I remember reading many years ago something to the effect that Henry VIII either had set up a military post in North America or was interested in doing so. I couldn’t find any reference online to Henry VIII’s interest in establishing military outposts in North America.
I’ve never read about any English base in North America before Roanoke in 1584; thirty-seven years after Hal’s reign.
If there was, the historian who spent years investigating it had all her documentation destroyed after her death.
I’ve had a minor obsession with John Cabot since I worked a day in a conference room named after him (all the conference rooms in the building were named for explorers).
I think Ruddock had hypotheses she couldn’t back up. One of which is the idea that an Italian friar named Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis went with Cabot and stayed and built a church in Newfoundland.
Even if they wanted to do so, it didn’t stick. It also was during the reign of Henry VII, not Henry VIII. And it wishy have been a military base.
There is a reference in the Wikipedia article on John Cabot’s son Sebastian to an attempt to send an expedition with the backing of Henry VIII, but it corny get enough funding.
One thinks of the differences between Spain, Portugal and England, when they claimed the americas…
The Iberians claimed lush tropical jungles with lots of people lining the shore, massive fresh water rivers flowing out , sending fresh water far out to sea.
Cabot only reported back on the lands at New Foundland.
Maybe Cabot’s third expedition was attacked by the spanish ? Because they marked on their maps places “Explored by the English”… yet no credible trace of the third expedition has been found. Maybe there were other English explorers, eg William Weston, Hugh Eliot, Robert Thorne, Sebastion Cabot… might have. Or they defrauded the king … there’s no reliable source of information, but some notes from Henry VII’s financials, which are not the full write up to prove it, and like, what of a map of where they had travelled ?
But no, Henry VIII did not send people to explore North America, and the reports were there were icy rocks like Newfoundland and Greenland. And they continued aggravating the Spanish with piracy , so they would not think they would have a good chance to survive in the Americas…
The ice pack growing after about 1350 effectively cut off access to Greenland and the colonists starved. The Little Ice Age from then onward effectively made northern North America more inhospitable. Other than furs and fishing the Grand Banks, at first there was not a lot to attract people, and certainly less incentive to settle. The European powers for a long time considered the little Carribean islands they claimed as more valuable than northern North America, in the race for colonial riches.