The Earliest Maps

OF THE

SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE DISCOVERIES.

BY THE EDITOR.

THE enumeration of the cartographical sources respecting the discoveries of the earlier voyagers began with the list, “Catalogus auctorum tabularum geographicarum, quotquot ad nostram cognitionem hactenus pervenere; quibus addidimus, ubi locorum, quando et a quibus excusi sunt,” which Ortelius in 1570 added to his Theatrum orbis terrarum, many of whose titles belong to works not now known. Of maps now existing the best-known enumerations are those in the Jean et Sébastian Cabot of Harrisse; the Mapoteca Colombiana of Uricoechea; the Cartografia Mexicana of Orozco y Berra, published by the Mexican Geographical Society; and Gustavo Uzielli’s Elenco descritto degli Atlanti, planisferi e carte nautiche, originally published in 1875, but made the second volume, edited by Pietro Amat, of the new edition of the Studi biografici e bibliografici della Società Geografica Italiana, Rome, 1882, under the specific title of Mappamondi, carte nautiche, portolani ed altri monumenti cartografici specialmente Italiani dei secoli XIII-XVII.

The Editor has printed in the Harvard University Bulletin a bibliography Of Ptolemy’s geography, and a calendar, with additions and annotations, of the Kohl collection of early maps, belonging to the Department of State at Washington, both of which contributions called for enumerations of printed and manuscript maps of the early period, and included their reproductions of later years.

The development of cartography is also necessarily made a part of histories of geography like those of Santarem, Lelewel, St.-Martin, and Peschel; but their use of maps hardly made chronological lists of them a necessary part of their works. Santarem has pointed out how scantily modern writers have treated of the cartography of the Middle Ages previous to the era of Spanish discovery; and he enumerates such maps as had been described before the appearance of his work, as well as publications of the earlier ones after the Spanish discovery.

To what extent Columbus had studied the older maps from the time when they began to receive a certain definiteness in the fourteenth century, is not wholly clear, nor how much he knew of the charts of Marino Sanuto, of Pizignani, and of the now famous Catalan map of that period; but it is doubtless true that the maps of Bianco (1436) and Mauro (1460) were well known to him. “Though these early maps and charts of the fifteenth century,” says Hallam, “are to us but a chaos of error and confusion, it was on them that the patient eye of Columbus had rested through long hours of meditation, while strenuous hope and unsubdued doubt were struggling in his soul.”

EARLY COMPASS.

This follows the engraving in Pigafetta’s Voyage and in the work of Jurien de la Gravière. The main points were designated by the usual names of the winds, Levante, east; Sirocco, southeast, etc.

A principal factor in the development of map-making, as of navigation, had been the magnet. It had been brought from China to the eastern coast of Africa as early as the fourth century, and through the Arabs and Crusaders it had been introduced into the Mediterranean, and was used by the Catalans and Basques in the twelfth century, a hundred years or more before Marco Polo brought to Europe his wonderful stories. In that century even it had become so familiar a sight that poets used it in their metaphors. The variation of its needle was not indeed unknown long before Columbus, but its observation in mid-ocean in his day gave it a new significance. The Chinese had studied the phenomenon, and their observations upon it had followed shortly upon the introduction of the compass itself to Western knowledge; and as early as 1436 the variation of the needle was indicated on maps in connection with places of observation.

The earliest placing of a magnetic pole seems due to the voyage of Nicholas of Lynn, whose narrative was presented to Edward III. of England. This account is no longer known, though the title of it, Inventio fortunata, is preserved, with its alleged date of 1355. Cnoyen, whose treatise is not extant, is thought to have got his views about the regions of the north and about the magnetic pole from Nicholas of Lynn, while he was in Norway in 1364; and it is from Cnoyen that Mercator says he got his notion of the four circumpolar islands which so long figured in maps of the Mercator and Finæus school. In the Ruysch map (1508) we have the same four polar islands, with the magnetic pole placed within an insular mountain north of Greenland. Ruysch also depended on the Inventio fortunata. Later, by Martin Cortes in 1545, and by Sanuto in 1588, the pole was placed farther south.

