Dr Alwyn Ruddock, a former reader in history at the University of London, was the world expert on John Cabot’s discovery voyages from Bristol to North America (1496-98). What she was said to have found out about these voyages looked set to re-write the history of the European discovery of America. Yet, when Dr Ruddock died in December 2005, having spent four decades researching this topic, she ordered the destruction of all her research.

In an article published in Historical Research, Alwyn Ruddock’s extraordinary claims are explored by Dr Evan Jones of the University of Bristol.

In Spring 2006, all Dr Ruddock’s research material was destroyed, in line with the instructions in her will. However, her correspondence with her intended publisher, the University of Exeter Press, survived. Using this correspondence Dr Jones has investigated the research that Dr Ruddock had worked on, and kept secret, for so many years.

“To describe Alwyn Ruddock’s claims as revolutionary,” said Dr Jones, “is not an exaggeration.” Her apparent findings include information about how John Cabot persuaded Henry VII to support his voyages and why the explorer was able to win the backing of an influential Italian cleric: Fr. Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis, an Augustinian friar who was also in charge of collecting the Pope’s taxes in England.

Dr Ruddock’s most exciting claims, however, involve John Cabot’s 1498 voyage to America . While the fate of this expedition has long been a mystery, Dr Ruddock appears to have found evidence of a long and complex exploration of the American coastline, which culminated in Cabot’s return to England in the spring of 1500, followed shortly by his death. During this voyage, Dr Ruddock suggests that Cabot explored a large section of the coastline of North America, claiming it for England in the process.

Dr Ruddock intended to reveal that while Cabot was sailing south down the coast of America his chief supporter, Fra Giovanni, was establishing a religious colony in Newfoundland. Having disembarked from his ship, the Dominus Nobiscum, Fra Giovanni apparently established a settlement and built a church. This church, the first to be built in North America, was named after the Augustinian church of San Giovanni a Carbonara in Naples.

Dr Jones said: “Ruddock’s claims about the 1498 voyage are perhaps the most exciting of all. For while we have long known that Fra Giovanni accompanied the expedition, along with some other ‘poor Italian friars’, nothing has been known of what happened to their mission. 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.”

Dr Ruddock’s claims are clearly extraordinary but are they all correct? This is an issue that remains, in large part, to be resolved. In his article, Dr Jones shows that in many cases Alwyn Ruddock’s claims can be substantiated by reference to previously unknown material. However, much remains to be done.

Dr Jones continued: “In publishing this article now my intent was to put into the public domain what appear to be the last vestiges of Dr Ruddock’s research. While her correspondence does not give all the answers, it does provide many clues that historians can use to investigate her claims. I also hope that the publication of this article might persuade people who possess knowledge of Dr Ruddock’s research to come forward. For it is clear from her correspondence that many people must possess useful knowledge, ranging from her ex-students at the British Library to the ‘old and historic families in Italy’ who gave her access to their private archives.”

As to why Alwyn Ruddock should have chosen to have all her research destroyed on her death, Dr Jones confesses that he has no clear answers. In her obituary in the Guardian newspaper, it was suggested that she destroyed the first draft of her book “because it did not meet her exacting standards.” This does not explain, however, why she wanted everything destroyed – including her microfilms, her photographs and the transcripts of the documents she used.

“What is clear,” said Dr Jones, “is that she had a great sense of possession for her work and she felt this gave her the moral right to take her secrets to the grave. But even if all the documents she claimed to have found do come to light eventually, the mystery of why she sought to suppress her own basic research may never be resolved.”

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A University of Pennsylvania scholar has pinpointed 1616 as the year of the first European voyage up the Delaware River.

Jaap Jacobs, a senior fellow at Penn’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies, detailed his findings in a paper, “Truffle Hunting with an Iron Hog: The First Dutch Voyage up the Delaware River,” recently presented as part of the McNeil Center Seminar Series.

Scholarly discoveries tend to be the outcome of a deliberate process, but serendipity played an important role in Jacobs’ discovery of the significance of a centuries-old deposition pinpointing the year of the first Dutch voyage up the Delaware.

Sometime between 1993 and 1994 while doing research for his dissertation, Jacobs copied a summary of a document he found at the Gemeentearchief Amsterdam, the Amsterdam notarial archives. He said that the summary didn’t indicate that the document was important, so he didn’t look at the original until July 2000. At that point it became clear to him that the document referred to the Delaware River rather than the Hudson River, as he had originally thought. Years later, in 2007, while preparing his paper on early Dutch exploration of the Delaware and Hudson rivers, he revisited the historiography and realized that the document pertained to the first voyage up the Delaware by Europeans.

