Information about Cabot’s 1497 voyage comes mostly…

Information about Cabot’s 1497 voyage comes mostly from four short letters and an entry in a 1565 chronicle of the city of Bristol.

Cabot is described as having one "little ship", of fifty tons burden, called the Matthew of Bristol (according to the 1565 chronicle).

It is said to be laden with sufficient supplies for "seven or eight months".

The ship departs in May with a crew of eighteen to twenty men.

They include an unnamed Burgundian and a Genoese barber, who presumably accompanies the expedition as the ship's surgeon.

It is likely that two ranking Bristol merchants were part of the expedition.

One was probably William Weston, who had not been identified as part of Cabot's expedition before the find of a new document in the late twentieth century.

His participation was confirmed by a document found in the early twenty-first century noting his reward from the King in January 1498 after the ship returned.

More importantly, in 2009 historian Evan Jones confirmed that Weston had undertaken an independent voyage to the New Found Land in 1499, probably under Cabot's patent, as the first Englishman to lead an expedition to North America.