Reputation
From the later sixteenth century until the mid-nineteenth century it was generally supposed that it was Sebastian, rather than his father John, who led the famous Bristol expeditions of the later 1490s, which resulted in the discovery, or rediscovery, of North America. This error seems to have been of Sebastian's own making, being based on what he told people in his old age. The result was that the influential geographical writer Richard Hakluyt represented John as a mere figurehead for the expeditions and suggested that Sebastian actually led them. When new archival finds in the nineteenth century demonstrated that this was not the case, Sebastian became something of a 'hate' figure - disparaged by Henry Harrisse, in particular, as a man who willfully appropriated his father's achievements and represented them as his own. Because of this, Sebastian received much less attention in the twentieth century - even though other finds demonstrate that he did, for instance, lead some genuine exploratory voyages from Bristol in the first decade of the sixteenth century.
Read more about this topic: Sebastian Cabot (explorer)
Famous quotes containing the word reputation:
“How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“Talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“The reputation of a man is like his shadow; it sometimes follows and sometimes precedes him, sometimes longer and sometimes shorter than his natural size.”
—French Proverb. Quoted in Dictionary of Similes, ed. Frank J. Wilstach (1916)