Margaret Condon

William Weston: early voyager to the New World: William Weston: early voyager to the New World

The Bristol merchant William Weston was the first known Englishman to lead an expedition to North America. Analysis of two important document finds suggests that Weston was an early supporter of the Venetian explorer John Cabot. A monetary reward demonstrates Henry VII’s satisfaction with the outcome of Weston’s voyage of c.1499 and the king’s continuing commitment to transatlantic discovery after Cabot’s presumed disappearance. Weston’s career is examined in detail to throw light on the nature and motivation of England’s earliest Atlantic explorers. Before 2008 William Weston, merchant of Bristol, was no more than a footnote to Bristol’s overseas trade. He emerged from obscurity as a result of an article in this journal on the unpublished research claims of Dr. Alwyn Ruddock (d. 2005), a former Reader at Birkbeck College and the leading authority on the voyages of discovery launched from Bristol to North America from c.1470–1508.1 Two things made the article unusual and went on to capture the public’s imagination. First, Ruddock’s assertions were astounding. She claimed to have found evidence that Bristol men had reached North America prior to John Cabot’s famous 1497 expedition, which initiated Europe’s exploration and settlement of the northern continent. Ruddock also argued for a previously unknown religious colony allegedly established in Newfoundland in 1498; and she offered reasons to believe that the Bristol explorers had charted much of the eastern seaboard of North America by 1500, long before those coasts were investigated by Juan Ponce de Leon (1513–21) and Giovanni da Verrazzano (1524). Second, the strangeness of Ruddock’s actions was enthralling. She failed to publish finds made over a forty-year period and then ordered the destruction of those discoveries in her will. It seemed incredible that an academic could unearth such amazing things and then seek to keep them secret. In combination, these two factors ensured that both the initial article and the follow-up research published in Historical Research received international press coverage.2 It also led to an unusually large 1 E. T. Jones, ‘Alwyn Ruddock: “John Cabot and the discovery of America”’, Hist. Research, lxxxi (2008), 224–54. Ruddock’s ideas had survived as a book synopsis in the archives of Exeter University Press. 2 Examples of the press coverage cited: [Accessed 7 Feb. 2017]. * Research for this article was undertaken as part of The Cabot Project, 2009–. From 2009–16 the project was funded by the University of Bristol, through the Arts Faculty Research Director’s Fund (2009–10), the British Academy, SG100194 (2010–11), and Gretchen Bauta, a private Canadian benefactor (2011–16), who also provided the cost of making this article freely available to the public. We would like to thank Francesco Guidi Bruscoli (University of Florence), Stuart Jenks (University of Erlangen), Dr. Jeff Reed and the late Peter Pope (Memorial University of Newfoundland), for reading and commenting on drafts of this article. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. William Weston: early voyager to the New World 629 Historical Research, vol. 91, no. 254 (November 2018)