A new investigation has shed fresh light on the voyages of John Cabot, the Italian navigator and explorer, divulging that he may have had prior knowledge of European expeditions to the 'New World' that predated Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage.

Although commonly credited with "discovering" America, Christopher Columbus would not reach the mainland of the New World until 1498, when he sailed to South America, the Discovery News reported.

Farther north, Cabot became the first European since Leif Ericson and the Vikings to land on North American soil when he embarked three voyages for England's Henry VII between the summers of 1496 and 1498.

The second of these expeditions, carried out in 1497, led to the European discovery of North America at Newfoundland.

Now, a concise entry in a yellowed accounting ledger has revealed an unexpected European aspect to Cabot's discovery: In April 1496, the Italian-born explorer received financial backing from an Italian bank - the Bardi banking house in London.

The notation - found through some serious sleuthing of the works of Alwyn Ruddock, a deceased, secretive historian - would also indicate that Europeans may have discovered the New World decades before both Cabot and Columbus set sail.

Found in a private Florentine archive, the document records that a payment of 50 nobles sterling was made to "Giovanni Chabotte" (John Cabot) of Venice so that he could undertake expeditions" to go and find the new land."

"This brief entry opens a whole new chapter in Cabot scholarship. It shows that the Bristol voyages were part of a wider network of Italian-supported exploratory enterprises," historian Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli,of the University of Florence said.

Guidi Bruscoli mentioned that the short entry referred to "the new land" ("ilnuovo paese" in the original Italian version) and not to "a new land" (or "un nuovo paese").

"The use of the definite article ('il'- 'the') rather than the indefinite 'a' ('un' in Italian) is indeed puzzling," Guidi Bruscoli said.

The phrasing might entail that the money was given to Cabot so that he could find a land whose existence was already known. The Bardi, far from being disinterested patrons, would have had a sound economic reason to finance what would have been a nearly certain discovery.

Since Cabot's royal patent only applied to lands "unknown to Christians," it seems unlikely that "the new land" referred to here was that which Columbus had found four years earlier.

As such, the note may revitalize claims that Bristol merchants had discovered North America at an earlier time.

"Unfortunately, we only have clues. While the entry implies that the Bardibelieved in a prior discovery, we can't assume this had occurred," Guidi-Bruscoli said.

The speculation receives some backing, however, from a letter written in the winter of 1497/8 by an English merchant named John Day to the "Lord Grand Admira" almost certainly Christopher Columbus.

Discovered in the 1950s, the letter discussed Cabot's lately completed 1497 voyage to Newfoundland, adding it was "considered certain" that men from Bristol had already "found and discovered in the past" the said land, "as your lordship well knows."

Even more convincing evidence appeared to have existed in the archives investigated by the late historian Alwyn Ruddock, a leading expert on the Bristol discovery voyages.

University of Bristol historian Evan Jones insisted that Ruddock made finds that "promised to revolutionize our understanding of Europe's engagement with North America in the three decades after 1492."

She claimed, for example, to have found proof in Italian and Spanish sources that Bristol merchants reached the New World sometime before 1470, and that Cabot didn't die on the 1498 expedition as widely believed, but returned to England in 1500.

"She had made some extraordinary finds, but she ordered in her will the destruction of all her research following her death," said Jones, who founded the Cabot Project research initiative.

That was done in 2005, when the intensely secretive Ruddock died aged 89.

Another of Ruddock's claims suggested that Cabot was financed by an Italian bank. Following an invitation to visit the deceased historian's house in 2010, Jones and his co-researcher, Margaret Condon, found the source of her information - in the form of a sticky label on an old shoe cupboard:

"The Bardi firm of London" (an Italian bank).

"The Bardi firm of London - that was all we needed to work out the identity of the Italian banking house that Ruddock kept secret for almost half a century," Jones said.

Jones and Condon contacted Guidi-Bruscoli in Florence, who was then able to situate a brief entry in the private archive of the Guicciardini family.

The findings have been published in the scholarly journal Historical Research. (ANI)