Clement Adams

Clement Adams (1519? – 1587), was an English schoolmaster and author, noted for producing an engraving of Sebastian Cabot's map of the world, sometime after 1544.

Adams was born at Buckington, Warwickshire, about 1519. He was educated at Eton, and thereafter elected to King's College, Cambridge, 17 August 1536, of which he is supposed to have been elected fellow in 1539. He took the degree of BA in 1540–1, and of M.A. in 1544, and was appointed schoolmaster to the "young courtly companions of Edward VI" at Greenwich 3 May 1552, at a salary of £10 per annum. He died 9 Jan 1586–7, and was buried at St. Alphege, Greenwich.

The earliest mention of Adams in the printed literature of the sixteenth century is by his contemporary, Richard Eden, the father of English geography. From the pages of his little read and less known Decades we learn that Clement Adams was a schoolmaster and not a traveller. To Adams we owe the first written account of the earliest English intercourse with Russia. Eden writes: ‘Wheras I have before (p. 252) made mention howe Moscouia was in our tyme discoured by the direction and information of the sayde master Sebastian [Cabote] who longe before had this secreate in his minde, I shall not neede here to describe that viage, forasmuch as the same is largely and faithfully written in the Latyn tonge by that lerned young man, Clement Adams, scol mayster to the Queenes henshemen (i.e. pages of honour) as he received it at the mouth of the sayde Richard Chancelor.'

The incidental allusion to the old pilot major Sebastian Cabot has some significance in connection with Adams. Cabot, it is well known, made a famous Mappe-monde, recording, among other things, the discoveries of himself and his father, John Cabot, along the coast of 'Newfoundland' (either Nova Scotia or Newfoundland) in 1497, the date of which discovery has been the subject of much debate among geographers and antiquaries. A contemporary copy of Cabot's map, discovered in Germany, is preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the original of which is now lost, in a volume edited by Nathan Chytræus, first published in 1594. It would appear that there was also a copy preserved at Oxford at the period named; be this as it may, we learn from Hakluyt, in 1584, that yet another copy was made and 'cut' by Adams, which was evidently well known at the period, for we read in a manuscript by Hakluyt on Westerne Planting (discovered in 1854) of 'the copye of [Gabote's] map sett out by Mr. Clemente Adams, and is in many marchants houses in London.' Hakluyt, five years later, amplifies this statement as to the map by Adams, in quoting a legend relating to the discoveries of the Cabots to be found upon it, described by him as 'an extract taken out of the mappe of Sebastian Cabot, cut by Clement Adams, concerning his [Cabot's] discovery of the West Indias which is to be seene in her Maiesties privie gallerie at Westminster, and in many other ancient merchants houses.' No copy of this map engraved by Adams is now known to exist.

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