"he had once been at Mecca, whither spices were brought by caravans from distant lands, and that those who brought them, when asked where the said spices grew, answered that they did not know, but that other caravans came to their home with this merchandise from more distant lands, and these [other caravans] again say that it is brought to them from other regions situated far away." Soncino adds that "Cabot reasons thus--that if the eastern people tell those in the south that these things come from places far distant from them, and so on from hand to hand, then, granting the earth to be round, the last people must obtain them in the north-west; and he says it in such a way that, as it does not cost me more than it costs, I too believe it...."[284]
It is not improbable that Cabot may have thought that as, on account of the spherical form of the earth, the circumference of the lines of latitude decreases towards the north, the shortest way over the western ocean to the east coast of Asia must lie along the northern latitudes (cf. Posidonius, vol. i. p. 79). But we cannot lose sight of the fact that Cabot did not advance this until long after the first voyage of Columbus, and it is, therefore, uncertain whether the idea occurred to him before or after that time. When this journey to Mecca took place we do not know.
Pedro de Ayala, the Spanish Minister in London, says in a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, in 1498, that Cabot is "another Genoese like Columbus, who has been in Seville and Lisbon, endeavouring to obtain help for this discovery" [i.e., of land in the west]. The question is whether this "who" refers to Columbus or Cabot. The latter appears more likely, as it seems superfluous for the Minister to inform Ferdinand and Isabella that Columbus had been in Seville. But here again we do not learn when Cabot may have made this journey to Spain and Portugal, whether before or after Columbus's voyage in 1492. In any case it may point to his having been occupied for a long time with plans of this sort.
[Sidenote: John Cabot arrives in England, circa 1490 ?]
Nor do we know when John Cabot came to England; but perhaps it was about 1490 that he settled in Bristol. If he really came there with ideas of making for Asia across the western ocean, he certainly found a favourable soil for such plans in the port which had already sent out ships in 1480 to look for the island of Brazil. But it is also very possible that these plans occurred to him after he had heard of this expedition, and had become familiar at first hand with the ideas of western lands which dominated the minds of the sailors of Western Europe (Englishmen and Portuguese) of that time. With the many fresh arguments he brought with him from Italy and the Mediterranean countries, it cannot have been difficult for him to induce the merchants of Bristol to make fresh attempts to find these countries in the west or north-west; and, to judge from Ayala's letter of 1497 about the expeditions sent out annually for the previous seven years, he seems to have been persistent.