Ptolemy, in the second century, accepting the generally received opinion that the world as known was much longer east and west than north and south, adopted with this theory the terms which naturally grew out of this belief, latitude and longitude, and first instituted them, it is thought, in systematic geography.

Pierre d’Ailly, in his map of 1410, in marking his climatic lines, had indicated the beginnings, under a revival of geographical inquiry, of a systematic notation of latitude. Several of the early Ptolemies had followed, by scaling in one way and another the distance from the equator; while in the editions of 1508 and 1511 an example had been set of marking longitude. The old Arabian cartographers had used both latitude and longitude; but though there were some earlier indications of the adoption of such lines among the European map-makers, it is generally accorded that the scales of such measurements, as we understand them, came in, for both latitude and longitude, with the map which Reisch in 1503 annexed to his Margarita philosophica.

Ptolemy had fixed his first meridian at the Fortunate Islands (Canaries), and in the new era the Spaniards, with the sanction of the Pope, had adopted the same point; though the Portuguese, as if in recognition of their own enterprise, had placed it at Madeira,—as is shown in the globes of Behaim and Schöner, and in the map of Ruysch. The difference was not great; the Ptolemean example prevailed, however, in the end.

In respect to latitude there was not in the rude instruments of the early navigators, and under favorable conditions, the means of closely approximate accuracy. In the study which the Rev. E. F. Slafter has made on the average extent of the error which we find in the records of even a later century, it appears that while a range of sixty geographical miles will probably cover such errors in all cases, when observations were made with ordinary care the average deviation will probably be found to be at least fifteen miles. The fractions of degrees were scarcely ever of much value in the computation, and the minute gradation of the instruments in use were subject to great uncertainty of record in tremulous hands. It was not the custom, moreover, to make any allowance for the dip of the horizon, for refraction or for the parallax; and when, except at the time of the equinox, dependence had to be placed upon tables of the sun’s declination, the published ephemerides, made for a series of years, were the subjects of accumulated error.

REGIOMONTANUS’ ASTROLABE.

This cut follows the engravings in Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 106, and in Ghillany’s Ritter Behaim, p. 40. Cf. Von Murr, Memorabilia bibliothecarum Norimbergensium, i. 9.

With these impediments to accurate results, it is not surprising that even errors of considerable extent crept into the records of latitude, and long remained unchallenged. Ptolemy, in A. D. 150, had placed Constantinople two degrees out of the way; and it remained so on maps for fourteen hundred years. In Columbus’ time Cuba was put seven or eight degrees too far north; and under this false impression the cartography of the Antilles began.

The historic instrument for the taking of latitude was the astrolabe, which is known to have been in use by the Majorcan and Catalanian sailors in the latter part of the thirteenth century; and it is described by Raymond Lullius in his Arte de navegar of that time. Behaim, the contemporary of Columbus, one of the explorers of the African coast, and a pupil of Regiomontanus, had somewhat changed the old form of the astrolabe in adapting it for use on shipboard. This was in 1484 at Lisbon, and Behaim’s improvement was doubtless what Columbus used. Of the form in use before Behaim we have that (said to have belonged to Regiomontanus) in the cut on page 96; and in the following cut the remodelled shape which it took after Behaim.

An instrument which could more readily adapt itself to the swaying of the observer’s body in a sea-way, soon displaced in good measure the astrolabe on shipboard. This was the cross-staff, or jackstaff, which in several modified forms for a long time served mariners as a convenient help in ascertaining the altitude of the celestial bodies. Precisely when it was first introduced is not certain; but the earliest description of it which has been found is that of Werner in 1514. Davis, the Arctic navigator, made an improvement on it; and his invention was called a backstaff.

