reëditing the ancient cosmographers, and bringing them into relations
with the new results of discovery. Two of these early writers thus
attracting attention were Pomponius Mela, whose _Cosmographia_ dated
back to the first century, and Solinus, whose _Polyhistor_ was of the
third. The Mela fell to the care of Johann Camers, who published it as
_De Situ Orbis_ at Vienna in 1512, at the press of Singrein; and this
was followed in 1518 by another issue, taken in hand by Joachim Watt,
better known under the Latinized name of Vadianus, who had been born in
Switzerland, and who was one of the earlier helpers in popularizing the
name of America. The Solinus, the care of which was undertaken by
Camers, the teacher of Watt, was produced under these new auspices at
the same time. Two years later (1520) both of these old writers attained
new currency while issued together and accompanied by a map of
Apianus,--as the German Bienewitz classicized his name,--in which
further iteration was given to the name of America by attaching it to
the southern continent of the west.
[Sidenote: A strait at the Isthmus of Panama.]
[Sidenote: 1515. Schöner.]
[Sidenote: Antarctic continent.]
In this map Apianus, in 1520, was combining views of the western
hemisphere, which had within the few antecedent years found advocacy
among a new school of cartographers. These students represented the
northern and southern continents as independent entities, disconnected
at the isthmus, where Columbus had hoped to find his strait. This is
shown in the earliest of the Schöner globes, the three copies of which
known to us are preserved, one at Frankfort and two at Weimar. It is in
the _Luculentissima Descriptio_, which was written to accompany this
Schöner globe of 1515, where we find that statement already referred to,
which chronicles, as Wieser thinks, an earlier voyage than Magellan's to
the southern strait, which separated the "America" of Vespucius from
that great Antarctic continent which did not entirely disappear from our
maps till after the voyage of Cook.
[Sidenote: 1515. Reisch.]
[Sidenote: Brazil.]
It is a striking instance of careless contemporary observation, which
the student of this early cartography has often to confront, that while
Reisch, in his popular cyclopædia of the _Margarita Philosophica_ which
he published first in 1503, gave not the slightest intimation of the
discoveries of Columbus, he did not much improve matters in 1515, when
he ignored the discoveries of Balboa, and reproduced in the main the
so-called "Admiral's map" of the Ptolemy of 1513. It is to be observed,
however, that Reisch was in this reproduced map of 1515 the first of
map makers to offer in the word "Prisilia" on the coast of Vespucius the
prototype of the modern Brazil. It will be remembered that Cabral had
supposed it an island, and had named it the Isla de Santa Cruz. The
change of name induced a pious Portuguese to believe it an instigation
of the devil to supplant the remembrance of the holy and sacred wood of
the great martyr by the worldly wood, which was commonly used to give a
red color to cloth!
[Sidenote: Theories of seamanship.]
In 1519, in the _Suma de Geographia_ of Fernandez d'Enciso, published
later at Seville, in 1530, we have the experience of one of Ojeda's
companions in 1509. This little folio, now a scarce book, is of interest
as first formulating for practical use some of the new theories of
seamanship as developed under the long voyages at this time becoming
common. It has also a marked interest as being the earliest book of the
Spanish press which had given consideration at any length to the new
possessions of Spain.
[Sidenote: 1522. Frisius.]
We again find a similar indisposition to keep abreast of discovery, so
perplexing to later scholars, in the new-cast edition of Ptolemy in
1522, which contains the well-known map of Laurentius Frisius. It is
called by Nordenskiöld, in subjecting it to analysis in his _Facsimile
Atlas_, "an original work, but bad beyond all criticism, as well from a
geographical as from a xylographical point of view." One sees, indeed,
in the maps of this edition, no knowledge of the increase of
geographical knowledge during later years. We observe, too, that they go
back to Behaim's interpretation of Marco Polo's India, for the eastern
shores of Asia. The publisher, Thomas Ancuparius, seems never to have
heard of Columbus, or at least fails to mention him, while he awards the
discovery of the New World to Vespucius. The maps, reduced in the main
from those of the edition of 1513, were repeated in those of 1525, 1535,
and 1541, without change and from the same blocks.
[Illustration: SCHÖNER.]
The results of the voyage of Magellan and Del Cano promptly attained a
more authentic record than usually fell to the lot of these early ocean
experiences.
[Sidenote: 1523. Magellan's voyage described.]
The company which reached Spain in the "Victoria" went at once to
Valladolid to report to the Emperor, and while there a pupil and
secretary of Peter Martyr, then at Court, Maximilianus Transylvanus by
name, got from these men the particulars of their discoveries, and,
writing them out in Latin, he sent the missive to his father, the
Archbishop of Salzburg,--the young man was a natural son of this
prelate,--and in some way the narrative got into print at Cologne and
Rome in 1523.
[Sidenote: 1523. Schöner.]
[Sidenote: Rosenthal gores.]
Schöner printed in 1523 a little tract, _De nuper ... repertis insulis
ac regionibus_ to elucidate a globe which he had at that time
constructed. It was published at Timiripæ, as the imprint reads, which
has been identified by Coote as the Grecized form of the name of a small
village not far from Bamberg, where Schöner was at that time a parochial
vicar. When a new set of engraved gores were first brought to light by
Ludwig Rosenthal, in Munich, in 1885, they were considered by Wieser,
who published an account of them in 1888, as the lost globe of Schöner.
Stevens, in a posthumous book on _Johann Schöner_, expressed a similar
belief. This was a view which Stevens's editor, C. H. Coote, accepted.
The opinion, however, is open to question, and Nordenskiöld finds that
the Rosenthal gores have nothing to do with the lost globe of Schöner,
and puts them much later, as having been printed at Nuremberg about
1540.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Political aspects of Magellan's voyage.]
[Sidenote: Gomez.]
The voyage of Magellan had reopened the controversy of Spain with
Portugal, stayed but not settled by the treaty of Tordesillas. Estevan
Gomez, a recusant captain of Magellan's fleet, who had deserted him just
as he was entering the straits, had arrived in Spain May 6, 1521, and
had his own way for some time in making representation of the
foolhardiness of Magellan's undertaking.
On March 27, 1523, Gomez received a concession from the Emperor to go on
a small armed vessel for a year's cruise in the northwest, to make
farther search for a passage, but he was not to trespass on any
Portuguese possession. The disputes between Portugal and Spain
intensifying, Gomez's voyage was in the mean time put off for a while.
[Sidenote: Dispute over the Moluccas.]
[Sidenote: Congress at Badajos.]
[Illustration: ROSENTHAL OR NUREMBERG GORES.]
Gomara tells us that, in the opinion of his time, the Spaniards had
gained the Moluccas, at the conference at Tordesillas, by yielding to
the demands of the Portuguese, so that what Portugal gained in Brazil
and Newfoundland she lost in Asia and adjacent parts. The Portuguese
historian, Osorius, viewed it differently; he counted in the American
gain for his country, but he denied the Spanish rights at the antipodes.
So the longitude of the Moluccas became a sharp political dispute, which
there was an attempt to settle in 1524 in a congress of the two nations
that was convened alternately at Badajos and Elvas, situated on opposite
sides of the Caya, a stream which separates the two countries.
[Sidenote: Council of the Indies.]
Ferdinand Columbus, by a decree of February 19, 1524, had been made one
of the arbiters. After two months of wrangling, each side stood stiff in
its own opinions, and it was found best to break up the congress.
Following upon the dissolution of this body, the Spanish government was
impelled to make the management of the Indies more effective than it had
been under the commissions which had existed, and on August 18, 1524,
the Council of the Indies was reorganized in more permanent form.
[Sidenote: Gomez's voyage.]
An immediate result of the interchange of views at Badajos was a renewal
of the Gomez project, to examine more carefully the eastern coast of
what is now the United States, in the hopes of yet discovering a western
passage. Of that voyage, which is first mentioned in the _Sumario_ of
Oviedo in 1526, and of the failure of its chief aim, enough has already
been said in the early part of this appendix.
It has been supposed by Harrisse that the results of this voyage were
embodied in the earliest printed Spanish map which we have showing lines
of latitude and longitude,--that found in a joint edition of Martyr and
Oviedo (1534), and which is only known in a copy now in the Lenox
Library.
The purpose which followed upon the congress of Badajos, to penetrate
the Atlantic coast line and find a passage to the western sea, was
communicated to Cortes, then in Mexico, some time before the date of his
fourth letter, October 15, 1524. The news found him already convinced of
the desirableness of establishing a port on the great sea of the west,
and he selected Zucatula as a station for the fleets which he undertook
to build.
[Sidenote: 1526. Cortes sends ships to the Moluccas.]
[Sidenote: The Moluccas sold to Portugal.]
Other projects delayed the preparations which were planned, and it was
not till September 3, 1526, that Cortes signified to the Emperor his
readiness to send his ships to the Moluccas. After a brief experimental
trip up the coast from Zucatula, three of his vessels were finally
dispatched, in October, 1527, on a disastrous voyage to those islands,
where the purpose was to confront the Portuguese pretensions. It so
happened, meanwhile, that Charles V. needed money for his projects in
Italy, and he called Ferdinand Columbus to Court to consult with him
about a sale of his rights in the Moluccas to Portugal. Ferdinand made a
report, which has not come down to us, but a decision to sell was
reached, and the Portuguese King agreed to the price of purchase on June
20, 1530. Thus the Moluccas, which had been so long the goal of Spanish
ambition, pass out of view in connection with American discovery.
There is some ground for the suspicion, if not belief, that the
Portuguese from the Moluccas had before this pushed eastward across the
Pacific, and had even struck the western verge of that continent which
separated them from the Spanish explorers on the Atlantic side.
[Illustration: MARTYR-OVIEDO]
[Illustration: MAP, 1534.]
[Sidenote: North America, east coast.]
[Sidenote: Verrazano.]
We come next to some further developments on the eastern coast of North
America. A certain French corsair, known from his Florentine birth as
Juan Florin, had become a terror by preying on the Spanish commerce in
the Indies. In January, 1524, he was on his way, under the name of
Verrazano, in the expedition which has given him fame, and has supplied
not a little ground for contention, and even for total distrust of the
voyage as a fact. He struck the coast of North Carolina, turned south,
but, finding no harbor, retraced his course, and, making several
landings farther north, finally entered, as it would seem from his
description, the harbor of New York. The only point that he names is a
triangular island which he saw as he went still farther to the east, and
which has been supposed to be Block Island, or possibly Martha's
Vineyard. At all events, the name Luisa which he gave to it after the
mother of Francis I. clung to an island in this neighborhood in the maps
for some time longer. So he went on, and, if his landings have been
rightly identified, he touched at Newport, then at some place evidently
near Portsmouth in New Hampshire, and then, skirting the islands of the
Maine coast, he reached the country which he recognized as that where
the Bretons had been. He now ended what he considered the exploration of
seven hundred leagues of an unknown land, and bore away for France,
reaching Dieppe in July, whence, on the 9th, he wrote the letter to the
King which is the source of our information. Attempts have been made,
especially by the late Henry C. Murphy, to prove this letter a forgery,
but in the opinion of most scholars without success.
