[2] Letter addressed to the writer in 1890.
[3] The vignette on proceeding page is a faithful representation of the
Florentine portrait.
[4] The usual course was to sail southward and reach Florida coasting
north, or to sail to Newfoundland and coast southward. It required
especial boldness to take the direct course, and, in 1562, when Ribault
followed this course, he was proud of the achievement. The fact that
Verrazano sailed the direct course at that time proves the authenticity
of his voyage, as a forger would not have invented the story.
[5] On the Map of Verrazano, to which attention will be directed, this
triangular island is delineated. The voyager approaching the island from
the west comes to a point of the triangle where he can look away in the
easterly direction, and at a glance take in two sides; while on reaching
the eastern limit the third side plainly appears. In sailing past Block
Island, as Verrazano did, from west to east, the navigator could not fail
to discover its triangular shape. Indeed it is so marked that one is
struck by the fact.
[6] The story of this map is curious. The American contents were first
given to the public by the writer in the “Magazine of American History,”
and afterward reprinted in “Verrazano the Explorer.”
[7] In “Cabo de Arenas,” the coast names taken from a large collection of
maps are arranged in parallel columns, illustrating three main divisions
of the coast, showing that Cabo de Baxos was the name applied to Cape
Cod, and Cabo de Arenas to Sandy Hook. Capo Cod in the early times was
not a sandy cape, but a beautiful and well-wooded cape. Sandy Hook ever
since it was known has borne its present character.
[8] Those who have fancied that Cape Arenas was Cape Cod, and that the
bay behind it was Massachusetts Bay, have the same difficulty as regards
dimensions. Students of American cartography understand perfectly well
that latitudes in the old maps were often more than two degrees out of
the way, the instruments of that period being so defective.
[9] To convince himself of this fact the reader may compare the
reconstructed Map of Chaves with the coast surveys, when the main
difference will be found to consist in the exaggeration of Sandy Hook.
The “Narrative and Critical History of America,” dealing with this point,
suppresses all allusion to the fact that Kohl recognizes the cape on the
Map of Chaves with the names “Santiago” and “Arenas” as Sandy Hook, which
follows, as the river inside of the Hook he identifies with the Hudson.
Dr. Kohl, though generally very acute, failed to see that Oviedo’s
description of the Map of Chaves was, substantially, the description
of Ribeiro, and that in identifying, as he chanced to, the “Arenas”
of Ribeiro with Cape Cod, he stultified his own reasoning. Nor did he
consider this, that if the great Cape “Arenas” was intended for Cape Cod,
there is no representation whatever of Sandy Hook and the Hudson in the
old cartography and that all the voyages to this region geographically
went for nothing. _Credat Judaeus Appellus!_ This exaggeration of
Sandy Hook is conceded, yet the inlets along the New Jersey shore may
have been viewed as connected by Gomez; and indeed, so great have been
the changes along the coast that no one can well deny that they were
connected in 1525, and formed a long bay running down behind Sandy Hook.
It will prove more historic to follow the writer, who says, “that the
coast of New York and the neighboring district were known to Europeans
almost a century before Hudson ascended the ‘Great River of the North,’
and that this knowledge is proved by various maps made in the course of
the sixteenth century. Nearly all of them place the mouth of a river
between the fortieth and forty-first degrees of latitude, or what should
be this latitude, but which imperfect instruments have placed farther
north.”—Nar. and Crit. His. of Amer., 4: 432.