History
Lack of clear documentation has been a problem in studying the history of the Matthew. Even its name has been questioned, with some authors suggesting that it was actually named Mattea after Cabot's wife. Until the 1950s, all that was known about its size is that it was a small ship carrying about 18 men, but the discovery of a letter from a Bristol merchant named John Day written in 1497 saying that "in his voyage he had only one ship of fifty 'toneles' and twenty men and food for seven or eight months" provided more certainty about its size. The age of the ship is also uncertain. The name Matthew does not appear in the 1492/3 customs accounts, so it was either fairly new or an older ship renamed or a foreign ship. It has been suggested that it probably was an ordinary Bristol merchant ship hired for the occasion. The name Matthew appears in documents in 1503/04 and 1510/11 but in a 1513 survey there is reference to a 'new Matthew' and references to this ship afterward leave out the 'new' suggesting that Cabot's Matthew no longer existed.
Read more about this topic: Matthew (ship)
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“Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)