4 The second article identified a document that proved, as Ruddock had suggested, that John Cabot received funding from ‘Italian bankers’ based in London. The first went some way to confirming one of Ruddock's key findings: that William Weston had undertaken a previously unknown discovery expedition from Bristol at the very end of the fifteenth century. Such concerns were addressed in subsequent articles. Major question marks remained, however, as to whether her more extraordinary statements were based in fact. It showed that all were plausible and that some could be verified. 3Įvan Jones's initial article set out Ruddock's numerous claims. 2 It also led to an unusually large readership for an academic journal, with the three articles becoming among the most downloaded items in its history. In combination, these two factors ensured that both the initial article and the follow-up research published in Historical Research received international press coverage. It seemed incredible that an academic could unearth such amazing things and then seek to keep them secret. She failed to publish finds made over a forty-year period and then ordered the destruction of those discoveries in her will. Second, the strangeness of Ruddock's actions was enthralling. Ruddock also argued for a previously unknown religious colony allegedly established in Newfoundland in 1498 and she offered reasons to believe that the Bristol explorers had charted much of the eastern seaboard of North America by 1500, long before those coasts were investigated by Juan Ponce de Leon (1513–21) and Giovanni da Verrazzano (1524).
She claimed to have found evidence that Bristol men had reached North America prior to John Cabot's famous 1497 expedition, which initiated Europe's exploration and settlement of the northern continent. First, Ruddock's assertions were astounding. 1 Two things made the article unusual and went on to capture the public's imagination. 2005), a former Reader at Birkbeck College and the leading authority on the voyages of discovery launched from Bristol to North America from c.1470–1508.
He emerged from obscurity as a result of an article in this journal on the unpublished research claims of Dr. Before 2008 William Weston, merchant of Bristol, was no more than a footnote to Bristol's overseas trade.
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