July 1, 2007, will be Canada's 140th birthday, and this post marks the spot where North America was probably "discovered" 510 years ago. Two spots, in fact.

The word discovered is in quotation marks because there were already hundreds of thousands of people living in North America on June 24, 1497, when John Cabot raised the British ensign either just north of what became the town of Bonavista, Newfoundland, or on a beach on Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. (Columbus, of course, never touched North America.)

The word probably must be emphasised too, because no one knows for sure where Cabot landed. It could have been Maine, which puts a whole different slant on the story. At commemorations in 1847 for the he 400th anniversary of Cabot's voyage, the consensus was the landing took place on Cape North, an outcrop of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Opinions shifted after Newfoundland joined the Canadian confederation in 1949.

Giovanni Caboto, the freelance Italian explorer whose name was anglicised when England�s King Henry VII hired him to find new territories, believed he could do a better job than Columbus had managed up to that point in discovering a quick route to the Orient. The trick, he convinced the merchants of Bristol, would be to follow the shorter northern latitudes. He'd zip around the top of the world, hit land and resupply, then sail south to Japan. Simple.

"This scheme might have succeeded were it not for Canada," Derek Croxton cracked in an essay for the University of Virginia.

Ye Matthew left Bristol sometime in May 1497. Cabot crossed the Atlantic in just over a month, looked around for another month, and was back in Bristol by August 6. He went to have another look the following year and this time never came back.

For more on the landfall location argument, with maps, check this site out.