[Illustration: THE VERRAZANO MAP.]
[Illustration: AGNESE, 1536.]
[Sidenote: The Verrazano map.]
Fortunately for the student, Hieronimo da Verrazano made, in 1529, a
map, still preserved in the college of the Propaganda at Rome, in which
the discoveries of his brother, Giovanni, are laid down. In this the
name of Nova Gallia supplants that of Francesca, which had been used in
the map of Maiollo (1527), supposed, also, to have some relation to the
Verrazano voyage.
[Illustration: MÜNSTER, 1540.]
The most distinguishing feature of the Verrazano map is a great inland
expanse of water, which was taken to be a part of some western ocean,
and which remained for a long while in some form or other in the maps.
It was made to approach so near the Atlantic that at one point there was
nothing but a slender isthmus connecting the discoveries of the north
with the country of Ponce de Leon and Ayllon at the south.
[Illustration: MÜNSTER, 1540.]
[Sidenote: The sea of Verrazano.]
It is in the _Sumario_ (1526) of Oviedo that we get the first idea of
this sea of Verrazano, as Brevoort contends, and we see it in the
Maiollo map of the next year, called "Mare Indicum," as if it were an
indentation of the great western ocean of Balboa. It was a favorite
fancy of Baptista Agnese, in the series of portolanos associated with
his name during the middle of the century, and in which he usually
indicated supposable ocean routes to Asia. As time went on, the idea was
so far modified that this indentation took the shape of a loop of the
Arctic seas, or of that stretch of water which at the north connected
the Atlantic and Pacific, as shown in the Münster map in the Ptolemy of
1540,--a map apparently based on the portolanos of Agnese,--though the
older form of the sea seems to be adopted in the globe of Ulpius (1542).
This idea of a Carolinian isthmus prevailed for some years, and may have
grown out of a misconception of the Carolina sounds, though it is
sometimes carried far enough north, as in the Lok map of 1582, to seem
as if Buzzard's Bay were in some way thought to stretch westerly into
its depths. The last trace of this mysterious inner ocean, so far as I
have discovered, is in a map made by one of Ralegh's colonists in 1585,
and preserved among the drawings of John White in the De Bry collection
of the British Museum, and brought to light by Dr. Edward Eggleston.
This drawing makes for the only time that I have observed it, an actual
channel at "Port Royal," leading to this oceanic expanse, which was
later interpreted as an inland lake. Thus it was that this geographical
blunder lived more or less constantly in a succession of maps for about
sixty years, until sometimes it vanished in a large lake in Carolina, or
in the north it dwindled until it began to take a new lease of life in
an incipient Hudson's Bay, as in the great Lake of Tadenac, figured in
the Molineaux map of 1600, and in the Lago Dagolesme in the Botero map
of 1603.
[Illustration: MICHAEL LOK, 1582.]
[Illustration: JOHN WHITE'S MAP.
[Communicated by Dr. Edward Eggleston.]]
[Sidenote: Norumbega.]
It was apparently during the voyage of Verrazano that an Indian name
which was understood as "Aranbega" was picked up along the northern
coasts as designating the region, and which a little later was reported
by others as "Norumbega," and so passed into the mysterious and fabled
nomenclature of the coast with a good deal of the unstableness that
attended the fabulous islands of the Atlantic in the fancy of the
geographers of the Middle Ages. As a definition of territory it
gradually grew to have a more and more restricted application, coming
down mainly after a while to the limits of the later New England, and at
last finding, as Dr. Dee (1580), Molineaux (1600), and Champlain (1604)
understood it, a home on the Penobscot. Still the region it represented
contracted and expanded in people's notions, and on maps the name seemed
to have a license to wander.
* * * * *
[Illustration: ROBERT THORNE, 1527.]
[Sidenote: The English on the coast.]
[Sidenote: William Hawkins.]
During this period the English also were up and down the coast, but they
contributed little to our geographical knowledge. Slave-catching on the
coast of Guinea, and lucrative sales of the human plunder in the Spanish
West Indies and neighboring regions, seem to have taken William Hawkins
and others of his countrymen to these coasts not infrequently between
1525 and 1540.
[Sidenote: John Rut.]
There is some reason to believe that John Rut, an Englishman, may have
explored the northeast coasts of the present United States in 1527, a
proposition, however, open to argument, as the counter reasonings of Dr.
Kohl and Dr. De Costa show. It is certain that at this time Robert
Thorne, an English merchant living in Seville, was gaining what
knowledge he could to promote English enterprise in the north, and there
has come down to us the map which in 1527 he gave to the English
ambassador in Spain, Edward Leigh, to be transmitted to Henry VIII.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Progress of maritime art.]
It was in 1526 when the Spanish authorities thought that the time was
fitting for making a sort of register of the progress of discovery and
of the attendant cartographical advances. Nordenskiöld says that "from
the beginning of the printing of maps the graduations of latitude and
longitude were marked down in most printed maps, at least in the
margin;" the most conspicuous example of omitting these being, perhaps,
in the work of Sebastian Münster, at a period a little later than the
one we have now reached.
[Sidenote: Latitude and longitude.]
In 1503 Reisch for the first time settled upon something like the modern
methods of indicating latitude and longitude in the map which he annexed
to his _Margarita philosophica_ at Freiburg, though so far as climatic
lines could stand for latitudinal notions, Pierre d'Ailly had set an
example of scaling the zones from the equator in his map of 1410. The
Spaniards, however, did not fall into the method of Reisch, so far as
published maps are concerned, till long afterwards (1534).
[Sidenote: Italian maps.]
Up to the time when the Strassburg Ptolemy was issued, in 1513, the
chief activity in map-making had been in Italy. The cartographers of
that country got what they could from Spain, but the main dependence
was on Portuguese sources, though the rivals of Spain were not always
free in imparting the knowledge of their hydrographical offices, since
we find Robert Thorne, in 1527, charging the Portuguese with having
falsified their records. It is worthy of remark that no official map of
the Indies was published in Spain till 1790.
[Illustration: SEBASTIAN MÜNSTER.
[From Reusner's _Icones_, 1590.]]
[Sidenote: Cartographical activity north of the Alps.]
[Sidenote: Map projections.]
After 1513, and so on to the middle of the century, it was to the north
of the Alps that the cosmographical students turned for the latest light
upon all oceanic movements. The question of longitude was the serious
one which both navigators and map makers encountered. The cartographers
were trying all sorts of experiments in representing the converging
meridians on a plane surface, so as not to distort the geography, and in
order to afford some manifest method for the guidance of ships.
[Sidenote: Lunar observations.]
[Sidenote: Chronometers.]
These experiments resulted, as Nordenskiöld counts, in something like
twenty different projections being devised before 1600. For the seaman
the difficulty was no less burdensome in trying to place his ship at
sea, or to map the contours of the coasts he was following. The
navigator's main dependence was the course he was steering and an
estimate of his progress. He made such allowance as he could for his
drift in the currents. We have seen how the imperfection of his
instruments and the defects of his lunar tables misled Columbus
egregiously in the attempts which he made to define the longitude of the
Antilles. He placed Española at 70° west of Seville, and La Cosa came
near him in counting it about 68°, so far as one can interpret his map.
The Dutch at this time were beginning to grasp the idea of a
chronometer, which was the device finally to prove the most satisfactory
in these efforts.
[Sidenote: Earliest sea-atlas.]
Reinerus Gemma of Friesland, known better as Gemma Frisius, began to
make the Dutch nautical views better known when he suggested, a few
years later, the carrying of time in running off the longitudes, and
something of his impress on the epoch was shown in the stand which a
pupil, Mercator, took in geographical science. The _Spieghel der
Zeevaardt_ of Lucas Wagenaer, in 1584 (Leyden), was the first sea-atlas
ever printed, and showed again the Dutch advance.
There were also other requirements of sea service that were not
forgotten, among which was a knowledge of prevalent winds and ocean
currents, and this was so satisfactorily acquired that the return voyage
from the Antilles came, within thirty years after Columbus, to be made
with remarkable ease. Oviedo tells us that in 1525 two caravels were but
twenty-five days in passing from San Domingo to the river of Seville.
Two of the duties imposed by the Spanish government upon the Casa de la
Contratacion, soon after the discovery of the New World, were to
patronize invention to the end of discovering a process for making fresh
water out of salt, and to improve ships' pumps,--the last a conception
not to take effective shape till Ribero, the royal cosmographer, secured
a royal pension for such an invention in 1526.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Congress of pilots at Seville.]
It was in the midst of these developments, both of the practical parts
of seamanship and of the progress of oceanic discovery, that in 1526
there was held at Seville a convention of pilots and cosmographers,
called by royal order, to consolidate and correlate all the
cartographical data which had accumulated up to that time respecting the
new discoveries.
[Sidenote: Ferdinand Columbus.]
Ferdinand Columbus was at this time in Seville, engaged in completing a
house and library for himself, and in planting the park about them with
trees brought from the New World, a single one of which, a West Indian
sapodilla, was still standing in 1871. It was in this house that the
convention sat, and Ferdinand Columbus presided over it, while the
examinations of the pilots were conducted by Diego Ribero and Alonso de
Chaves.
[Illustration: HOUSE AND LIBRARY OF FERDINAND COLUMBUS.]
[Sidenote: 1527-29. Maps.]
There have come down to us two monumental maps, the outgrowth of this
convention. One of these is dated at Seville, in 1527, purporting to be
the work of the royal cosmographer, and has been usually known by the
name of Ferdinand Columbus; and the other, dated 1529, is known to have
been made by Diego Ribero, also a royal cosmographer. These maps closely
resemble each other.
[Illustration: SPANISH MAP, 1527.
[After sketch in E. Mayer's _Die Entwicklung der Seekarten_ (Wien,
1877).]]
The Weimar chart of 1527, which Kohl, Stevens, and others have assigned
to Ferdinand Columbus, has been ascribed by Harrisse to Nuño Garcia de
Toreno, but by Coote, in editing Stevens on _Schöner_, it is assigned to
Ribero, as a precursor of his undoubted production of 1529.
