CABOTO, Giovanni. — Italian navigator, naturalized Venetian in 1476. Having learned of the results of Columbus’s first voyage, he organized, in the service of England, two expeditions northward across the Atlantic Ocean. With the first (1497), aboard the 50-ton ship Matthew with a crew of 18 men, he reached the vicinity of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and Newfoundland. With the second (1498), he identified the North American coast south of the St. Lawrence as far as present-day New York.
Sebastian, son of Giovanni and more famous than his father, was born in Venice in 1482. In the service of England, in 1509 he reached the coasts of Greenland and Labrador, entered Hudson Strait, and sailed it as far as Hudson Bay, which he wished to identify with the Pacific, believing thus to have found the Northwest Passage to Asia. Having passed into Spain, in 1518 he was appointed Piloto mayor and thus took part in the Junta of Badajoz (1524), which was to decide whether the Moluccas belonged to Spain or Portugal. Finding the search of other navigators for a Pacific passage through Central America in vain, he accepted the task of leading an expedition following in the footsteps of Magellan and reached the Moluccas. The expedition did not reach the strait, but, changing course, ascended the estuary of the Río de la Plata, the Paraná and the Paraguay as far as present-day Asunción (1526–30). During this expedition his envoys explored the territory on the right bank of the Paraguay as far as the Andes. Returning to England in 1548, his name is associated with the search for the Northeast Passage (1553). In his final years he devoted himself to studies on magnetic declination, the construction of nautical instruments, and the delineation of his famous map (1544), of which only one copy remains in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. He died around 1557.
He lived through the entire glorious era of great geographical discoveries; to him England owes the beginnings of its dominion in the United States and Canada, and Spain the colonization of the Río de la Plata.