John Cabot Reaches North America

In 1497, the Italian navigator John Cabot, sailing under the authority of King Henry VII of England, crossed the North Atlantic and made landfall on the northeastern coast of North America. His voyage was the first English-sponsored expedition to reach the continent, and it later served as the foundation for English claims in the Americas. The region he reached lies in present-day Canada rather than the United States, though the event is often grouped with the early history of English North America.

Cabot, born Giovanni Caboto in Italy and later a resident of Venice, moved to England in the 1490s. Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage for Spain had stirred great interest in reaching Asia by sailing west, and Cabot believed a more northerly route would be shorter and could give access to the spice and silk trade. Henry VII, eager not to be left behind by Spain and Portugal, granted him letters patent in 1496 permitting him to sail in the king's name and claim lands unknown to Christian rulers. Merchants in the port of Bristol, whose sailors were already experienced in Atlantic fishing and exploration, helped support the venture.

Cabot set out from Bristol in the small ship Matthew with a crew usually estimated at about eighteen men. After a voyage of roughly a month, he sighted land in the summer of 1497, traditionally dated to late June. He went ashore briefly, claimed the territory for England, and explored part of the coast without, as far as we know, meeting any inhabitants, though he reported signs of human presence. He returned to England that summer and was rewarded by the king.

Exactly where he landed is disputed. Newfoundland, Cape Breton Island and parts of Labrador have all been proposed, and the surviving evidence consists mostly of brief letters and secondhand accounts rather than Cabot's own records. Reports of seas teeming with cod were especially influential.

In 1498 Cabot led a larger expedition, but it disappeared, and his fate remains unknown. His voyages did not produce an immediate route to Asia or any lasting settlement. Their importance lay in what followed: the rich fishing grounds drew English, French, Portuguese and Basque fishermen for generations, and the 1497 voyage gave England a precedent for later colonial ambitions, which grew substantially under Elizabeth I and the Stuarts. Cabot's landing also stands as one of the early European encounters with a continent already home to Indigenous peoples, whose lands would be profoundly transformed by the colonization that followed.