In this episode of A Book with Legs, Cole Smead, CEO and Portfolio Manager at Smead Capital Management, and Chairman and Chief Investment Officer Bill Smead sit down with Lydia Towns to discuss her book, “In Search of Trade and Fortune: John Cabot, Christopher Columbus and the Opening of the Atlantic.”
Lydia Towns is an assistant professor of world history at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. She earned her PhD in Transatlantic History from the University of Texas at Arlington, where her dissertation on England’s transatlantic activities under Henry VIII won the George Wolfskill Dissertation Award. She served six years as Executive Secretary of the Society for the History of Discoveries and has published on Henry VIII’s planned 1521 Atlantic voyage and the history of the Grand Banks fishery. “In Search of Trade and Fortune” is her first book, drawing on archives in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The conversation starts in 986, with a Norse trader blown off course who sights North America and simply keeps sailing. From there, it traces five centuries of Atlantic activity before 1492. Topics include Norse expeditions driven by timber and iron rather than adventure, butternuts at L’Anse aux Meadows that prove contact with the St. Lawrence River Valley, and a 2021 discovery in Milan showing that knowledge of lands west of Greenland had reached the Mediterranean. Towns also covers the Black Sea slave trade that shaped Cabot’s world and why the fall of Constantinople did not, by itself, push Europe west.
Through a business and markets lens, Cole and Bill dig into how these voyages were actually structured and financed. They compare Genoa’s entrepreneurial family networks with Venice’s state-run merchant galleys, which were auctioned each year and helped give rise to the joint venture. They also discuss how the Crown carried almost no risk while entrepreneurs carried all of it, and why the investors behind Columbus simply transplanted the sugar plantation model they already owned in Madeira and the Canaries. Other topics include who really financed 1492 and Columbus’s demand for a one-eighth co-investment right in every voyage. Towns’s takeaway for investors: great reward comes with great risk, and there is no reward without taking it.
“In Search of Trade and Fortune: John Cabot, Christopher Columbus and the Opening of the Atlantic,” published by Reaktion Books, is available now: https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/in-search-of-trade-and-fortune
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