While the observations of the early navigators in respect to latitude were usually accompanied by errors, which were of no considerable extent, their determinations of longitude, when attempted at all, were almost always wide of the truth,—so far, indeed, that their observations helped them but little then to steer their courses, and are of small assistance now to us in following their tracks. It happened that while Columbus was at Hispaniola on his second voyage, in September, 1494, there was an eclipse of the moon. Columbus observed it; and his calculations placed himself five hours and a half from Seville,—an error of eighteen degrees, or an hour and a quarter too much. The error was due doubtless as much to the rudeness of his instruments as to the errors of the lunar tables then in use.

THE JACKSTAFF.

The removal of the Line of Demarcation from the supposed meridian of non-variation of the needle did not prevent the phenomena of terrestrial magnetism becoming of vast importance in the dispute between the Crowns of Spain and Portugal. It characterizes the difference between the imaginative and somewhat fantastic quality of Columbus’ mind and the cooler, more practical, and better administrative apprehension of Sebastian Cabot, that while each observed the phenomenon of the variation of the needle, and each imagined it a clew to some system of determining longitude, to Columbus it was associated with wild notions of a too-ample revolution of the North Star about the true pole. It was not disconnected in his mind from a fancy which gave the earth the shape of a pear; so that when he perceived on his voyage a clearing of the atmosphere, he imagined he was ascending the stem-end of the pear; where he would find the terrestrial paradise. To Cabot the phenomenon had only its practical significance; and he seems to have pondered on a solution of the problem during the rest of his life, if, as Humboldt supposes, the intimations of his death-bed in respect to some as yet unregistered way of discovering longitude refer to his observations on the magnetic declination.

The idea of a constantly increasing declination east and west from a point of non-variation, which both Columbus and Cabot had discovered, and which increase could be reduced to a formula, was indeed partly true; except, as is now well known, the line of non-variation, instead of being a meridian, and fixed, is a curve of constantly changing proportions.

THE BACKSTAFF.

The earliest variation-chart was made in 1530 by Alonzo de Santa Cruz; and schemes of ascertaining longitude were at once based on the observations of these curves, as they had before been made dependent upon the supposed gradation of the change from meridian to meridian, irrespective of latitude. Fifty years later (1585), Juan Jayme made a voyage with Gali from the Philippine Islands to Acapulco to test a “declinatorum” of his own invention. But this was a hundred years (1698-1702) before Halley’s Expedition was sent,—the first which any government fitted out to observe the forces of terrestrial magnetism; and though there had been suspicions of it much earlier, it was not till 1722 that Graham got unmistakable data to prove the hourly variation of the needle.

The earliest map which is distinctively associated with the views which were developing in Columbus’ mind was the one which Toscanelli sent to him in 1474. It is said to have been preserved in Madrid in 1527; and fifty-three years after Columbus’ death, when Las Casas was writing his history, it was in his possession. We know that this Italian geographer had reduced the circumference of the globe to nearly three quarters of its actual size, having placed China about six thousand five hundred miles west of Lisbon, and eleven thousand five hundred miles east. Japan, lying off the China coast, was put somewhere from one hundred degrees to one hundred and ten degrees west of Lisbon; and we have record that Martin Pinzon some years later (1491) saw a map in Rome which put Cipango (Japan) even nearer the European side.

A similar view is supposed to have been presented in the map which Bartholomew Columbus took to England in 1488; but we have no trace of the chart itself.

It has always been supposed that in the well-known globe of Martin Behaim we get in the main an expression of the views held by Toscanelli, Columbus, and other of Behaim’s contemporaries, who espoused the notion of India lying over against Europe.

MARTIN BEHAIM.

This cut follows the engravings in Ghillany’s Behaim, and in Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 105.

Eratosthenes, accepting the spherical theory, had advanced the identical notion which nearly seventeen hundred years later impelled Columbus to his voyage. He held the known world to span one third of the circuit of the globe, as Strabo did at a later day, leaving an unknown two thirds of sea; and “if it were not that the vast extent of the Atlantic Sea rendered it impossible, one might even sail from the coast of Spain to that of India along the same parallel.”