[Sidenote: Idea of a new continent spreading.]
We have seen how, succeeding to the belief of Columbus that the new
regions were Asia, there had grown up, a few years after his death, in
spite of his audacious notarial act at Cuba, a strong presumption among
geographical students that a new continent had been found. We have seen
this conception taking form with more or less uncertainty as to its
western confines immediately upon, and even anticipating, the discovery
of the actual South Sea by Balboa, and can follow it down in the maps or
globes of Stobnicza and Da Vinci, in that known as the Lenox globe, in
those called the Tross and Nordenskiöld gores, the Schöner and Hauslab
globes, the Ptolemy map of 1513, and in those of Reisch, Apianus,
Laurentius Frisius, Maiollo, Bordone, Homem, and Münster,--not to name
some others. In twenty years it had come to be a prevalent belief, and
men's minds were turned to a consideration of the possibility of this
revealed continent having been, after all, known to the ancients, as
Glareanus, quoting Virgil, was the earliest to assert in 1527.
[Illustration: THE NANCY GLOBE.]
[Sidenote: Reaction in the monk Franciscus.]
About 1525 there came a partial reaction, as if the discovery of Balboa
had been pushed too far in its supposed results. We find this taking
form in 1526, in an identification of North America with eastern Asia in
a map ascribed to the monk Franciscus, while South America is laid down
as a continental island, separated from India by a strait only. The
strait is soon succeeded by an isthmus, and in this way we get a
solution of the problem which had some currency for half a century or
more.
[Sidenote: Orontius Finæus.]
Orontius Finæus was one of these later compromisers in cartography, in a
map which he is supposed to have made in 1531, but which appeared the
next year in the _Novus Orbis_ (1532) of Simon Grynæus, and was used in
some later publications also. We find in this map, about the Gulf of
Mexico, the names which Cortes had applied in his map of 1520 mingled
with those of the Asiatic coast of Marco Polo. We annex a sketch of this
map as reduced by Brevoort to Mercator's projection. A map very similar
to this and of about the same date is preserved in the British Museum
among the Sloane manuscripts, and the same bold solution of the
difficulty is found in the Nancy globe of about 1540, and in the globe
of Gaspar Vopel of 1543.
[Illustration: THE NANCY GLOBE.]
[Sidenote: Johann Schöner.]
There is a good instance of the instability of geographical knowledge at
this time in the conversion of Johann Schöner from a belief in an
insular North America, to which he had clung in his globes of 1515 and
1520, to a position which he took in 1533, in his _Opusculum
Geographicum_, where he maintains that the city of Mexico is the Quinsay
of Marco Polo.
[Illustration: ORONTIUS FINÆUS, 1532.
[After Cimelinus's Copperplate of 1566.]]
[Illustration: ORONTIUS FINÆUS, 1531.
[Reduced by Brevoort to Mercator's projection.]]
[Sidenote: The Pacific explored.]
[Sidenote: California.]
[Illustration: CORTES.]
Previous to Cortes's departure for Spain in 1528, he had, as we have
seen, dispatched vessels from Tehuantepec to the Moluccas, but nothing
was done to explore the Pacific coast northward till his return to
Mexico. In the spring or early summer of 1532 he sent Hurtado de Mendoza
up the coast; but little success attending the exploration, Cortes
himself proceeded to Tehuantepec and constructed other vessels, which
sailed in October, 1533. A gale drove them to the west, and when they
succeeded in working back and making the coast, they found themselves
well up what proved to be the California peninsula. They now coasted
south and developed its shape, which was further brought out in detail
by an expedition led by Cortes himself in 1535, and by a later one sent
by him under Francisco de Ulloa in 1539. Cortes had supposed the
peninsula an island, but this expedition of 1539 demonstrated the fact
that no passage to the outer sea existed at the head of the gulf, which
these earliest navigators had called the Sea of Cortes. The conqueror of
Mexico had now made his last expedition on the Pacific, and his name was
not destined to be long connected with this new field of discovery,
unless, indeed, it was a prompting of Cortes--hardly proved,
however--which attached to this peninsular region the euphonious name of
California, and which, after an interval when the gulf was called the
Red Sea, was applied to that water also. The views of Ulloa were
confirmed in part, at least, by Castillo in 1540, who has left us a map
of the gulf.
[Illustration: CASTILLO'S CALIFORNIA.]
The outer coast of the peninsula as far north as 28° 30' had been
established in 1533. It was ten years later, in 1543, that Cabrillo,
making his landfall in the neighborhood of 33°, just within the southern
bounds of the present State of California, coasted up to Cape
Mendocino, and perhaps to 44°, or nearly, to that spot, in the present
State of Oregon. If Cabrillo, who had died January 3, 1543, did not
himself go so high, the credit belongs to Ferrelo, his chief pilot.
Late in 1542 Mendoza sent an expedition under Ruy Lopez de Villalobos,
across the Pacific, and if a map of Juan Freire, made in 1546, is an
indication of his route, he seems to have gone higher up the coast than
any previous explorer.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Atlantic coast of North America.]
While this development of the northwest coast of North America was going
on, there were other discoverers still endeavoring on the Atlantic side
to connect the waters of the two oceans.
[Sidenote: 1534. Cartier.]
In April, 1534, Jacques Cartier, a jovial and roistering fellow, as
Father Jouon des Longrais, his latest biographer, makes him out
(_Jacques Cartier_, Paris, 1888), and who had led the roving life of a
corsair in the recent wars of France, was now turning his energy to
solve the great problem of this western passage. He sailed from St.
Malo, and for the first time laid open, by an official examination, the
inner spaces of the St. Lawrence Gulf, which might have been, indeed,
and probably were, known earlier to the hardy Breton and Norman
fishermen. We are deficient in a knowledge of the early frequenting of
these coasts because the charts of such fishermen, and of those who
visited the region for trade in peltries, have not come down to us,
though Kohl thinks there is some likelihood of such records being
preserved in a portolano of the British Museum.
The track of Cartier about the Gulf of St. Lawrence has caused some
discussion and difference of opinion in the publications of Kohl, De
Costa, Laverdière, and W. F. Ganong, the latter writer claiming, in a
careful paper in the _Transactions_ of the Royal Society of Canada for
1889, that in the correct interpretation of Cartier's first voyage we
find a key to the cartography of the gulf for almost a century.
The Rotz map of 1542 seems to be the earliest map which we know to show
a knowledge of Cartier's first voyage. The Henri II. map of 1542 still
more develops his work of exploration.
The chance of further discovery in this direction induced the French
king once more to commission Cartier, October 30, 1534, and early in
1535 his little fleet sailed, and by August, after some discouragements,
not lessened when he found the water freshening, he began to ascend the
St. Lawrence River, reaching the site of Montreal. No map by Cartier
himself is preserved, though it is known that he made such.
Thenceforward the cartography of this northeastern region showed the St.
Lawrence Gulf in a better development of the earlier so-called Square
Gulf and of the great river of Canada. It is of record that Francis I.,
in commissioning Cartier, considered that he was dispatching him to
ascend an Asiatic river, and the name of Lachine even to-day is
preserved as evidence of the belief which Cartier entertained that he
was within the bounds of China.
[Illustration: SKETCH FROM A PORTOLANO IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM.]
[Sidenote: John Rotz's map.]
John Rotz's _Boke of Idiography_--a manuscript of 1542, preserved in the
British Museum--shows, in his drawing of the region about the Gulf of
St. Lawrence, certain signs, as Kohl thinks, of having had access to the
charts of Cartier, and Harrisse traces in them the combined influence of
the Portuguese and Dieppe navigators.
The Cartier voyages seem to have made little impression outside of
France, and we find for some years few traces of his discoveries in the
portolanos of Italy and in the maps of the rest of Europe. It was only
when the expedition of Roberval, in 1540-41, excited attention that the
rest of Europe seemed to recognize these French efforts.
[Illustration: HOMEM, 1558.]
[Illustration: ZIEGLER'S SCHONDIA.]
[Sidenote: Cartier's later voyages.]
[Sidenote: Allefonsce.]
The later voyages of Cartier, in 1541 and 1543, revealed nothing more of
general geographical interest. Indeed, the hope of a western passage in
this direction had been abandoned in effect after Cartier's second
voyage, although the pilot Allefonsce, who accompanied a later
expedition, had been detailed to explore the Labrador coast to that end,
and had been turned back by ice. After this he seems to have gone south
into a great bay, under 42°, the end of which he did not reach. This may
have been the large expanse partly shut in by Cape Sable (Nova Scotia)
and Cape Cod, now called in the coast survey charts the Gulf of Maine;
or perhaps it may conform, taking into account his registered latitude,
to the inner bight of it called Massachusetts Bay. At all events,
Allefonsce believed himself on coasts contiguous to Tartary, through
which he had hopes to find access to the more hospitable orient
(occident) farther south. He apparently had something of the same notion
regarding the westerly stretch of water which he found below Cape Cod,
extending he knew not where, along the inclosure of the present Long
Island Sound.
In the years both before and after the middle of the century, French
vessels were on this coast in considerable numbers for purposes of trade
or for protecting French interests, but we know nothing of any
accessions to geographical knowledge which they made.
[Illustration: RUSCELLI, 1544.]
Allefonsce speaks of the Saguenay as widening, when he went up, till it
seemed to be an arm of the sea, and "I think the same," he adds, "runs
into the Sea of Cathay;" and so he draws it on one of his maps,--an idea
made more general in the map of Homem in 1558, where the St. Lawrence
really becomes a channel, locked by islands, bordering an Arctic Sea.
Ramusio, in 1553, has inferred from such reports as he could get of
Cartier's explorations, that his track had lain in channels bounded by
islands, and a similar view had already been expressed in a portolano of
1536, preserved in the Bodleian, which Kohl associates with Homem or
Agnese. The oceanic expansion of the Saguenay is preserved as late as
the Molineaux map of 1600.
[Sidenote: River of Norumbega.]
It is to the work of Allefonsce that we probably owe another confusion
of this northern cartography in the sixteenth century. What we now know
as Penobscot Bay and River was called by him the River of Norumbega, and
he seems to have given some ground for believing that this river
connected the waters of the Atlantic with the great river of Canada,
just as we find it later shown upon Gastaldi's map in Ramusio, by
Ruscelli in 1561, by Martines in 1578, by Lok in 1582, and by Jacques de
Vaulx in 1584.
[Sidenote: Greenland connects Europe and America.]
