If Canada were a person, its 140th birthday today would put it right up there in Guinness Record Land with those wrinkly Japanese grannnies and vodka-soaked Albanian geezers. To boost its numbers as a country, though, this month also has the 510th anniversary of the day John Cabot stubbed his toe on Newfoundland.

Assuming it was Newfoundland where Canada-to-be was first “discovered” by white guys (or at least Cape Breton), and not Maine, in which case, just skip it, eh?

This doubt over exactly where Cabot landed on June 24, 1497, is probably why I don’t remember being taught any specifics in history class. We skipped through a lot of Canadian history, of course, but mostly because American history is a lot more interesting and the teachers wanted to move on to it quickly.

So I had to do my own studyin’ up for this anniversary and, yet again, I found a Dorseyland connection. It turns out that Cabot set sail from a place in County Cork, Ireland, called Dursey Head, seen here in a Google Earth image. That’s gotta be a relative, because it sounds uncomfortably like a drunken version of my name. I couldn’t find much information on Dursey Head on the Net apart from the fact that a lot of people enjoy taking measurements around it.

Giovanni Caboto, the freelance Venetian 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 moneybags of Bristol, would be to follow the shorter northern latitudes. He’d zip around the top of the world, hit land quick 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.

Go forth, King Henry actually told Cabot, and discover “whatsoever islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels, in whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all Christians.” After bad weather, insufficient food and an ornery crew aborted the first attempt in 1496, he left Bristol sometime in May 1497.

This image is a detail from “The Departure of John and Sebastian Cabot from Bristol on Their First Voyage of Discovery, 1497″ by Ernest Board, 1906. It shows Cabot having his pulse checked to see if he was crazy.

Cabot crossed the Atlantic in just over a month, looked around for another month, and was back in Bristol by August 6. For his efforts he was awarded a pension of several whole pounds a month, but that was neither here nor there because he went to have another look the following year and this time never came back.

Bonavista, population less than 5,000, is sticking to its claim that its rocky peninsula was the place Cabot landed, having spotted it from the deck of his 65-foot caravel, Ye Matthew, and cried out “O buono vista!” (”Oh, happy sight!”).

That story was good enough for Queen Elizabeth II, who sat on a Bonavista bench on June 24, 1997, for the 400th-anniversary party, during which a full-scale replica of Ye Matthew arrived from Bristol. Today tourists can sail on a replica of the replica that’s docked in Bonavista.

‘’Remember that our country was founded here,'’ the queen heard Sheila Copps say, and to the then-heritage minister’s words, Her Maj added that Cabot’s arrival in Bonavista was ‘’the geographical and intellectual beginning of North America”.

In the back of her royal mind, perhaps, was the fact that Cabot had also launched England’s empire, which exactly one week after the anniversary party received the fatal coup de grace when Britain gave Hong Kong back to the Chinese. Sitting alongside Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh was then-Irish Prime Minister John Bruton, who might also have had something to say about the British Empire, but he was only there representing County Cork.

And watching the anniversary celebrations on TV were many, many Native North Americans who certainly did have something to say about Cabot being the instigator of history’s worst genocide.

But everyone could at least agree on something: That no one can agree on the location of Cabot’s landing. It’s quirks like this that make Canadian history worthwhile after all.

Nope, you can talk all you want about Vikings getting to North America first, or St Brendan in a reed basket or some Basques in a boat, but the real fun is in arguing about whether Cabot discovered Canada in Bonavista, Newfoundland, or Cape North on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, or whether he was actually just looking at Maine, which wouldn’t be much of a discovery at all since Columbus had “discovered America” five years earlier (or at least some Caribbean islands, so close enough).

In these arguments, Maine is forgotten by the time someone orders the second round of beer. That’s just a fish story. It’s down to Newfies and Bluenosers.

The Nova Scotians say Cape North was the place because it says so right on the map that Sebastian Cabot, John’s son, supposedly made. (If John Cabot kept a log or made a map, no one knows where he last left it.)

The Newfoundlanders say that Sebastian was suspected of doctoring his map for political reasons.

The Nova Scotians say, “Oh-ho! You want politics?”, because until Newfoundland finally got around to joining the Canadian confederation in 1949, historians were mostly agreed that Cabot landed on Cape Breton. In fact the 400th anniversary in 1897 was celebrated on Cape Breton. Rewriting the history books to say it was Bonavista was probably one of the clauses in the Newfies’ contract when they agreed to become Canadians.

The Newfoundlanders say, “Hey by, you want maps?”, and whip out John Mason’s 17th-century chart which, even though it’s upside down, clearly shows Bonavista as “A Caboto primum reperta”, which means “First found by Cabot”.

The Newfoundlanders also say, and you’ve got to admit they have a point, what dimwit would sail right past Newfoundland and get all the way to the Cape Breton shore without noticing a very large rock off his starboard bow?

The Nova Scotians say, “Well, if Cabot didn’t land in Breton, how come there’s a big marker there with a plaque from the Canadian government that says he did?”

They have a point too. There are two plaques in Cabot’s Landing Provincial Park in Nova Scotia, in fact, and a cairn with a bust of the great man. The plaque erected by the Cape Breton Historical Society says landfall was “in this vicinity and is believed to have been the lofty headland of North Cape Breton”.

But, the Newfoundlanders point out, the plaque from Ottawa doesn’t say that. It says the landing was “somewhere on the east coast of Canada” and diplomatically adds: “Although the sources do not allow unequivocal identification of the site, local tradition records Cape North as the landfall.”

And that’s as far as the argument ever gets before last call. There’s only enough time left for a final round and the making of half-hearted plans to do some fishing out by St Paul ’s Island, just off the tip of Cape North. There are a lot of whales and shipwrecks around St Paul’s too. I say they should be looking for Cabot’s footprints out there.