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. In the first (1497), aboard the 50-ton ship Mattheu with a crew of 18 men, he reached the vicinity of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the Gulf of S. Lawrence, and Newfoundland. In the second (1498), he identified the coasts of North America south of the S. Lawrence as far as present-day New York. SEBASTIANO, Giovanni’s son and more famous than his father, b. in Venice in 1482. In the service of England, in 1509 he reached the coasts of Greenland and Labrador, entered Hudson Strait, and sailed through it as far as the bay of the same name, which he wished to identify with the Pacific, thus believing that he had found the northwest passage to Asia. Having transferred to 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. Having seen that other navigators’ search for a passage to the Pacific through Central America was futile, he accepted the task of leading an expedition that would follow in Magellan’s footsteps and reach the Moluccas. The expedition did not reach the strait but, changing course, sailed up the estuary of the Rio 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 Pa-
raguay as far as the Andes. Returning to England in 1548, his name became associated with the search for the northeast passage (1553). In his final years he devoted himself to studies of magnetic declination, to the construction of nautical instruments, and to the drawing of his famous map (1544), of which a single copy remains in the National Library of Paris. He died around 1557. He lived through the entire glorious age of the great geographical discoveries; England owes him the beginnings of its dominion in the United States and Canada, and Spain the colonization of the Plata.