1 FEBRUARY 1930, Page 22

The Argonaut Press has produced yet another book of first-

rate importance for the history of travel in Dr. James A. Williamson's masterly study of The Voyages of the Cabots. (38s.). Many books have been written on John and Sebastian Cabot and their voyages to North America, and, while John has been acclaimed, his son Sebastian has often been set down as an impostor, though he was successively adviser in navi- gation to the King of Spain and to the English Crown. Dr. Williamson, by first printing all the contemporary evidence and then commenting on it, has brought light out of darkness and shown, more clearly than ever before, what the early Tudor voyagers in the Atlantic did and in particular what Sebastian Cabot almost certainly achieved—in the discovery of Hudson's Bay. His monograph is a very fine piece of historical analysis. He makes it clear that before the Reformation English seamen knew a good deal more about the northern part of North America than is commonly supposed. The volume is superbly illustrated with maps of the period.