Behaim had spent much of his life in Lisbon and the Azores, and was a friend of Columbus. He had visited Nuremberg, probably on some family matters arising out of the death of his mother in 1487. While in this his native town, he gratified some of his townspeople by embodying in a globe the geographical views which prevailed in the maritime countries; and the globe was finished before Columbus had yet accomplished his voyage. The next year (1493) Behaim returned to Portugal; and after having been sent to the Low Countries on a diplomatic mission, he was captured by English cruisers and carried to England. Escaping finally, and reaching the Continent, he passes from our view in 1494, and is scarcely heard of again.

Of Columbus’ maps it is probable that nothing has come down to us from his own hand. Humboldt would fain believe that the group of islands studding a gulf which appears on a coat-of-arms granted Columbus in May, 1493, has some interest as the earliest of all cartographical records of the New World; but the early drawings of the arms are by no means constant in the kind of grouping which is given to these islands. Queen Isabella, writing to the Admiral, Sept. 5, 1493, asks to see the marine chart which he had made; and Columbus sent such a map with a letter. We have various other references to copies of this or similar charts of Columbus. Ojeda used such a one in following Columbus’ route, as he testified in the famous suit against the heirs of Columbus. Bernardo de Ibarra, in the same cause, said that he had seen the Admiral’s chart, and that he had heard of copies of it being used by Ojeda, and by some others. It is known that about 1498 Columbus gave one of his charts to the Pope, and one to René of Lorraine. Angelo Trivigiano, secretary of the Venetian Ambassador to Spain, in a letter dated Aug. 21, 1501, addressed to Dominico Malipiero, speaks of a map of the new discoveries which Columbus had.

LA COSA, 1500.

Three or four maps at least have come down to us which are supposed to represent in some way one or several of these drafts by Columbus. The first of these is the celebrated map of the pilot Juan de la Cosa, dated in 1500, of which some account, with a heliotype fac-simile of the American part of the map, is given in another place. After the death (April 27, 1852) of Walckenaer (who had bought it at a moderate cost of an ignorant dealer in second-hand articles), it was sold at public auction in Paris in the spring of 1853, when Jomard failed to secure it for the Imperial Library in Paris, and it went to Spain, where, in the naval museum at Madrid, it now is.

Of the next earliest of the American maps the story has recently been told with great fulness by Harrisse in his Les Cortereal, accompanied by a large colored fac-simile of the map itself, executed by Pilinski. The map was not unknown before, and Harrisse had earlier described it in his Cabots.

We know that Gaspar Cortereal had already before 1500 made some explorations, during which he had discovered a mainland and some islands, but at what precise date it is impossible to determine; nor can we decide upon the course he had taken, but it seems likely it was a westerly one. We know also that in this same year (1500) he made his historic voyage to the Newfoundland region, coasting the neighboring shores, probably, in September and October. Then followed a second expedition from January to October of the next year (1501),—the one of which we have the account in the Paesi novamente retrovati, as furnished by Pasqualigo. There was at this time in Lisbon one Alberto Cantino, a correspondent—with precisely what quality we know not—of Hercule d’Este, Duke of Ferrara; and to this noble personage Cantino, on the 19th of October, addressed a letter embodying what he had seen and learned of the newly returned companions of Gaspar Cortereal.

The Report of Cantino instigated the Duke to ask his correspondent to procure for him a map of these explorations. Cantino procured one to be made; and inscribing it, “Carta da navigar per le Isole novamte tr.... in le parte de l’India: dono Alberto Cantino Al S. Duca Hercole,” he took it to Italy, and delivered it by another hand to the Duke at Ferrara. Here in the family archives it was preserved till 1592, when the reigning Duke retired to Modena, his library following him. In 1868, in accordance with an agreement between the Italian Government and the Archduke Francis of Austria, the cartographical monuments of the ducal collection were transferred to the Biblioteca Estense, where this precious map now is. The map was accompanied when it left Cantino’s hands by a note addressed to the Duke and dated at Rome, Nov. 19, 1502, which fortunately for us fixes very nearly the period of the construction of the map. A much reduced sketch is annexed.

