Excerpt from John and Sebastian Cabot: A Four Hundredth Anniversary Memorial of the Discovery of America In other words, theory must precede action. John Cabot, certainly, and Sebastian Cabot, possibly, were the first Europeans to discover the American continent and make record and cartographical representation of the same, preserving to all posterity the time, place and circumstance of their discovery. To the present time the American people have neglected to the place one stone upon another designed to memorialize those men, or to express gratitude for the geographical discovery, which either made our great nation a possibility, or an accomplished fact. While we claim for the Cabots the distinguished honor of the first view of the American continent, technically, and in fact, we do not presume to name them as the discoverers of America, in the largest and more just sense of the phrase. That distinguished honor the world has long since accorded to Christopher Columbus, and their righteous judgment should never again be disputed. The discovery and exploration of America cannot be understood by one distinct statement of fact. The results of various navigations and explorations, attended with much peril and anxious solicitude, covering a period of two hundred years, makes intelligible and plain to us, what to the early navigators and explorers was chaotic and at most dubious, and solely problematical. Nor is it necessary for the purposes of this paper that we review all that early history in detail. The nautical problem and the geographical discoveries proposed by Diaz, Da Gama, Columbus, Magellan, Verrazano, and the Cabots, was not to find an unknown continent, but solely to ascertain the most feasible route to the eastern shore of Asia. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.