This is still a readable account of the career of the Cabots, but its main value to the modern reader is the impressive collection of contemporary sources relating to the two men, which vary from official documents to mentions in private letters, and allow us to come to our own conclusions.

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History of War, John Rickard

John Cabot led an expedition to the New World in 1497 on behalf of Henry VII. He is considered the first European to explore North America since the Viking voyages five hundred years earlier. Although Cabot’s exact landfall on his first voyage is not known – it could have been Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, or even Maine – his claim for England to this territory countered the Spanish and Portuguese explorations to the south, and changed world history. Cabot made three round trips between Bristol, England, and North America, and later, his son, Sebastian, made two similar voyages. John and Sebastian Cabot was first published in the late nineteenth century. Its enduring value in addition to its lucid, well-balanced, and researched narrative is the author’s detailed perspectives of prior voyages to the North American continent, including those from China and the Pacific Islands as well as those from the realms of mythology.

Big Jules Blog - Julian Stockwin

John and Sebastian Cabot: the discovery of North America has long been out of print and it is not readily accessible. In an era where such classic works are more easily found on the Internet than on library shelves, students of the later Middle Ages and the early modern voyages of discovery and those examining the mentalities of late nineteenth-century England will be grateful to Westholme Publishing for reissuing this important and seminal book.

Australian Naval Institute - John Johnston