While this idea of the north was developing, there came in another that
made the peninsular Greenland of the ante-Columbian maps grow into a
link of land connecting Europe with the Americo-Asiatic main, so that
one might in truth perambulate the globe dryshod. We find this
conception in the maps of the Bavarian Ziegler (1532), and in the
Italians Ruscelli (1544) and Gastaldi (1548),--the last two represented
in the Ptolemies of those years published in Italy. But these Italian
cosmographers were by no means constant in their belief, as Ruscelli
showed in his Ptolemy of 1561, and Gastaldi in his Ramusio map of 1550.
[Illustration: CARTA MARINA, 1548.]
[Sidenote: Asia and America joined in the higher latitudes.]
[Illustration: MYRITIUS, 1590.]
As the Pacific explorations were stretched northward from Mexico, and
the peninsula of California was brought into prominence, there remained
for some time a suspicion that the western ocean made a great northerly
bend, so as to sever North America from Asia except along the higher
latitudes. We find this northerly extension of the Pacific in a map of
copper preserved in the Carter-Brown library, which seems to have been
the work of a Florentine goldsmith somewhere about 1535; in the Carta
Marina of Gastaldi in 1548; and it even exists in maps of a later date,
like that of Paolo de Furlani (1560) and that of Myritius (1587).
[Illustration: ZALTIÈRE, 1566.]
[Sidenote: Entanglement of the American and Asiatic coasts.]
[Sidenote: 1728. Bering.]
This map of Myritius, which appeared in his _Opusculum Geographicum_,
published at Ingolstadt in 1590, is the work of, perhaps, the last of
the geographers who did not leave more or less doubt about the
connection of North America with Asia. So it took about a full century
for the entanglement of the coasts of Asia and America, which Columbus
had imagined, to be practically eradicated from the maps. Not that there
were not doubters, even very early, but the faith in a new continent
grew slowly and had many set-backs; nor did the Asiatic connection fade
entirely out, as among the possibilities of geography, for considerably
more than a century yet to come. The uncertainties of the higher
latitudes kept knowledge in suspense, and even the English settlers on
the northerly coasts of the United States were not quite sure. Thomas
Morton, the chronicler of a colony on the Massachusetts shores, felt it
necessary, so late as 1636, to make a reservation that possibly the
mainland of America bordered on the land of the Tartars. Indeed, no one
could say positively, though much was conjectured, that there was not a
terrestrial connection in the extreme northwest, under arctic latitudes,
till Bering in 1728, two hundred and thirty-six years after Columbus
offered his prayer at San Salvador, passed from the Pacific into the
polar waters. This became the solution of the fabled straits of Anian,
an inheritance from the very earliest days of northern exploration,
which, after the middle of the sixteenth century, was revived in the
maps of Martines, Zaltière, Mercator, Porcacchi, Furlani, and Wytfliet,
prefiguring the channel which Bering passed. Much in the same way as the
southern apex of South America was a vision in men's minds long before
Magellan found his way to the Pacific.
[Illustration: PORCACCHI, 1572.]
[Sidenote: 1536. Chaves.]
[Sidenote: 1538. Mercator.]
[Sidenote: 1540. Hartmann gores.]
But we have anticipated a little. Coincident with the efforts of Cartier
to discover this northern passage we mark other navigators working at
the same problem. The Spaniard Alonso de Chaves made a chart of this
eastern coast in 1536; but we only know of its existence from the
description of it written by Oviedo in 1537. In the earliest map which
we have from the hand of Gerard Mercator, and of which the only copy
known was discovered some years ago by the late James Carson Brevoort,
of New York, we find the northern passage well defined in 1538, and a
broad channel separating the western coast of America from a parallel
coast of Asia,--a kind of delineation which is followed in some
globe-gores of about 1540, which Nordenskiöld thinks may have been the
work of George Hartmann, of Nuremberg. This map is evidently based on
Portuguese information, and that Swedish scholar finds no ground for
associating it with the lost globe of Schöner, as Stevens has done. A
facsimile of part of it has already been given.
[Sidenote: 1540-45. Münster.]
Sebastian Münster, in his maps in the Ptolemy of 1540-45, makes a clear
seaway to the Moluccas somewhere in the latitude of the Strait of Belle
Isle. Münster was in many ways antiquated in his notions. He often
resorted to the old device of the Middle Ages by supplying the place of
geographical details with figures of savages and monsters.
* * * * *
We come now to two significant maps in the early history of American
cartography.
[Illustration: MERCATOR'S GLOBE OF 1538.]
Columbus had been dead five and thirty years when a natural result grew
out of those circumstances which conspired to name the largest part of
the new discoveries after a secondary pathfinder. We have seen that
there seemed at first no injustice in the name of America being applied
to a region in the main external to the range of Columbus's own
explorations, and how it took nearly a half century before public
opinion, as expressed in the protest of Schöner in 1533, recognized the
injustice of using another's name.
[Sidenote: 1541. Mercator.]
Whether that protest was prompted by a tendency, already shown, to give
the name to the whole western hemisphere is not clear; but certainly
within eight years such a general application was publicly made, when
Mercator, in drafting in 1541 some gores for a globe, divided the name
AME--RICA so that it covered both North and South America, and qualified
its application by a legend which says that the continent is "called
to-day by many, New India." Thus a name that in the beginning was given
to a part in distinction merely and without any reference to the entire
field of the new explorations, was now become, by implication, an
injustice to the great first discoverer of all. The mischief, aided by
accident and by a not unaccountable evolution, was not to be undone,
and, in the singular mutations of fate, a people inhabiting a region of
which neither Columbus nor Vespucius had any conception are now
distinctively known in the world's history as Americans.
[Illustration: MERCATOR'S GLOBE OF 1538.]
These 1541 gores of Mercator were first made known to scholars a few
years ago, when the Belgian government issued a facsimile edition of the
only copy then known, which the Royal Library at Brussels had just
acquired; but since there have been two other copies brought to
light,--one at St. Nicholas in Belgium, and the other in the Imperial
library at Vienna.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Henry II. map.]
[Sidenote: 1544. Cabot map.]
There are some indications on Spanish globes of about 1540, and in the
Desceliers or Henry II. map of 1546, that the Spanish government had
sent explorers to the region of Canada not long after Cartier's earliest
explorations, and it is significant that the earliest published map to
show these Cartier discoveries is the other of the two maps already
referred to, namely, the Cabot mappemonde of 1544, which has been
supposed a Spanish cartographical waif. Early publications of southern
and middle Europe showed little recognition of the same knowledge.
[Illustration: MÜNSTER, 1545.]
The Cabot map has been an enigma to scholars ever since it was
discovered in Germany, in 1843, by Von Martius. It was deposited the
next year in the great library at Paris. It is a large elliptical
world-map, struck from an engraved plate, and it bears sundry
elucidating inscriptions, some of which must needs have come from
Sebastian Cabot, others seem hardly to merit his authorship, and one
acknowledges him as the maker of the map. There is, accordingly, a
composite character to the production, not easily to be analyzed so as
to show the credible and the incredible by clear lines of demarcation.
We learn from it how it proclaimed for the first time the real agency of
John Cabot in the discovery of North America, confirmed when Hakluyt, in
1582, printed the patent from Henry VII. There is an unaccountable year
given for that discovery, namely, 1494, but we seem to get the true date
when Michael Lok, in 1582, puts down "J. Cabot. 1497," against Cape
Breton in his map of that year. As this last map appeared in Hakluyt's
_Divers Voyages_, and as Hakluyt tells us of the existence of Cabot's
maps and of his seeing them, we may presume that we have in this date of
1497 an authoritative statement. We learn also from this map of 1544
that the land first seen was the point of the island now called Cape
Breton. Without the aid of this map, Biddle, who wrote before its
discovery, had contended for Labrador as the landfall.
[Illustration: MERCATOR, 1541.
[Sketched from his gores.]]
[Illustration: FROM THE SEBASTIAN CABOT MAPPEMONDE. 1514.]
[Sidenote: Scarcity of Spanish printed maps.]
We know, on the testimony of Robert Thorne in 1527, if from no other
source, that it was a settled policy of the Spanish government to allow
no one but proper cartographical designers to make its maps, "for that
peradventure it would not sound well to them that a stranger should know
or discover their secrets." This doubtless accounts for the fact that,
in the two hundred maps mentioned by Ortelius in 1570 as used by him in
compiling his atlas, not one was published in Spain; and every
bibliographer knows that not a single edition of Ptolemy, the best known
channel of communicating geographical knowledge in this age of
discovery, bears a Spanish imprint. The two general maps of America
during the sixteenth century, which Dr. Kohl could trace to Spanish
presses, were that of Medina in 1545 and that of Gomara in 1554, and
these were not of a scale to be of any service in navigating.
[Sidenote: Cabot's connection with the map of 1544.]
There seem to be insuperable objections to considering that Sebastian
Cabot had direct influence in the production of the map now under
consideration. It is full of a lack of knowledge which it is not
possible to ascribe to him. That it is based upon some drafts of Cabot
is most probably true; but they are clearly drafts, confused and in some
ways perverted, and eked out by whatever could be picked up from other
sources.
That the Cabot map was issued in more than one edition is inferred
partly from the fact that the legends which Chytræus quotes from it
differ somewhat from those now in the copy preserved in Paris; and
indeed Harrisse finds reason to suppose that there may have been four
different editions. That in some form or other it was better known in
England than elsewhere is deduced from certain relations sustained with
that country on the part of those who have mentioned the map,--Livio
Sanuto, Ortelius, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Richard Willes, Hakluyt, and
Purchas.
Whoever its author and whatever its minor defects, this so-called Cabot
map of 1544 may reasonably be accepted as the earliest really honest,
unimaginative exhibition of the American continent which had been made.
There was in it no attempt to fancy a northwest passage; no confidence
in the marine or terrestrial actuality of the region now known to be
covered by the north Pacific; no certainty about the entire western
coast line of South America, though this might have been decided upon if
the maker of the map had been posted to date for that region. The maker
of it further showed nothing of that presumption, which soon became
prevalent, of making Tierra del Fuego merely but one of the various
promontories of an immense Antarctic continent, which later stood in the
planispheres of Ortelius and Wytfliet.
[Illustration: MEDINA, 1544.]
[Sidenote: Geographical study transferred to Italy.]
This map of Cabot was the last of the principal cartographical monuments
made north of the Alps in this early half of the sixteenth century. The
centre of geographical study was now transferred to Italy, where it had
begun with the opening of the interest in oceanic discovery. For the
next score years and more we must look mainly to Venice for the newer
development.
