Bristol’s Hunt for Hy-Brasil: Pre-Columbian Rumors and Atlantic Voyages

TL;DR

• Bristol sent expeditions west in 1480 and 1481 explicitly “to serch & fynde a certain Isle called the Isle of Brasile,” per civic/legal records and chronicle notices Bristol HA pamphlet (2019) citing the inquiry against customs officer Thomas Croft; Worcestre’s Itinerarium as translated in DCB, DCB, “John Jay”.
• A contemporary merchant, John Day (1497/8), wrote that “the men from Bristol…found ‘Brasil’,” implying earlier landfall/capes before Cabot; the edited text survives from Simancas archives Univ. of Bristol transcription.
• Spain’s ambassador Pedro de Ayala (25 Jul 1498) reported Bristol had sent 2–4 caravels annually for seven years in search of “the island of Brazil and the Seven Cities” Univ. of Bristol source.
• “Brasil” here is the phantom island west of Ireland, not the South American country; its name and placement come from Gaelic lore and centuries of maps (1320s–1870s) Library of Congress blog, 2020.
• One 1481 Bristol voyage carried salt, consistent with fishing aims; if they reached the Grand Banks/Newfoundland, secrecy is expected in a competitive cod economy Memorial Univ. of Newfoundland summary, Innis, The Cod Fisheries (1940).
• Verdict: credible proto-knowledge (real ships, real attempts, contemporaneous letters) but no surviving logbook or unambiguous land description. Cabot keeps the laurel for documented English landfall; Bristol built the runway.

“The ocean will dissolve its bonds, and a vast new land will be revealed.”
— Seneca, Medea (trans.)

Bristol & “Brasil”: what the documents actually say#

The first clear Bristol push is 1480. William Worcestre notes that John Jay Jr. co-owned a ship that sailed from the Kingroad “to the Island of Brasylle,” commanded by the expert mariner “Thloyde”; storms drove her back to Ireland after some weeks (Worcestre’s wording is preserved in later editions; the DCB gives a compact translation and references to the Latin text) (DCB, “John Jay”). A year later, 1481, a legal inquiry into customs officer Thomas Croft records that two ships—the George and the Trinity—were sent out “to serch & fynde a certain Isle called the Isle of Brasile.” This is the kind of administrative breadcrumb historians love because it’s boring, specific, and hard to fake (Bristol Historical Association pamphlet, pp. 2–3; with citations to the Croft case).

Fast-forward to Cabot’s moment and you get the John Day letter (winter 1497/8), written by a Bristol merchant to a Spanish “Grand Admiral” (probably Columbus). Day states that “it is considered certain that the cape of the said land was found…by the men from Bristol who found ‘Brasil’,” and that “Island of Brasil…is assumed and believed to be the mainland that the men from Bristol found” (Univ. of Bristol transcription). This is fresh testimony within months of Cabot’s return.

Then Pedro de Ayala—Spain’s ambassador in London—writes to Ferdinand and Isabella on 25 July 1498: “For the last seven years the people of Bristol have equipped two, three, four caravels to go in search of the island of Brazil and the Seven Cities,” and he claims to have seen a chart made by the discoverer, “another Genoese like Colón” (this “other Genoese” is usually taken to be Cabot) (Univ. of Bristol edition). That’s not pub gossip; that’s a diplomat’s dispatch.

So, documentary signal: repeated expeditions (1480–81), a merchant’s near-contemporary claim of prior Bristol discovery (1497/8), and a Spanish ambassador’s multi-year pattern report (1498). None of it proves a pre-Cabot landing in North America, but it collapses the “nobody looked west” caricature.

What “Brasil” meant to Bristol#

“Brasil” in these sources is the phantom isle west of Ireland, appearing on portolan charts from the 1320s onward, often as a circular island with a central strait, and persisting on maps as late as 1873. The Library of Congress map blog runs through canonical examples (Angelino Dulcert 1320s, Andrea Bianco 1436, Ortelius 1570, Jefferys 1753, “Imaginary Isle of O’Brazil”) (LoC, 2020). University of Bristol’s note on the c.1476 Salazar text sets the onomastics: a Gaelic root (“Isle of the Blest”) that later gets tangled with brazilwood (a red-dye commodity), helping explain why “Brazil” becomes a magnet for commercial fantasies and misreadings (U. Bristol, “Salazar’s c.1476 account”).

Importantly, these maps didn’t live on Instagram; they lived in merchants’ heads and pilots’ chests. Phantom islands are a medieval way of encoding rumors as waypoints.

Fish, not Eldorado#

The Memorial University synthesis notes that the 1481 pair carried salt—an efficient tell for fishing rather than treasure hunting. It situates the Bristol push in a North Atlantic ecology already famed for cod, whales, and birds (Heritage NL/MI, “English Voyages before Cabot”). Harold Innis’s classic on the cod economy explains why secrecy is a rational equilibrium: a firm that discovers a rich bank does not publish it; it sails it to death (Innis 1940; Bristol reading list). If sailors from Bristol nipped the Grand Banks or a Newfoundland cape in the 1480s, you would expect exactly the archive we have: ships recorded as hunting “Brasil,” rumors of capes found, a diplomat noting serial attempts—and no charts left to rivals.

The signal, organized#

Table 1. Key documentary signals (1476–1498)

Reliability glyphs: ◕ = moderate; ◕◕ = strong; ◕◕◕ = very strong (for what the document claims).

