Sometime in the early summer of 1497, a small caravel, the
Matthew, with a crew of 18 men, spied land after weeks of
perilous sailing across the dangerous, then-unknown waters of
the northwest Atlantic Ocean. Captained by an Italian seaman,
John Cabot, whose original name was Giovanni Caboto, the ship
had departed Bristol in late May with King Henry VII’s blessing
to look for new lands across the ocean. What Cabot and his men
saw was a rugged coastline of deep, narrow bays, towering
cliffs, and soaring headlands teeming with nesting seabirds — a
landscape not unlike many portions of the coastline of Britain
and Ireland. Cabot was undoubtedly inspired by the success, only
a few years earlier, of fellow Genoese mariner Christopher
Columbus, in discovering the islands of the Caribbean. But this
was no subtropical paradise peopled with friendly natives; the
seas here were rough, cold, and full of icebergs carried south
from Greenland. Instead of waving palm trees, the land was
forested with fir and spruce, with t