[Illustration: MEDINA, 1544.]
[Sidenote: 1548, Gastaldi.]
In the Venice Ptolemy of 1548, we have for the first time a _series_ of
maps of the New World by Gastaldi, which were simply enlarged by
Ruscelli in the edition of 1561, except in a few instances, where new
details were added, like the making of Yucatan a peninsula instead of
the island which Gastaldi had drawn. They were repeated in the edition
of 1562.
[Sidenote: Sea manuals.]
Meanwhile the most popular sea manuals of this period were Spanish; but
they studiously avoided throwing much light on the new geography.
[Illustration: WYTFLIET, 1597.]
That of Martin Cortes was the first to suggest a magnetic pole as
distinct from the terrestrial pole. Its rival, the _Arte de Navegar_ of
Pedro de Medina, published at Valladolid in 1545, never reached the same
degree of popularity, nor did it deserve to, for his notions were in
some respects erratic.
The English in their theories of navigation had long depended on the
teachings of the Spaniards, and Eden had translated the chief Spanish
manual in his _Arte of Navigation_ of 1561.
[Illustration: WYTFLIET, 1597.]
[Sidenote: Ship's log.]
A great advance was possible now, for a new principle had been devised,
and an estimate of the progress of a ship was no longer dependent on
visual observation. The log had made it possible to put dead reckoning
on a pretty firm basis. This was the great new feature of the _Regiment
of the Sea_, which the Englishman, William Bourne, published in 1573;
and sixteen years later, in 1589, another Englishman, Blunderville, made
popularly known the new instrument for taking meridian altitudes at sea,
the cross-staff, which had very early superseded the astrolabe on
shipboard.
The inclination or dip of the needle, showing by its increase an
approach to a magnetic pole, was not scaled till 1576, when Robert
Norman made his observations, and it is not without some service to-day
in that combination of phenomena of which Columbus noted the earliest
traces in his first voyage of 1492.
[Illustration: THE CROSS-STAFF.]
[Sidenote: Italian discoverers.]
[Sidenote: English discoverers.]
It is significant how large a part in the cardinal discoveries of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was taken by Italian navigators,
seamen, shipwrights, mathematicians, and merchants, whether in Portugal
or Spain, France or England. It is curious, too, to observe how, when
the theoretical work and confirmatory explorations were finished, and
the commercial spirit succeeded to that of science, England embarked
with her adventurous spirit. The death of Queen Mary in 1558 was the
signal for English exertion, and that exertion became ominous to all
Europe in the reign of Elizabeth, accompanied by an intellectual
movement, typified in Bacon and Shakespeare, similar to that which
stirred the age of Columbus and the Italian renaissance.
[Sidenote: John Hawkins.]
John Hawkins and African marauders of his English kind were selling
negro slaves in Española in 1562 and subsequent years, and from them we
get our first English accounts of the Florida coast, which on their
return voyages they skirted.
[Sidenote: New France.]
[Sidenote: Spanish settlements fail at the north.]
America had at this time been abandoned for a long while to Spain and
France, and the latter power had only entered into competition with
Charles V., when Francis I., as we have seen, had sent out Verrazano in
1521 to take possession of the north Atlantic coasts. Out of this grew
upon the maps the designation of New France, which was attached to the
main portion of the North American continent. And this French claim is
recognized in the maps, painted about 1562, on the walls of the
geographical gallery in the Vatican. So the French stole upon the
possession of Spain in the West Indies; and the English followed in
their wake, when the death of Mary rendered it easier for the English to
smother their inherited antipathy to France. This done, the English in
due time joined the French in efforts to gain an ascendency over Spain
in the Indies, to compensate for the loss of such power in Italy. The
Spaniards, though they had attempted to make settlements along the
Chesapeake at different times between 1566 and 1573, never succeeded in
making any impression on the history of this northern region.
* * * * *
The cartography of the north was at this period subject to two new
influences; and both of them make large demands upon the credulity of
scholarship in these latter days.
[Sidenote: André Thevet.]
Attempts have been made to trace some portion of the development of the
coasts of the northeastern parts of the United States to the
publications of a mendacious monk, André Thevet. He had been sent out to
the French colony of Rio de Janeiro in 1555, where he remained
prostrated with illness till he was able to reëmbark for France, January
31, 1556. In 1558 he published his _Singularitez de la France
Antarctique_, a descriptive and conglomerate work, patched together from
all such sources as he could pillage, professing to follow more or less
his experiences on this voyage. He says nothing in it of his tracking
along the east coast of the present United States. Seeking notoriety and
prestige for his country, he pretends, however, in his _Cosmographie_
published in 1575, to recount the experiences of the same voyage, and
now he professes to have followed this same eastern coast to the region
of Norumbega. Well-equipped scholars find no occasion to believe that
these later statements were other than boldly conceived falsehoods,
which he had endeavored to make plausible by the commingling of what he
could filch from the narratives of others.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Zeni story.]
[Illustration: THE ZENI MAP.]
It was at this time also (1558) that there was published at Venice the
strange and riddle-like narrative which purports to give the experiences
of the brothers Zeni in the north Atlantic waters in the fourteenth
century. The publication came at a time when, with the transfer of
cartographical interest from over the Alps to the home of its earliest
growth, the countrymen of Columbus were seeking to reinstate their
credit as explorers, which during the fifteenth century and the early
part of the sixteenth they had lost to the peoples of the Iberian
peninsula. Anything, therefore, which could emphasize their claims was a
welcome solace. This accounts both for the bringing forward at this time
of the long-concealed Zeni narrative,--granting its genuineness,--and
for the influence which its accompanying map had upon contemporary
cartography. This map professed to be based upon the discoveries made by
the Zeni brothers, and upon the knowledge acquired by them at the north
in the fourteenth century. It accordingly indicated the existence of
countries called Estotiland and Drogeo, lying to the west, which it was
now easy to identify with the Baccalaos of the Cabots, and with the New
France of the later French.
[Sidenote: The Zeni map.]
"If this remarkable map," says Nordenskiöld, "had not received extensive
circulation under the sanction of Ptolemy's name," for it was copied in
the edition of 1561 of that geographer, "it would probably have been
soon forgotten. During nearly a whole century it had exercised an
influence on the mapping of the northern countries to which there are
few parallels to be found in the history of cartography." It is
Nordenskiöld's further opinion that the Zeni map was drawn from an old
map of the north made in the thirteenth century, from which the map
found in the Warsaw Codex of Ptolemy of 1467 was also drawn. He further
infers that some changes and additions were imposed to make it
correspond with the text of the Zeni narrative.
[Illustration: THE ZENI MAP.]
* * * * *
The year 1569 is marked by a stride in cartographical science, of which
we have not yet outgrown the necessity.
[Illustration: THE WARSAW CODEX, 1467; after Nordenskiöld.]
[Sidenote: 1569. Mercator's projection.]
The plotting of courses and distances, as practiced by the early
explorers, was subject to all the errors which necessarily accompany the
lack of well-established principles, in representing the curved surface
of the globe on a plane chart. Cumbrous and rude globes were made to do
duty as best they could; but they were ill adapted to use at sea.
Nordenskiöld (_Facsimile Atlas_, p. 22) has pointed out that
Pirckheimer, in the Ptolemy of 1525, had seemingly anticipated the
theory which Mercator now with some sort of prevision developed into a
principle, which was applied in his great plane chart of 1569. The
principle, however, was not definite enough in his mind for the clear
exposition of formulæ, and he seems not to have attempted to do more
than rough-hew the idea. The hint was a good one, and it was left for
the Englishman Edward Wright to put its principles into a formulated
problem in 1599, a century and more after Columbus had dared to track
the ocean by following latitudinal lines in the simplest manner.
[Illustration: THE WARSAW CODEX, 1467; after Nordenskiöld.]
It has been supposed that Wright had the fashioning of the large map
which, on this same Mercator projection, Hakluyt had included in his
_Principall Navigations_ in 1599. Hondius had also adopted a like method
in his _mappemonde_ of the same year.
[Sidenote: 1570. The _Theatrum_ of Ortelius.]
[Sidenote: Decline of Ptolemy.]
[Illustration: MERCATOR, 1569.]
In 1570 the publication of the great atlas of Abraham Ortelius showed
that the centre of map-making had again passed from Italy, and had found
a lodgment in the Netherlands. The _Theatrum_ of Ortelius was the signal
for the downfall of the Ptolemy series as the leading exemplar of
geographical ideas. The editions of that old cartographer, with their
newer revisions, never again attained the influence with which they had
been invested since the invention of printing. This influence had been
so great that Nordenskiöld finds that between 1520 and 1550 the Ptolemy
maps had been five times as numerous as any other. They had now passed
away; and it is curious to observe that Ortelius seems to have been
ignorant of some of the typical maps anterior to his time, and which we
now look to in tracing the history of American cartography, like those
of Ruysch, Stobnicza, Agnese, Apianus, Vadianus, and Girava.
[Sidenote: Ortelius.]
It has already been mentioned that when Ortelius published his
_Theatrum_, and gave a list of ninety-nine makers of maps whom he had
consulted, not a solitary one of Spanish make was to be found among
them. It shows how effectually the Council of the Indies had concealed
the cartographical records of their office.
[Illustration: MERCATOR.]
[Sidenote: 1577. English explorations.]
[Sidenote: 1548. Sebastian Cabot.]
It was eighty years since the English under John Cabot had undertaken a
voyage of discovery in the New World. The interval passed not without
preparation for new efforts, which had for a time, however, been
extended to the northwest rather than to the northeast. In 1548
Sebastian Cabot had returned to his native land to assume the first
place in her maritime world. His influence in directing, and that of
Richard Eden in informing, the English mind prepared the way for the
advent of Frobisher, the younger Hawkins, and Drake.
[Sidenote: 1576. Frobisher.]
[Illustration: ORTELIUS.]
[Sidenote: 1577-78. Frobisher.]
Frobisher's voyage of 1576 was the true beginning of the arctic search
for a northwest passage, all earlier efforts having been in lower
latitudes. He had sought, by leaving Greenland on the right, to pass
north of the great American barrier, and thus reach the land of spices.
He congratulated himself on having found the long-desired strait, when,
naming it for himself, he returned to England. Frobisher attempted to
add to these earlier discoveries by a voyage the next year, 1577, but he
made exploration secondary to mining for gold, and not much was done. A
third voyage in 1578 brought him into Hudson's Straits, which he entered
with the hope of finding it the channel to Cathay. But in all his
voyages Frobisher only crossed the threshold of the arctic north.