For the northern coast of South America La Cosa and Cantino’s draughtsmen seem to have had different authorities. La Cosa attaches forty-five names to that coast: Cantino only twenty-nine; and only three of them are common to the two. Harrisse argues from the failure of the La Cosa map to give certain intelligence of the Atlantic coast of the United States (here represented in the north and south trend of shore, north of Cuba), that there was existing in October, 1500, at least in Spanish circles, no knowledge of it, but that explorations must have taken place before the summer of 1502 which afforded the knowledge embodied in this Cantino map. This coast was not visited, so far as is positively known, by any Spanish expedition previous to 1502. Besides the eight Spanish voyages of this period (not counting the problematical one of Vespucius) of which we have documentary proof, there were doubtless others of which we have intimations; but we know nothing of their discoveries, except so far as those before 1500 may be embodied in La Cosa’s chart. The researches of Harrisse have failed to discover in Portugal any positive trace of voyages made from that kingdom in 1501, or thereabout, records of which have been left in the Cantino map. Humboldt had intimated that in Lisbon at that time there was a knowledge of the connection of the Antilles with the northern discoveries of Cortereal by an intervening coast; but Harrisse doubts if Humboldt’s authority—which seems to have been a letter of Pasqualigo sent to Venice, dated Oct. 18, 1501, found in the Diarii of Marino Sanuto, a manuscript preserved in Vienna—means anything more than a conjectural belief in such connection. Harrisse’s conclusion is that between the close of 1500 and the summer of 1502, some navigators, of whose names and nation we are ignorant, but who were probably Spanish, explored the coast of the present United States from Pensacola to the Hudson. This Atlantic coast of Cantino terminates at about 59° north latitude, running nearly north and south from the Cape of Florida to that elevation. Away to the east in mid-ocean, and placed so far easterly as doubtless to appear on the Portuguese side of the Line of Demarcation, and covering from about fifty to fifty-nine degrees of latitude, is a large island which stands for the discoveries of Cortereal, “Terra del Rey du Portuguall;” and northeast of this is the point of Greenland apparently, with Iceland very nearly in its proper place. This Cantino map, now positively fixed in 1502, establishes the earliest instance of a kind of delineation of North America which prevailed for some time. Students of this early cartography have long supposed this geographical idea to date from about this time, and have traced back the origin of what is known as “The Admiral’s Map” to data accumulated in the earliest years of the sixteenth century. Indeed Lelewel, thirty years ago, made up what he called a Portuguese chart of 1501-1504, by combining in one draft the maps of the 1513 Ptolemy, with a hint or two from the Sylvanus map of 1511, acting on the belief that the Portuguese were the real first pursuers, or at least recorders, of explorations of the Floridian peninsula and of the coast northerly.

The earliest Spanish map after that of La Cosa which has come down to us is the one which is commonly known as Peter Martyr’s map. It is a woodcut measuring 11 × 7½ inches, and is usually thought to have first appeared in the Legatio Babylonica, or Martyr’s first decade, at Seville, 1511; but Harrisse is inclined to believe that the map did not originally belong to Martyr’s book, because three copies of it in the original vellum which he has examined do not have the map. Quaritch says that copies vary, that the leaf containing the map is an insertion, and that it is sometimes on different folios. Thus of two issues, one is called a second, because two leaves seem to have been reprinted to correct errors, and two new leaves are inserted, and a new title is printed. It is held by some that the map properly belongs to this issue. Brevoort thinks that the publication of the map was distasteful to the Spanish Government (since the King this same year forbade maps being given to foreigners); and he argues that the scarcity of the book may indicate that attempts were made to suppress it.

The maker of the 1513 map as we have it was Waldseemüller, or Hylacomylus, of St. Dié, in the Vosges Mountains; and Lelewel gives reasons for believing that the plate had been engraved, and that copies were on sale as early as 1507. It had been engraved at the expense of Duke René II. of Lorraine, from information furnished by him to perfect some anterior chart; but the plate does not seem to have been used in any book before it appeared in this 1513 edition of Ptolemy. It bears along the coast this legend: “Hec terra adjacentibus insulis inventa est per Columbū ianuensem ex mandato Regis Castelle;” and in the Address to the Reader in the Supplement appears the following sentence, in which the connection of Columbus with the map is thought to be indicated: “Charta antē marina quam Hydrographiam vocant per Admiralem [? Columbus] quondam serenissi. Portugalie [? Hispaniæ] regis Ferdinandi ceteros denique lustratores verissimis pagratiōibus lustrata, ministerio Renati, dum vixit, nunc pie mortui, Ducis illustris. Lotharingie liberalius prelographationi tradita est.”

