Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Tantalizing clues about a previously unknown Christian mission built 509 years ago in Newfoundland -- possibly the first church in North America-- were left behind by an eccentric British historian who died in 2005.

However, the book about the discovery of Canada by Italian- born navigator John Cabot, which scholars suspect would have been "revolutionary," was never published.

Alwyn Ruddock, a respected chronicler of Cabot's landmark voyages, stunned fellow historians when she ordered her manuscript and all of her research notes destroyed by executors of her will.

Evan Jones, a University of Bristol expert on Cabot's transatlantic expeditions, has reconstructed Ms. Ruddock's research from a seven-page book outline she sent to her British publisher -- apparently the only surviving trace of her findings.

"To describe Alwyn Ruddock's claims as revolutionary is not an exaggeration," Mr. Jones said upon publishing his detailed analysis of Ms. Ruddock's outline in the latest issue of the scholarly journal Historical Research.

"If Ruddock is right, it means that the remains of the only medieval church in North America may still lie buried under the modern town of Carbonear" -- a historic community across Conception Bay from St. John's.

Despite the bizarre fate of Ms. Ruddock's research, neither Mr. Jones nor other leading historians are dismissing her claims.

Ms. Ruddock was best known for her knowledge of England's expatriate Italian merchant community in the 1400s and 1500s. It was through her research in this field, Mr. Jones has learned, that Ms. Ruddock apparently discovered fresh evidence detailing the links between Cabot -- the Genoa-born navigator originally known as Giovanni Caboto -- and Italian clerics living in England in the late 1400s.

According to Ms. Ruddock's book plan, a key backer of Cabot's westward expeditions across the Atlantic was Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis, an Augustinian friar who collected taxes in England for the Vatican.

After Cabot's famous 1497 landfall in Newfoundland, he's known to have returned to North America the following year.

Little evidence of that 1498 expedition has been found by scholars, but Mr. Jones says the "most exciting" claim in Ms. Ruddock's note to her publisher suggests she discovered a host of documents about Cabot's second voyage to the future Canada.

Among the facts she apparently unearthed is that Friar Giovanni accompanied Cabot to Newfoundland and stayed there -- to build a church and establish a religious colony. Ms. Ruddock appeared to have proof, as well, that the colony named for Carbonariis evolved to become the today's "Carbonear" -- the origins of which have traditionally been attributed to French or Spanish visitors to Newfoundland in the late 1500s or early 1600s.

"Her findings are so extraordinary that they will, if proved correct, transform our entire conception of the scale, nature and importance of John Cabot's achievements," Mr. Jones writes in his Historical Research article.

"If she were correct, this would be the first European Christian settlement in North America, with the church Ruddock mentions being the first built on the continent."

© National Post 2007

Randy Boswell - CanWest News Service