[Illustration: ORTELIUS, 1570.]
[Sidenote: The Zeni influence.]
[Illustration: SEBASTIAN CABOT.]
It was one of the results of Frobisher's voyages that they served to
implant in the minds of the cartographers of the northern waters the
notions of the Zeni geography, and aided to give those notions a new
lease of favor. It is conjectured that Frobisher had the Zeni map with
him, or its counterpart in one of the recent Ptolemies. This map had
placed the point of Greenland under 66° instead of 61°, and under the
last latitude this map had shown the southern coast of its insular
Frisland. Therefore, when Frobisher saw land under 61°, which was in
fact Greenland, he supposed it to be Frisland, and thus the maps after
him became confused. A like mischance befell Davis, a little later. When
this navigator found Greenland in 61°, he supposed it an island south of
Greenland, which he called "Desolation," and the fancy grew up that
Frobisher's route must have gone north of this island and between it and
Greenland, and so we have in later maps this other misplacement of
discoveries.
[Illustration: FROBISHER.]
[Sidenote: 1577. Francis Drake.]
While Frobisher was absent, Drake developed his great scheme of
following in the southerly track of Magellan.
[Sidenote: Drake sees Cape Horn.]
Four years before (1573), being at Panama, he had seen from a treetop
the great Pacific, and had resolved to be the first of the English to
furrow its depths. In 1577, starting on his great voyage of
circumnavigation, he soon added a new stretch of the Pacific coast to
the better knowledge of the world. When he returned to England, he
proved to be the first commander who had taken his ship, the "Pelican,"
later called the "Golden Hind" wholly round the globe, for Magellan had
died on the way. Passing through Magellan's Strait and entering the
Pacific, Drake's ship was separated from its companions and driven
south. It was then he saw the Cape Horn of a later Dutch navigator, and
proved the non-existence of that neighboring antarctic continent, which
was still persistently to cling to the maps. Bereft of his other ships,
which the storm had driven apart, Drake, during the early months of
1579, made havoc among the Spanish galleons which were on the South
American coasts.
[Illustration: FROBISHER, 1578.]
In March, 1579, surfeited with plunder, he started north from the coast
of Mexico, to find a passage to the Atlantic in the upper latitudes.
[Sidenote: In the north Pacific.]
In June he had reached 42° north, though some have supposed that he went
several degrees higher. He had met, however, a rigorous season, and his
ropes crackled with the ice. The change was such a contrast to the
allurements of his experiences farther to the south that he gave up his
search for the strait that would carry him, as he had hoped, to the
Atlantic, and, turning south, he reached a bay somewhere in the
neighborhood of San Francisco, where he tarried for a while. Having
placed the name of New Albion on the upper California coast, and fearing
to run the hazards of the southern seas, where his plundering had made
the Spaniards alert, he sailed westerly, and, rounding the Cape of Good
Hope, reached England in due time, and was acknowledged to be the
earliest of English circumnavigators.
[Illustration: FRANCIS DRAKE.]
It is one of the results of Drake's explorations in 1579-80 that we get
in subsequent maps a more northerly trend to the California coast.
[Sidenote: Confusion in the Pacific coast cartography.]
Shortly after this, a great confusion in the maps of this Pacific region
came in. From what it arose is not very apparent, except that absence of
direct knowledge in geography opens a wide field for discursiveness. The
Michael Lok map of 1582 indicates this uncertainty. It seemed to be the
notion that the Arctic Sea was one and the same with that of Verrazano;
also, that it came down to about the latitude of Puget Sound, and that
the Gulf of California stretched nearly up to meet it.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Francisco Gali.]
[Sidenote: Proves the great width of the Pacific.]
Francisco Gali, a Spanish commander, returning to Acapulco from China in
1583, tried the experiment of steering northward to about 38°, when he
turned west and sighted the American coast in that latitude. At this
point he steered south, and showed the practicability of following this
circuitous route with less time than was required to buffet the easterly
trades by a direct eastern passage. His experiment established one other
fact, namely, the great width of water separating the two continents in
those upper latitudes; for he had found it to be 1200 leagues across
instead of there being a narrow strait, as the theorizing geographers
had supposed. Gali seems also to have shown that the distance south from
Cape Mendocino to the point of the California peninsula was not more
than half as great as the maps had made it. His voyage was a significant
source of enlightenment to the cartographers.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Eastern coast of North America.]
[Sidenote: 1579. The English on the coast.]
To return to the eastern coasts, an English vessel under Simon
Ferdinando spent a short season in 1579 somewhere about the Gulf of
Maine, and was followed the next year by another under John Walker, and
in 1593 by still a third under Richard Strong.
[Sidenote: Sir Humphrey Gilbert.]
For eighty years England might have rested her claim to North America on
the discoveries of the Cabots; but Queen Elizabeth first gave prominence
to these pretensions when she granted to Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1578
the right to make a settlement somewhere in these more northerly
regions. Gilbert's first voyage accomplished nothing, and there was an
interdict to prevent a second, since England might have use for daring
seamen nearer home. "First," says Robert Hues, "Sir Humphrey Gilbert,
with great courage and forces, attempted to make discovery of those
parts of America which were yet unknown to the Spaniards; but the
success was not answerable." The effort was not renewed till 1583, when
Gilbert took possession of Newfoundland and attempted to make
settlements farther south; but disaster followed him, and his ship
foundered off the Azores on his return voyage.
[Illustration: GILBERT'S MAP, 1576.]
[Sidenote: Sir Walter Ralegh.]
It was at this time that Sir Walter Ralegh came into prominence in
pushing English colonization in America. He had been associated with his
half-brother, Gilbert, in the earlier movements, but now he was alone.
In 1584 he got his new charter, partly by reason of the urgency of
Hakluyt in his _Westerne Planting_. Ralegh had his eye upon a more
southern coast than Gilbert had aimed for,--upon one better fitted to
develop self-dependent colonization. He knew that north of what was
called Florida the Spaniards had but scantily tracked the country, and
that they probably maintained no settlements. Therefore to reach a
region somewhere south of the Chesapeake was the aim of the first
company sent out under Ralegh's inspiration. These adventurers made
their landfall where they could find no good inlet, and so sailed north,
searching, until at last they reached the sounds on the North Carolina
coast, and tarried awhile. Satisfied with the quality of the country,
they returned to England; and their recitals so pleased Ralegh and the
Queen that the country was named Virginia, and preparations were made to
dispatch a colony. It went the next year, but its history is of no
farther importance to our present purpose than that it marks the
commencement of English colonization, disastrous though it was, on the
North American continent, and the beginning of detailed English
cartography of its coast, in the map, already referred to, which seems
to open a passage, somewhere near Port Royal, to an interior sea.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 1585-86. John Davis.]
In 1585-86 John Davis had been buffeting among the icebergs of Greenland
and the north in hopes to find a passage by the northwest; on June 30,
1587, he reached 72° 12' on the Greenland coast, and discovered the
strait known by his name, and in 1595 when he published his _World's
Hydrographical Description_, he maintained that he had touched the
threshold of the northwest passage. He tells us that the globe of
Molineaux shows how far he went.
[Sidenote: English seamanship.]
Seamanship owes more to Davis than to any other Englishman. In 1590, or
thereabout, he improved the cross-staff, and giving somewhat more of
complexity to it, he produced the back-staff. This instrument gave the
observer the opportunity of avoiding the glare of the sun, since it was
used with his back to that luminary; and when Flamsteed, the first
astronomer royal at Greenwich, used a glass lens to throw reflected
light, the first approach to the great principle of taking angles by
reflection was made, which was later, in 1731, to be carried to a
practical result in Hadley's quadrant.
[Illustration: BACK-STAFF.]
The art of finding longitude was still in an uncertain state. Gemma
Frisius, as we have noted, had as early as 1530 divined the method of
carrying time by a watch; but it was not till 1726 that anything really
practicable came of it, in a timekeeper constructed by Harrison. This
watch was continually improved by him up to 1761, when the method of
ascertaining longitude by chronometer became well established; and a few
years later (1767) the first nautical almanac was published, affording a
reasonably good guide in lunar distances, as a means in the computations
of longitude.
[Sidenote: 1676.]
In 1676 the Greenwich observatory had been founded to attempt the
rectification of lunar tables, then so erroneous that the calculations
for longitude were still uncertain. In 1701 Edmund Halley had published
his great variation charts. These dates will fix in the reader's mind
the advance of scientific skill as applied to navigation and discovery.
It will be well also to remember that in 1594 Davis published his
_Seaman's Secrets_, the first manual in the English tongue, written by a
practical sailor, in which the principles of great circle sailing were
explained.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 1583-84. Earliest marine atlas.]
[Sidenote: 1592. Dutch West India Company.]
[Sidenote: 1598.]
The first marine atlas had been printed at Leyden in 1583-84; but the
Dutch had not at that time taken any active part in the development of
discovery in the New World. Their longing for a share in it, mated with
a certain hostile intention towards the Spaniards, instigated the
formation of the West India Company, which had first been conceived in
the mind of William Usselinx in 1592, though it was not put into
execution till twenty-five years later. It was claimed by the Dutch that
in 1598 the ships of their Greenland Company had discovered the Hudson
River, though there can be little doubt that the French, Spanish, and
perhaps English had been there much earlier. It is also claimed that the
straits shown in Lok's map in 1582 had instigated Heinrich Hudson to his
later search. But the truth in all these questions which involve
national rights is very much perplexed with claim and counter-claim,
invention and perversion, in which historical data are at the beck of
political objects.
[Sidenote: 1598. The Dutch on the North American coasts.]
[Sidenote: The English.]
By the end of the sixteenth century the Dutch began to appear on the
coasts of the Middle and New England States, and the cartography of
those regions developed rapidly under their observation; but it was
through the boating explorations of Captain John Smith in 1614 that it
took a shape nearer the truth. It is to him that the northerly parts owe
the name of New England, which Prince Charles confirmed for it. The
reports from Hudson, May, and others instigated a plan marked out in
1618, but not directly ordered by the States General till 1621, which
led to the Dutch occupation of Manhattan and the neighboring regions,
introducing more strongly than before a Dutch element into the maps.
[Sidenote: The English leaders in maritime discovery.]
[Sidenote: Richard Hakluyt.]
When the seventeenth century opened, the English had come well to the
front in maritime explorations. A large-minded and patriotic man, Sir
Thomas Smith, did much in his capacity as governor of the "merchants
trading into the East Indies" to direct contemporary knowledge into
better channels. Dr. Thomas Hood gave public lectures in London on the
improvements in methods of navigation. Richard Hakluyt, the
historiographer of the new company, had already shown that he had
inherited the spirit of helpful patronage which had characterized the
labors of Eden.
