Wiiiship : Cabot Biography 575 will be glad of an index so complete and a guide so judicious to the much vexed subject of the Cabots and their voyages. Coming at the close of an active controversy it will be welcomed as a summary of the voluminous literature in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese concerning the event which gave to the English race an inchoate title to Northern America. The introductory essay sets forth concisely that which the author con- ceives to be the solid residue of fact remaining over from a controversy of fifty years. It is written in the true historic spirit and with method and clearness. The numbers along the margins of the pages are those of the articles in the Bibliography which are considered to establish the conclusions in the text. Mr. Winship, however, brings out more strongly than any other English writer the probability of another voyage by Se- bastian Cabot to the northeast coast of America in 1507 or 1508. This point has not been sufficiently elucidated and he is right in dwelling upon it, especially in the light of the report made by Marcantonio Contarini to the Venetian senate in 1536 (Art. 80). The ill-fated expedition to the La Plata is treated with much insight. The moral character of Sebas- tian Cabot is summed up with historic sanity, as that of an ordinary man of his day and generation — ^not an anachronistic, evangelical saint on the one hand, nor a perfidious liar and traitor on the other. The cele- brated map of 1544 is discussed and its evidence as to the landfall of 1497 having been on Cape Breton Island is accepted as conclusive. In short Mr. Winship adopts the rules of practice of every law court and accepts one piece of definite, positive evidence as outweighing a wilder- ness of negative and contradictory conjecture. His reasons, however, for supposing that Sebastian Cabot, on his return to England, took up his residence at Bristol are not apparent. The main body of the volume is the Bibliography, and that is divided into a bibliography of " sources " (or of writers before the year 1600) and of later or secondary authorities, including all the controversialists of recent years. The articles are numbered consecutively for easy refer- ence, and the works cited have evidently been examined with care and are described with accuracy. The notes appended are very valuable and contain an impartial estimate of each work and, in the case of larger and more general treatises, references to the pages where the Cabot matter may be found. The Bibliography is as complete as such a work can pos- sibly be. Some of the articles in popular magazines and newspapers during the Cabot celebration year might perhaps have been omitted, but in such a work fulness is an error on the right side. On the other hand mention might have been made of Champlain, and certainly it is due to Charlevoix. The edition of Navarrete's Voyages in quarto is the one usually found in large libraries, but there is also a later edition in octavo which is deserving of mention as is also D'Avezac's Examen Critique of NichoU's life of Sebastian Cabot in the Revue Critique d' Histoire of April, 1870, which has been published separately. One reference, how- ever, we do miss — the three-cent postage stamp of Newfoundland ; for it
