British historians have unearthed a letter written 510 years ago by King Henry VII that sheds startling new light on Canadian history.
The letter reveals a previously unknown English expedition to this country in 1499 and may add the name of William Weston -- an obscure shipping merchant from the west England port of Bristol -- to the pantheon of early New World explorers.
The regal dispatch, believed to have been written the year after Anglo-Italian navigator John Cabot perished on his second voyage of discovery to Canada, indicates Weston was set to embark on his own transatlantic journey to "serche and fynde" the same distant territory.
Specifically, the king names Weston's destination as "the new founde land" reached by Cabot in June 1497 -- the first European landfall in North America since the age of the Vikings.
That makes Henry's letter, believed to have been written on March 12, 1499, the earliest known use of the phrase that would eventually be used to designate Canada's easternmost province.
Until now, the first mention of "new found land" in connection with Canada's Atlantic shore was from a 1502 entry in Henry VII's royal daybook.
The find, to be published this week in the scholarly journal Historical Research, follows years of sleuthing by University of Bristol professor Evan Jones and a handful of other historians among the scattered and scanty records of England's 15th-century voyages to the future Canada.
The tattered document, written in the elaborate script and archaic language of late-medieval England, is essentially an order from the king to his lord chancellor, Archbishop of Canterbury John Morton, to suspend a lawsuit facing Weston until after his return from North America.
"We entende that he shall shortly with goddes grace passe and saille for to serche and fynde if he can the new founde land," the king writes.
With so few records surviving from the era -- even those related to Cabot's history-making expeditions of 1497 and 1498 -- "almost any new information about the voyages is valuable," Mr. Jones writes about Henry VII's reference to Weston's expedition.
"The very existence of such a voyage would, therefore, alter the standard narrative of the early and poorly documented English voyages to the New World."
He concludes that the letter reveals "the existence of the first English-led expedition to North America, commanded by a previously unknown Bristol explorer, who was probably linked to Cabot," an Italian-born explorer who was named Giovanni Caboto before sailing for the English king.
Mr. Jones emphasizes that Henry VII's inaugural reference to the "new founde land" sought by Weston "should be of particular interest to the inhabitants of the eponymous Canadian province."
Some details about Weston's life in Bristol, where he was involved in overseas trade to mainland Europe and died sometime before 1505, have been collected in a thesis by University of Bristol history student Annabel Peacock.
Mr. Jones suspects Weston was first involved as a key investor or participant in Cabot's voyages to Canada -- possibly even piloting one of the ships in the 1498 expedition, from which Cabot himself never returned.
The king's letter suggests Weston was given royal backing to continue exploring the New World for England in the months after Cabot's disappearance. That would have put Weston on a course for Canada before Gaspar Corte-Real's 1501 explorations for Portugal along the Newfoundland and Labrador coasts.
Weston may also have reached Canada before Cabot's son, Sebastian, carried on his family's legacy by heading a 1508-09 voyage into more northerly waters, possibly Hudson Strait south of Baffin Island.
By that time, fishing fleets from several European countries were making annual voyages to Eastern Canada to exploit the region's abundant supplies of cod.
The new evidence suggests it may have been Weston -- not Sebastian Cabot -- who initiated the fabled search for the Northwest Passage to the Pacific, once it was realized after the John Cabot voyages that North America was a separate continent blocking the way to the spice riches of Asia.
That realization has been described by historians as "the intellectual discovery" of America.
The remarkable Weston find unfolded in a convoluted way over three decades. The king's letter was first identified in the 1970s by British archivist Margaret Condon, a specialist on the life of Henry VII, who knew little about New World exploration.
She shared her prize with British historian David Quinn, then the world's leading authority on the European discovery of Canada, who consulted another expert, Alwyn Ruddock, an eccentric researcher steeped in knowledge of Cabot and the Anglo-Italian community that supported his landmark expeditions under the English flag.
Decades passed without the Weston discovery being publicly revealed by either Ms. Ruddock or Mr. Quinn - who, like other specialists in the field, was apparently waiting for Ms. Ruddock to complete her much-anticipated book about Cabot, which was expected to revolutionize scholarly knowledge of the discovery era.
Eventually, both Mr. Quinn and Ms. Ruddock died. Bizarrely, before her death in 2005, Ms. Ruddock ordered the destruction of her research notes for the never-published book.
In 2007, Mr. Jones published an article based on some of Ms. Ruddock's private writings -- including a book outline she had submitted to her publisher -- that had escaped destruction by the executor of her will.
Among those materials were tantalizing clues about a previously unknown, short-lived Christian mission built in 1498 during Cabot's ill-fated second voyage to Canada.
That revelation, reported by Canwest News Service in 2007, fuelled further interest among discovery-era historians in trying to recreate Ms. Ruddock's lines of research.
Among the subsequent findings were letters showing that Ms. Ruddock had discovered independent confirmation of a Weston-led voyage to North America in 1499.
Mr. Jones and other historians are now looking for further primary evidence -- from Bristol shipping records and other late 15th- and early 16th-century documents -- detailing the Weston expedition to Canada alluded to in the letter.
"Having secured his legal position until his return, Weston might then have sailed to Newfoundland and then headed up the coast of Labrador, perhaps in the hope of finding a northwest passage to the Orient," Mr. Jones writes in Historical Research. "Such an interpretation would make sense of the wording of the king's letter, with its implication that Weston was in charge of the planned voyage."
Apart from the important new information contained in the king's order to Morton, says Mr. Jones, the letter provides solid corroboration for some of the claims in Ms. Ruddock's book outline.
"If nothing else," Jones writes, "all this does provide further evidence that Alwyn Ruddock, while peculiar in her actions, did not simply make up her claims," and that the scholarly discoveries she hinted at to other historians in the 1990s "were not simply the inventions of an aging mind. With these reassurances, the incentive to try to rediscover the documents that Ruddock found is all the greater."