[Sidenote: 1600.]
[Sidenote: The search for a western passage at the north.]
[Sidenote: 1601. George Waymouth.]
We find the peninsula made by the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic
insularized from the beginning of the seventeenth century, the
transverse channel being now on the line of the Hudson, then of the
Penobscot, then of the St. Croix, and when the seventeenth century came
in, it was not wholly determined that the longed-for western passage
might not yet be found somewhere in this region. On July 24, 1601,
George Waymouth, a navigator, as he was called, applied to the London
East India Company to be assisted in making an attempt to discover a
northwest passage to India, and the company agreed to his proposition.
The Muscovy Company protested in vain against such an infringement of
its own rights; but it found a way to smother its grief and join with
its rival in the enterprise. Through such joint action Waymouth was sent
by the northwest "towards Cataya or China, or the back side of America,"
bearing with him a letter from Queen Elizabeth to the Emperor of "China
or Kathia." The attempt failed, and Waymouth returned almost
ignominiously.
[Sidenote: Hudson at the north.]
In 1602, under instructions from the East India Company, he again
sailed, and now pushed a little farther into Hudson's Strait than any
one had been before. In 1609 Hudson had made some explorations, defining
a little more clearly the northern coasts of the present United States;
and in 1610 he sailed again from England to attempt the discovery of the
northwest passage, in a small craft of fifty-five tons, with
twenty-three souls on board. Following the tracks of Davis and Waymouth,
he went farther than they, and revealed to the world the great inland
sea which is known by his name, and in which he probably perished.
[Sidenote: Hudson's Bay.]
[Sidenote: 1615. Baffin's Bay.]
In 1612-13 Sir Thomas Button developed more exactly the outline in part
of this great bay, and in 1614 the _Discovery_, under Robert Bylot and
William Baffin, passed along the coasts of Hudson's Strait, making most
careful observation, and Baffin took for the first time at sea a lunar
observation for longitude, according to a method which had been
suggested as early as 1514. It was on a voyage undertaken in the next
year, 1615, that Baffin, exceeding the northing of Davis, found lying
before him the great expanse of Baffin's Bay, through which he proceeded
till he found a northern exit in Sir Thomas Smith's Sound, under 78°.
Baffin did all this with an accuracy which surprised Sir John Ross, who
was the next to enter the bay, two centuries later. It was in these
years of Hudson and Baffin that Napier invented logarithms and
simplified the processes of nautical calculations.
[Illustration: LUKE FOX, 1635.]
[Sidenote: 1631. Luke Fox.]
[Sidenote: Thomas James.]
The voyage of Luke Fox in 1631 developed some portions of the western
shores of Hudson's Bay, and he returned confident, from his observation
of the tides farther north, that they indicated a western passage; and
in the same year Thomas James searched the more southern limits of the
great bay with no more success. These voyages put a stay for more than a
hundred years to efforts in this direction to find the passage so long
sought.
[Sidenote: 1602. Gosnold.]
Up to 1602 the explorations of our northern coasts seem to have been
ordinarily made either by a sweep northerly from Europe, striking
Newfoundland and then proceeding south, or by a southerly sweep
following the Spanish tracks and coasting north from Florida. In this
year, 1602, the Englishman Gosnold, without any earlier example that we
know of since the time of Verrazano, stood directly to the New England
coast, and in the accounts of his voyage we begin to find some
particular knowledge of the contour of this coast, which opens the way
to identifications of landmarks. The explorations of Pring (1603),
Champlain (1604), Waymouth (1605), Popham (1607), Hudson (1609), Smith
(1614), Dermer (1619), and others which followed are of no more
importance in our present survey than as marking further stages of
detailed geography. Even Dermer was dreaming of a western passage yet to
be found in this region.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Discoveries on the Pacific coast.]
We must now turn to follow the development during the seventeenth
century of the discoveries on the Pacific coast.
[Sidenote: 1602. Viscaino.]
Sebastian Viscaino, in his voyage up the coast from Acapulco in 1602,
sought the hidden straits as high as 42°, and one of his captains
reporting the coast to trend easterly at 43°, his story confused the
geography of this region for many years. This supposed trend was held to
indicate another passage to the Gulf of California, making the peninsula
of that name an island, and so it long remained on the maps, after once
getting possession, some years later (1622), of the cartographical
fancy.
[Sidenote: 1643. De Vries.]
Some explorations of the Dutch under De Vries, in 1643, were the source
of a notion later prevailing, that there was an interjacent land in the
north Pacific, which they called "Jesso," and which was supposed to be
separated by passages both from America and from Asia; and for half a
century or more the supposition, connected more or less with a land seen
by João da Gama, was accepted in some quarters. Indeed, this notion may
be said to have not wholly disappeared till the maps of Cook's voyage
came out in 1777-78, when the Aleutian Islands got something like their
proper delineation.
[Sidenote: Confused geographical notions of a western sea.]
In fact, so vague was the conception of what might be the easterly
extension of the northern sea in the latitudinal forties that the notion
of a sea something like the old one of Verrazano was even thought in
1625 by Briggs in Purchas, and again in 1651 in Farrer's map of
Virginia, to bathe the western slope of the Alleghanies.
[Sidenote: 1700.]
[Sidenote: Maldonado, Da Fuca, De Fonte.]
Early in the eighteenth century, even the best cartographers ran wild in
their delineations of the Pacific coast. A series of multifarious
notions, arising from more or less faith in the alleged explorations of
Maldonado, Da Fuca, and De Fonte, some of them assumed to have been made
more than a century earlier, filled the maps with seas and straits,
identified sometimes with the old strait of Anian, and converting the
northwestern parts of North America into a network of surmises, that
look strangely to our present eyes. Some of these wild configurations
prevailed even after the middle of the century, but they were finally
eliminated from the maps by the expedition of that James Cook who first
saw the light in a Yorkshire cabin in 1728.
[Illustration: JESSO.
[After Hennepin.]]
[Sidenote: 1724. Bering.]
[Sidenote: 1728.]
In 1724 Peter the Great equipped Vitus Bering's first expedition, and in
December, 1724, five weeks before his death, the Czar gave the
commanding officer his instruction to coast northward and find if the
Asiatic and American coasts were continuous, as they were supposed to
be. There were, however, among the Siberians, some reports of the
dividing waters and of a great land beyond, and these rumors had been
prevailing since 1711. Peter the Great died January 28, 1725 (old
style), just as Bering was beginning his journey, and not till March,
1728, did that navigator reach the neighborhood of the sea. In July he
spread his sails on a vessel which he had built.
[Illustration: DOMINA FARRER'S MAP, 1651.]
[Illustration: DOMINA FARRER'S MAP, 1651.]
[Illustration: BUACHE'S THEORY, 1752.]
[Illustration: BERING'S STRAITS.]
[Sidenote: 1732.]
[Sidenote: 1741. Bering.]
By the middle of August he had passed beyond the easternmost point of
Asia, and was standing out into the Arctic Ocean, when he turned on his
track and sailed south. Neither in going nor in returning did he see
land to the east, the mists being too thick. He had thus established the
limits of the Russian Empire, but he had not as yet learned of the close
proximity of the American shores. His discoveries did not get any
cartographical record till Kiriloff made his map of Russia in 1734,
using the map which Bering had made in Moscow in 1731. The following
year (1732), Gvosdjeff espied the opposite coast; but it was not till
1741 that Bering sailed once more from the Asiatic side to seek the
American coast. He steered southeast, and soon found that the land seen
by Da Gama, and which the Delisles had so long kept on their maps, did
not exist there.
[Sidenote: Aleutian Islands.]
Thence sailing northward, Bering sighted the coast in July and had Mount
St. Elias before him, then named by him from that saint's day in the
calendar. On his return route some vague conception of the Aleutian
Islands was gained, the beginning of a better cartography, in which was
also embodied the stretch of coast which Bering's associate, Chirikoff,
discovered farther east and south.
[Sidenote: Northern Pacific.]
In 1757 Venegas, uninformed as to these Russian discoveries, confessed
in his _California_ that nothing was really known of the coast line in
the higher latitudes,--an ignorance that was the source of a great
variety of conjectures, including a large inland sea of the west
connecting with the Pacific, which was not wholly discarded till near
the end of the century, as has already been mentioned.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The search for the northwest passage.]
The search for the northwest passage to Asia, as it had been begun by
the English under Cabot in 1497, was also the last of all the endeavors
to isolate the continent. The creation of the Hudson Bay Company in 1670
was ostensibly to promote "the discovery of a new passage into the South
Sea," but the world knows how for two centuries that organization
obstinately neglected, or as far as they dared, the leading purpose for
which they pretended to ask a charter. They gave their well-directed
energies to the amassing of fortunes with as much persistency as the
Spaniards did at the south, but with this difference: that the wisdom in
their employment of the aborigines was as eminent as with the Southrons
it was lacking. It was left for other agencies of the British government
successfully to accomplish, with the aid of the votaries of geographical
science, what the pecuniary speculators of Fen Church Street hardly
dared to contemplate.
[Sidenote: 1779. James Cook.]
The spirit of the old navigators was revived in James Cook, when in 1779
he endeavored to pass eastward by Bering's Straits; but it was not till
forty years later that a series of arctic explorations was begun, in
which the English races of both continents have shown so conspicuous a
skill and fortitude.
[Sidenote: Kendrick in the "Columbia."]
While the English, French, and Spaniards were dodging one another in
their exploring efforts along this upper coast, a Boston ship, the
"Columbia," under Captain Kendrick, entered the Columbia River, then
named; and to these American explorations, as well as to the
contemporary ones of Vancouver, the geographical confusion finally
yielded place to something like an intelligible idea.
[Sidenote: 1790-95. Vancouver.]
It had also been the aim of Vancouver in 1790-95 "to ascertain the
existence of any navigable communication between the North Pacific and
the North Atlantic Oceans," and the correspondence of the British
government leading to this expedition has only been lately printed in
the _Report_ of the Dominion archivist, Douglas Brymner, for 1889.
[Illustration: THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE.]
[Sidenote: Arctic explorers.]
[Sidenote: 1850. McClure finds the northwest passage.]
