevalence of
fur-bearing animals and hopes that the nearby waterway of the St.
Lawrence might yet be found to be the route to Asia. This colony
would also be positioned relatively close to the Grand Banks
fishing grounds.