This “Admiral’s map” seems to have been closely followed in the map which Gregor Reisch annexed to his popular encyclopædia, the Margarita philosophica, in 1515; though there is some difference in the coast-names, and the river mouths and deltas on the coast west of Cuba are left out.

Stevens and others have contended that this represents Columbus’ Ganges; but Varnhagen makes it stand for the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi,—a supposition more nearly like Reisch’s interpretation, as will be seen by his distinct separation of the new lands from Asia. Reisch is, however, uncertain of their western limits, which are cut off by the scale, as shown in the map; while on the other side of the same scale Cipango is set down in close proximity to it.

It has been supposed that it was a map of this type which Bartholomew Columbus, when he visited Rome in 1505, gave to a canon of St. John Lateran, together with one of the printed accounts of his brother’s voyage; and this canon gave the map to Alessandro Strozzi, “suo amico e compilatore della raccolta,” as is stated in a marginal note in a copy of the Mundus novus in the Magliabecchian library.

Columbus is said to have had a vision before his fourth voyage, during which he saw and depicted on a map a strait between the regions north and south of the Antillian Sea. De Lorgues, with a convenient alternative for his saintly hero, says that the mistake was only in making the strait of water, when it should have been of land!

We have a suspicion of this strait in another map which has been held to have had some connection with the drafts of Columbus, and that is the Ruysch map, which appeared in the Roman Ptolemy of 1508, the earliest published map, unless the St. Dié map takes precedence, to show any part of the new discoveries.

It seems from its resemblance to the La Cosa chart to have been kept much nearer the Columbian draft than the geographer of St. Dié, with his Portuguese helps, was contented to leave it in his map. In La Cosa the vignette of St. Christopher had concealed the mystery of a westerly passage; Ruysch assumes it, or at least gives no intimation of his belief in the inclosure of the Antillian Sea. Harrisse has pointed out how an entirely different coast-nomenclature in the two maps points to different originals of the two map-makers. The text of this 1508 edition upon “Terra Nova” and “Santa Cruz” is by Marcus Beneventanus. There are reasons to believe that the map may have been issued separately, as well as in the book; and the copies of the map in the Barlow Collection and in Harvard College Library are perhaps of this separate issue.

MÜNSTER, 1532.

The distinctive features both of the La Cosa and the Ruysch drafts, of the Cantino map and of the Waldseemüller or St. Dié map of 1513, were preserved, with more or less modifications in many of the early maps. The Stobnicza map—published in an Introductio to Ptolemy at Cracow in 1512—is in effect the St. Dié map, with a western ocean in place of the edge of the plate as given in the 1513 Ptolemy, and is more like the draft of Reisch’s map published three years later.

There are other drawings of this map in Stevens’s Notes; in Nordenskiöld’s Bröderna Zenos (Stockholm, 1883); etc.

The Schöner globe of 1515, often cited as the Frankfort globe; the Schöner globe of 1520; the so-called Tross gores of 1514-1519; the map of Petrus Apianus—or Bienewitz, as he was called in his vernacular—which appeared in the Polyhistoria of Solinus, edited by the Italian monk Camers, and also in 1522 in the De orbis situ of Pomponius Mela, published by Vadianus,—all preserve the same characteristics with the St. Dié map, excepting that they show the western passage referred to in Columbus’ dream, and so far unite some of the inferences from the map of Ruysch. There was a curious survival of this Cantino type, particularly as regards North America for many years yet to come, as seen in the map which Münster added to the Basle edition of the Novus orbis in 1532 and 1537, and in the drawing which Jomard gives as from “une cassette de la Collection Trivulci, dite Cassettina all’Agemina.” This last drawing is a cordiform mappemonde, very like another which accompanied Honter’s Rudimenta cosmographica in 1542, and which was repeated in various editions to as late a period as 1590. Thus it happened that for nearly a century geographical views which the earliest navigators evolved, continued in popular books to convey the most inadequate notion of the contour of the new continent.