The names of Barrow, Ross, Parry, and Franklin, not to mention others of
a later period, make the story of the final severance of the continent
in the arctic seas one of conspicuous interest in the history of
maritime exploration. Captain Robert L. McClure, in the "Investigator,"
late in 1850 passed into Bering's Straits, and before September closed
his ship was bound in the ice. In October McClure made a sledge journey
easterly over a frozen channel and reached the open sea, which thirty
years before Parry had passed into from the Atlantic side. The northwest
passage was at last discovered.
We have seen that within thirty years from the death of Columbus the
outline of South America was defined, while it had taken nearly two
centuries and a quarter to free the coast lines of the New World from an
entanglement in men's minds with the outlines of eastern Asia, and
another century and a quarter were required to complete the arctic
contour of America, so that the New World at last should stand a wholly
revealed and separate continent.
Nor had all this labor been done by governments alone. The private
merchant and the individual adventurer, equipping ships and sailing
without national help, had done no small part of it. Dr. Kohl strikingly
says, "The extreme northern limit of America, the desolate peninsula
Boothia, is named after the English merchant who fitted out the arctic
expedition of Sir John Ross; and the southernmost strait, beyond
Patagonia, preserves the name of Le Maire, the merchant at whose charge
it was disclosed to the world!"
INDEX.
Acklin Island, 215.
Adam of Bremen, 147.
Adda, G. d', 12.
Admiral's map, 534, 546, 581. _See_ Waldseemüller.
Africa, circumnavigations of, 91;
discoveries along its coast, 91, 151;
early maps, 133;
Ptolemy's map of its southern part, 335.
Agnese Baptista, his maps, 595, 597.
Aguado, Juan, sent to Española, 317;
his conduct, 319.
Ailly, Pierre d', _De Imagine Mundi_, 7, 8, 121, 180, 497;
his map (1410), 601.
Albertus Magnus, 497; portrait, 120.
Aleutian Islands, 652, 658.
Alexander VI., letter to, from Columbus, 9;
pope, 252;
his bull of demarcation, 252;
his bust, 253.
Alfonso V. (Portugal), 108.
Aliacus. _See_ Ailly.
Allefonsce, 614.
Allegetto degli Allegetti, _Ephemerides_, 32.
Almagro, 565.
Alto Velo, 390.
Alva, Duke of, 514, 515.
Amazons, 235, 237.
America, mainland first seen by Columbus, 351;
gradually developed as a continent, 529, 606, 619, 660;
history of its name, 538, 621;
earliest maps bearing the name, 547-552;
the name never recognized in Spain, 554;
earliest on maps, 581;
was it known to the ancients? 606.
_See_ North _and_ South America.
Anacaona, 305;
entertains Bartholomew Columbus, 361;
captured, 473.
Ancuparius, 588.
Angelus, Jacobus. 531.
Ango, Jean, 556.
Anian, Straits of, 418, 620.
Antarctic continent, 628, 644.
Antillia, belief in, 111, 112, 128.
Apianus, his map (1520), 550, 587;
portrait, 586.
Archipelago on the Asiatic coast, 190.
Arctic explorations, 640, 658, 659, 660.
Asia, as known to Marco Polo, etc., map, 113, 114.
Aspa, Ant. de, his documents, 29.
Astrolabe, 94-96, 132, 150, 260, 632.
Atlantic Ocean, early cartography of, 86, 88;
floating islands in, 185;
its archipelago, 185;
as defined by Behaim compared with its actual condition, 190;
early voyages on, 603.
Atlantis, story of, 126.
Aubert, Thomas, 556.
Audiencia, 518.
Avila, Luis de, 527.
Ayala, Pedro de, 343.
Ayllon, Lucas Vasquez de, 561;
and Diego Colon, 522;
his map, 561, 584;
settlement on the Potomac, 561.
Azores discovered, 86, 88.
Babeque, 225, 230, 231.
Baccalaos, 344.
Back-staff, 648.
Bacon, Roger, _Opus majus_, 121, 497.
Badajos, congress at, 590.
Baffin, Wm., 650.
Baffin's Bay, 651.
Bahamas, Herrera's map, 212;
modern map, 213;
character of, 215;
their peoples, 218;
depopulated, 515.
Balboa, 562;
portrait, 563;
discovers the South Sea, 564, 606;
executed, 564.
Ballester, Miguel, 366, 372.
Bancroft, H. H., on Columbus, 59, 503.
Bank of St. George, and its records, 21, 70.
Barclay, Alex., translates Brant, 537.
Barlow, S. L. M., his library, 17.
Barrentes, Garcia de, 372.
Barros, João de. _Decada_, 33, 149, 241.
Bastidas, Rodrigo de, on the South American coast, 426, 528.
Basques on the Atlantic, 128;
fishermen, 340.
Baza, siege of, 169.
Behaim, Martin, in Lisbon, 132;
improves the astrolabe, 132;
at sea, 134;
portrait, 134;
and Columbus, 150;
his globe, 185-188, 533.
Behechio, 305, 361.
Belknap, Dr. Jeremy, on Columbus, 55.
Belloy, Marquis de, life of Columbus, 54.
Beneventanus, 533.
Benincasa, maps, 81.
Benzoni, 32, 51.
Beradi, Juonato, 258, 317.
Bergenroth, _Calendar_, 13, 23.
Bergomas, his chronicle, 32.
Bering's Straits, 418, 657.
Bering, his discoveries, 529, 620, 653.
Bernaldez, Andrès, friend of Columbus, 13, 331; _Historia_, 13, 18,
37.
Berwick, Duke of, 527.
Béthencourt, Jean de, 86.
Bianco, Andrea, his map, 88, 89; helps Fra Mauro, 100.
Bienewitz. _See_ Apianus.
Bimini, 422, 558, 560.
Birds, flight of, 88.
Blanco, Cape, passed, 98.
Bloodhounds, 312.
Blunderville, 632.
Bobadilla, Francisco de, sent to Santo Domingo, 390;
his character, 395;
his instructions, 396, 397;
reaches Española, 398;
his acts, 398;
their effect upon Columbus, 400;
arrests Bastidas, 426;
his rule in Santo Domingo, 428;
superseded, 429;
to return to Spain, 440;
lost, 440.
Bohio, 228.
Bojador, Cape, passed, 97.
Bordone, map, 142.
Bossi, L., on Columbus, 32.
Bourne, Wm., _The Regiment of the Sea_, 631.
Boyle. _See_ Buil.
Brandt, _Shyppe of Fools_, 14.
Brazil coast visited by Cabral, 378;
early explorers, 533.
Brazil, island of, 112, 139.
Breton explorations, 555, 556.
Breviesca, Ximeno de, 333.
Brevoort, J. C., 597, 607, 621.
Briggs in Purchas, 652.
Bristol, England, and its maritime expeditions, 342.
Brocken, Baron van, _Colomb_, 55.
Brymner, Douglas, 660.
Buache, his map, 656.
Büdinger, Max, _Acten zur Columbus Geschichte_, 46;
_Zur Columbus Literatur_, 46.
Buet, C., _Colomb_, 54.
Buil, Bernardo, sent to the New World, 259.
Bull of demarcation, 22, 252, 339.
Bull of extension, 305.
Button, Sir Thomas, 650.
Bylot, Robert, 650.
Cabot, John, in England, 167, 340;
sails on a voyage of discovery, 340;
earliest engraved map of his discoveries, 341;
great circle sailing, 341;
discovers land, 341;
question of his landfall, 341;
returns to Bristol, 342;
question of his going to Seville, 343;
his second voyage, 344;
its extent, 344;
lack of knowledge respecting these voyages, 345;
authorities on, 346;
was his voyage known to Columbus? 386;
and the Ruysch map, 533; his explorations, 624.
Cabot, Sebastian, his observation of the line of no variation, 201;
on Columbus's discovery, 248;
his participancy in his father's voyages, 344;
his papers, 345;
alleged voyage, 427;
voyages, 555;
his mappemonde, 341, 345, 624, 626, 627;
returns to England, 639;
portrait, 642.
Cabral, Pedro Alvarez, on the South American coast, 377.
Cabrero, Juan, 161.
Cabrillo, 611.
Cacique, 231.
Cadamosto, his voyage, 98.
Cado, Fermin, 285.
California, peninsula of, 610;
its name, 611;
map, 611;
mapped as an island, 652;
Drake on the coast, 644, 645.
Cam, Diogo, 134.
Camargo on the coast of Chili, 577.
Camers, Johann, 585.
Canaries, their history, 86; map of, 194.
Cannibals, 225, 227, 230, 268, 270, 281.
Canoes, 219.
Cantino, Alberto, 417;
Cantino map, 387;
sketched, 419;
its traits examined, 420;
its relation with Columbus, 421.
Caonabo, 305;
attacks La Navidad, 273, 275;
attacks St. Thomas, 308;
forms a league, 308;
captured, 313;
dies, 323.
Cape Blanco, 98.
Cape Bojador, 97.
Cape Breton, 627.
Cape of Good Hope discovered, 151.
Cape Horn discovered, 577;
seen by Drake, 644.
Cape Race, 534.
Cape Verde Island discovered, 199.
Cardenas, Alonso de, 161.
Cardona, Cristoval de, Admiral of Aragon, 524, 526, 527.
Caribs, 236, 271, 323.
Carpini, Plano, 90.
Carthaginians as voyagers, 127.
Cartier, Jacques, his explorations, 612, 624.
Carvajal, Alonso Sanchez de, factor of Columbus, 430.
Carvajal, Bernardin de, 248.
Casa de Contratacion, 481.
Casaneuve. _See_ Colombo the Corsair.
Casanove, 71.
Casoni, F., annals of Genoa, 32, 154.
Casteñeda, Juan de, 238.
Castellanos, _Elegias_, 491.
Castillo, 611.
Catalan seamanship, 94.
Catalina, Doña, 9, 276.
Cathay, 224, 457;
early name of China, 90;
map of, 113, 114;
as found by the Portuguese, 509.
Cazadilla, 150.
Chanca, Dr., his narrative, 29;
goes to the new world, 262, 282.
Charles V., portrait, 519.
Chaves, Alonso, his map, 561, 621;
at the Seville Conference, 604.
Chesapeake Bay, Spaniards in the, 633.
Chili discovered, 565, 577.
China, early known, 90. _See_ Cathay.
Chronica Delphinea, 9, 11.
Chronometers, 260, 603.
Chytræus, 627.
Cibao, 232;
its mines visited by Ojeda, 279.
Ciguare, 447.
Cipango, 125; map, 113.
Circourt, Count, 46.
Clavus, Claudius, 140, 141.
Clemente, Claudio, _Tablas_, 214.
Climatic lines, 601.