The document he had found was a deposition of the sworn testimony of sailor Jan Jacobsz Bens. At the request of an Amsterdam merchant, Bens had testified about a trip he took on one of the earliest recorded ships built in North America, the Iron Hog. He stated that the trip occurred in 1616.

Historians acknowledge that while earlier European explorers may have sighted the mouth of the Delaware Bay, Henry Hudson became the first European to actually enter it in August 1609. European exploration of the Delaware River had long been presumed to have occurred sometime during 1614-1616. The document Jacobs found now pinpoints the year as 1616.

“The document I found provides the missing link in the early cartography of the Delaware River,” Jacobs said. “This document is evidence that the Dutch voyaged to America in 1616 and explored a large section of the coastline, claiming it for the Dutch Republic in the process.”

The first trades between the Dutch and the Susquehannock Indians took place during the time when the Iron Hog sailed across the Atlantic to Europe and the northeastern coast of America.

“Jaap Jacobs’s discovery of a document that has rested in Dutch archives for nearly three centuries casts our understanding of the Philadelphia region’s early colonial history in a new light,” said Daniel K. Richter, director of Penn’s McNeil Center and a professor of history at Penn. “Perhaps no other scholar has the depth of knowledge, the insight and the detective skills not only to uncover but to understand the significance of this remarkable discovery.”

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The mystery over the identity of the woman behind Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” painting has been solved once and for all, German academics at Heidelberg University announced on Tuesday.

Mona Lisa is “undoubtedly” Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, according to Veit Probst, director of the Heidelberg University Library.

Conclusive evidence came from notes written in October 1503 in the margin of a book.

Discovered two years ago in the library’s collection by manuscript expert Armin Schlechter, the notes were made by Florentine city official Agostino Vespucci, an acquaintance of Leonardo da Vinci, in an edition of letters by the Roman orator, Cicero.

In his annotations, Vespucci wrote that Leonardo was working on three paintings at the time, including a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo.

“All doubts about the identity of the ‘Mona Lisa’ have been eliminated,” the university said in a statement.

Vespucci’s notes also “establish more precisely the year the painting was done,” the university said.

Until now, the only other source to have identified the sitter in Leonardo’s masterpiece as Lisa Gherardini, was the 16th century painter and art historian Giorgio Vasari.

In his work “Lives of the Artists,” Vasari named Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the wealthy Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo as the subject of the portrait and concluded that the portrait was painted between 1503 and 1506.

But doubts about Vasari’s attribution have always abounded since he was known to rely on anecdotal evidence.

The work is unsigned, undated and bears nothing to indicate the sitter’s name. Attempts to solve the mystery surrounding her famous smile as well as her identity have included theories that she was the artist’s mother, a noblewoman, a courtesan, even a prostitute.

There have also been theories that the sitter was happily pregnant, or affected by various diseases ranging from facial paralysis to the compulsive gnashing of teeth.

“The German finding confirms that Vasari is indeed a reliable source,” Giuseppe Pallanti, the author of two books on the “Mona Lisa,” told Discovery News.

Pallanti was the first historian to identify the sitter in Leonardo’s portrait as Lisa Gherardini, following 25 years of research.

“Indeed, I found documents showing that Leonardo’s father — a local notary, Ser Piero da Vinci — and Lisa’s family were neighbors, living about 10 feet away from each other in Via Ghibellina,” Pallanti said. “Leonardo met a pregnant Lisa in 1500 in Florence. In December 1502 she gave birth again.”

According to Pallanti’s research, Lisa Gherardini, a member of a minor noble family of rural origins, was born on June 15, 1479, in a rather ugly house in Via Sguazza in Florence.

In 1495, when she was 16 years old, she married the merchant Francesco del Giocondo. Ser Francesco was 14 years her senior and had lost his first wife, Camilla Rucellai, the previous year.

The girl moved to Del Giocondo’s house, located in today’s San Lorenzo market quarter. Though the house was big and beautiful, the surroundings were less than ideal. Prostitutes populated the area, which was a sort of Renaissance red light district.

In that house, Lisa gave birth to five children: Piero, Andrea, Giocondo, Camilla and Marietta.

Pallanti was also able to reconstruct Lisa’s last years. She died four years after her husband’s death on July 15, 1542, at age 63, and was buried in the convent Saint Orsola.

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