SYLVANUS’ MAP, 1511.

The map is given in its original projection in Lelewel, pl. xlv., and on a greatly reduced scale in Daly’s Early Cartography, p. 32. There are copies of this 1511 Ptolemy in the Lenox, Carter-Brown, Astor, Brevoort, Barlow, and Kalbfleisch collections. Cf. Murphy Catalogue, no. 2,051, for a copy now in the American Geographical Society’s Library, and references in Winsor’s Bibliography of Ptolemy sub anno 1511.

In the same year with the publication of the Peter Martyr map of 1511, an edition of Ptolemy, published at Venice and edited by Bernardus Sylvanus, contained a mappemonde on a cordiform projection,—which is said to be the first instance of the use of this method in drafting maps. What is shown of the new discoveries is brought in a distorted shape on the extreme western verge of the map; and to make the contour more intelligible, it is reduced in the sketch annexed to an ordinary plane projection. It is the earliest engraved map to give any trace of the Cortereal discoveries and to indicate the Square, or St. Lawrence, Gulf. It gives a curious Latinized form to the name of the navigator himself in “Regalis Domus” (Cortereal), and restores Greenland, or Engronelant, to a peninsular connection with northwestern Europe as it had appeared in the Ptolemy of 1482.

THE LENOX GLOBE.

It will be seen that, with the exception of the vague limits of the “Regalis Domus,” there was no sign of the continental line of North America in this map of Sylvanus. Much the same views were possessed by the maker of the undated Lenox globe, which probably is of nearly the same date, and of which a further account is given elsewhere.

Another draft of a globe, likewise held to be of about the same date, shows a similar configuration, except that a squarish island stands in it for Florida and adjacent parts of the main. This is a manuscript drawing on two sheets preserved among the Queen’s collections at Windsor; and since Mr. R. H. Major made it known by a communication, with accompanying fac-similes, in the Archæologia, it has been held to be the work of Leonardo da Vinci, though this has been recently questioned.

If deprived of the associations of that august name, the map loses much of its attraction; but it still remains an interesting memorial of geographical conjecture. It is without date, and can only be fixed in the chain of cartographical ideas by its internal evidence. This has led Major to place it between 1512 and 1514, and Wieser to fix it at 1515-1516. A somewhat unsatisfactory map, since it shows nothing north of “Ysabella” and “Spagnollo,” is that inscribed Orbis typus universalis juxta hydrographorum traditionem exactissime depicta, 1522, L. F., which is the work of Laurentius Frisius, and appeared in the Ptolemy of 1522.

A new element appears in a map which is one of the charts belonging to the Yslegung der Mer-Carthen oder Cartha Marina, said also to be the work of Frisius, which was issued in 1525, in exposition of his theories of sea-charts.

The map is of interest as the sole instance in which North America is called a part of Africa, on the supposition that a continental connection by the south enclosed the “sea toward the sunset.” The insular Yucatan will be observed in the annexed sketch, and what seems to be a misshapen Cuba. The land at the east seems intended for Baccalaos, judging from the latitude and the indication of fir-trees upon it. This map is one of twelve engraved sheets constituting the above-named work, which was published by Johannes Grieninger in 1530. Friess, or Frisius, who was a German mathematician, and had, as we have seen, taken part in the 1522 Ptolemy, says that he drew his information in these maps from original sources; but he does not name these sources, and Dr. Kohl thinks the maps indicate the work of Waldseemüller.

Among the last of the school of geographers who supposed North America to be an archipelago, was Pierro Coppo, who published at Venice in 1528 what has become a very rare Portolano delli lochi maritimi ed isole der mar.