How rumor becomes runway#

Two dynamics make Bristol’s “Brasil” unusually consequential:

1. Cartographic priors → capital allocation. Phantom islands like Hy-Brasil sit on charts for centuries. By the 1420s, Antillia-type archipelagos were normalized on portolans; by the 1430s, “Insula de Brasil” is in circulation; by the 1570s Ortelius shows “Brasil” off Ireland; a British Admiralty chart still labels “Brasil Rock” in 1873 (LoC blog overview). These priors nudge merchants toward the western slot machine.

2. Commercial incentives. If your target is cod, you do not write poetry; you load salt. The Memorial University sketch and the longer Bristol scholarship (Jones, Condon) track the city’s westering from the 1480s into the Cabot era, with William Weston emerging as an early post-Cabot leader (Heritage NL/MI), (Condon 2018). Evan T. Jones’s work on financiers and Crown backing shows how rumor coalesced into credit by the mid-1490s (Jones 2006), (Jones 2010).

The historian’s hedge. Nothing here overturns Cabot’s status as the first documented post-Viking English landfall. But Bristol’s “Brasil” archive is abnormally good for proto-knowledge: repeated voyages with names and ships, a merchant explicitly connecting earlier Bristol sailing to Cabot’s “mainland,” and a foreign ambassador confirming a multi-year search program. That’s not smoke; that’s a glow.

FAQ#

Q1. Did a Bristol ship physically reach Newfoundland before 1497? A. Possibly; the Day letter implies a cape was found earlier, and the 1481 salt cargo fits a fishing objective, but without a surviving chart/log or specific coastal description, historians stop at plausible but unproven (Day 1497/8; Heritage NL/MI).

Q2. Isn’t “Brasil” just the country? A. No. Fifteenth-century “Brasil” in these English sources is the phantom island west of Ireland from Gaelic lore and medieval charts; the South American name derives from brazilwood, a dyewood commodity (LoC blog; U. Bristol, Salazar).

Q3. Why would fishermen hide a discovery that big? A. Because new banks are rents. Secrecy preserves advantage in cod economies; only when the Crown and big merchants mobilize does publicity pay. Innis is the classic account; Jones and Condon show the Bristol mechanics (Innis 1940; Condon 2018).

Q4. Are the 1480–81 voyages universally accepted? A. Their existence is anchored in credible records (Worcestre; the Croft inquiry). What’s debated is how far they got—phantom isle chase vs. genuine Western landfall (DCB; Bristol HA pamphlet).

Footnotes#

Sources#

• Primary & documentary editions

1. University of Bristol, Dept. of History. “John Day letter to the Lord Grand Admiral (1497/8).” Transcription/translation from Archivo General de Simancas.
2. University of Bristol, Dept. of History. “Pedro de Ayala’s report (25 July 1498).” Transcription/translation.
3. University of Bristol, Dept. of History. “Salazar’s c.1476 account of Bristol’s discovery of Brasil.” Contextual note on the toponym.
4. Dictionary of Canadian Biography (David B. Quinn). “JAY, JOHN.” Includes translated excerpt from William Worcestre’s Itinerarium and references to the Latin text.
5. Bristol Historical Association. Bristol and America 1480–1631. Pamphlet summarizing Croft inquiry language (“to serch & fynde… the Isle of Brasile”) with citations.

• Synthesis & scholarship

6. Jones, Evan T. “The Matthew of Bristol and the financiers of John Cabot’s 1497 voyage to North America.” English Historical Review (2006). See Bristol reading page with links to abstract/HTML/PDF: University of Bristol, “Reading: Smugglers’ City.”
7. Jones, Evan T. “Henry VII and the Bristol expeditions to North America: the Condon documents.” Historical Research 83 (2010): 444–455. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2281.2009.00519.x
8. Condon, Margaret M. “William Weston: early voyager to the New World.” Historical Research 91, no. 254 (2018): 628–649. Oxford Academic.
9. Quinn, David B. England and the Discovery of America, 1481–1620. Routledge, 1974 (repr./e-book).
10. Jones, Evan T., and Margaret M. Condon. Cabot and Bristol’s Age of Discovery: The Bristol Discovery Voyages 1480–1508. Cabot Project Publications, 2016 (digitised by Bristol Record Society).

• Context: maps & myth

11. Library of Congress, Worlds Revealed blog. “Hy-Brasil: The Supernatural Island.” (2020). With map gallery (Dulcert, Bianco, Ortelius, Jefferys, etc.).
12. University of Minnesota, James Ford Bell Library. “The Pizzigano Portolan: A cartographic mystery.” (2024) — background on portolans and Atlantic mental maps.

• North Atlantic fishery

13. Innis, Harold A. The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy. Toronto, 1940. (Classic analysis of information/market dynamics.)
14. Memorial University of Newfoundland / Heritage NL/MI. “English Voyages before Cabot.” Notes salt cargo and Bristol activity.

• Useful primary-source anthologies & pointers

15. Williamson, J. A. The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery under Henry VII (Hakluyt Society, 1962). (Translations of key texts; cited via Bristol reading page.)
16. Reddaway & Ruddock (eds.). “The accounts of John Balsall, purser of the Trinity of Bristol, 1480–1.” Camden Miscellany XXIII (1969). (Purser’s accounts; context for 1480–81 shipping.)