APPENDIX.

THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS.

Progress of discovery.

There was a struggling effort of the geographical sense of the world for thirty years and more after the death of Columbus, before the fact began to be grasped that a great continent was interposed as a substantial and independent barrier in the track to India. It took nearly a half century more before men generally recognized that fact, and then in most cases it was accepted with the reservation of a possible Asiatic connection at the extreme north. It was something more than two hundred and twenty years from the death of Columbus before that severance at the north was incontestably established by the voyage of Bering, and a hundred and thirty years longer before at last the contour of the northern coast of the continent was established by the proof of the long-sought northwest passage in 1850. We must now, to complete the story of the influence of Columbus, rehearse somewhat concisely the narrative of this progressive outcome of that wonderful voyage of 1492. The spirit of western discovery, which Columbus imparted, was of long continuance.

The influence of Ptolemy and his career.

"If we wish to make ourselves thoroughly acquainted," says Dr. Kohl, "with the history of discovery in the New World, we must not only follow the navigators on their ships, but we must look into the cabinets of princes and into the counting-houses of merchants, and likewise watch the scholars in their speculative studies." There was no rallying point for the scholar of cosmography in those early days of discovery like the text and influence of Ptolemy.

We know little of this ancient geographer beyond the fact of his living in the early portion of the second century, and mainly at Alexandria, the fittest home of a geographer at that time, since this Egyptian city was peerless for commerce and learning. Here he could do best what he advises all geographers to do, consult the journals of travelers, and get information of eclipses, as the same phenomena were observed at different places; such, for instance, as that of the moon noted at Arbela in the fifth, and seen at Carthage in the second hour.

Portolanos.

The precision of Ptolemy was covered out of sight by graphic fancies among the cosmographers of succeeding ages, till about the beginning of the fourteenth century Italy and the western Mediterranean islands began to produce those atlases of sea-charts, which have come down to us under the name of "portolanos;" and still later a new impetus was given to geographical study by the manuscripts of Ptolemy, with his maps, which began to be common in western Europe in the beginning of the fifteenth century, largely through the influence of communications with the Byzantine peoples.

PTOLEMY. [From Reusner's Icones.]

The portolanos, however, never lost their importance. Nordenskiöld says that, from the great number of them still extant in Italy, we may deduce that they had a greater circulation during the sixteenth century than printed cartographical works. About five hundred of these sea-charts are known in Italian libraries, and the greater proportion of them are of Italian origin.

Latin text of Ptolemy.

The Donis maps.

It is a composite Latin text, brought into final shape by Jacobus Angelus not far from 1400-1410, which was the basis of the early printed editions of Ptolemy. This version was for a while circulated in manuscript, sometimes with copies of the maps of the Old World having a Latinized nomenclature; and the public libraries of Europe contain here and there specimens of these early copies, one of which it is thought was known to Pierre d'Ailly. It is a question if Angelus supplied the maps which accompanied these early manuscripts, and which got into the Bologna edition of 1462 (wrongly dated for 1472), and into the metrical version of Berlingièri. These maps, whether always the same in the early manuscripts or not, were later superseded by a new set of maps made by a German cartographer, Nicolaus Donis, which he added to a revision of Angelus's Latin text. These later maps were close copies of the original Greek maps, and were accompanied by others of a similar workmanship, which represented better knowledge than the Greeks had. In 1478 these Donis maps were first engraved on copper, and were used in the later editions of 1490, and slightly corrected in those of 1507 and 1508. The engravers were Schweinheim and Buckinck, and their work, following copies of it in the edition of 1490, has been admirably reproduced in The Facsimile Atlas of Nordenskiöld (Stockholm, 1889).

DONIS, 1482.

Greenland in maps.

Meanwhile, editions of the text of Angelus had been issued at Ulm in 1482, and giving additions in 1486, with woodcut maps, the same in both issues on a different projection, assigned to Dominus Nicolaus Germanus, who had, according to Nordenskiöld, completed the manuscript fifteen years earlier. It is significant, perhaps, of the slowness with which the bruit of Portuguese discoveries to the south had traveled that there is in the maps of Africa no extension of Ptolemy's knowledge. But if they are deficient in the south, they are remarkable in the north for showing the coming America in a delineation of Greenland, which, as we have already pointed out, was no new object in the manuscript portolanos, even as far back as the early part of the same century.

RUYSCH, 1508.

Two years after the death of Columbus, we find in the edition of 1508, and sometimes in the edition of 1507,—there is no difference between the two issues except in the title-page,—the first engraved map which has particular reference to the new geographical developments of the age.

1507-8. The Ruysch map.

This Ruysch map shows the African coast discoveries of the Portuguese, with the discoveries of Marco Polo towards the east. In connection with the latter, the same material which Behaim had used in his globe seems to have been equally accessible to Ruysch. The latter's map has a legend on the sea between Iceland and Greenland, saying that an island situated there was burnt up in 1456. This statement has been connected by some with another contained in the Sagas, that from an island in this channel both Greenland and Iceland could be seen.

We also learn from another legend that Portuguese vessels had pushed down the South American coast to 50° south latitude, and the historians of these early voyages have been unable to say who the pioneers were who have left us so early a description of Brazil.

Columbus and the Ruysch map.

It is inferred from a reference of Beneventanus, in his Ptolemy, respecting this map, that some aid had been derived from a map made by one of the Columbuses, and a statement that Bartholomew Columbus, in Rome in 1505, gave a map of the new discoveries to a canon of San Giovanni di Laterano has been thought to refer to such a map, which would, if it could be established, closely connect the Ruysch map with Columbus. It is also supposed to have some relation to Cabot, since a voyage which Ruysch made to the new regions westward from England may have been, and probably was, with that navigator. In this case, the reference to that part of the coast of Asia which the English discovered may record Ruysch's personal experiences. If these things can be considered as reasonably established, it gives great interest to this map of Ruysch, and connects Columbus not only with the earliest manuscript map, La Cosa of 1500, but also with the earliest engraved map of the New World, as Ruysch's map was.

Sources of the Ruysch map.

In speaking of the Ruysch map, Henry Stevens thinks that the cartographer laid down the central archipelago of America from the printed letter of Columbus, because it was the only account in print in 1507; but why restrict the sources of information to those in print, when La Cosa's map might have been copied, or the material which La Cosa employed might have been used by others, and when the Cantino map is a familiar copy of Portuguese originals, all of which might well have been known in the varied circles with which Ruysch is seen by his map to have been familiar?

Portuguese geography and maps.

While it is a fact that central and northern Europe got its cartographical knowledge of the New World almost wholly from Portugal, owing, perhaps, to the exertions of Spain to preserve their explorers' secrets, we do not, at the same time, find a single engraved Portuguese map of the early years of this period of discovery.

Portuguese portolano.

Pedro Reinel.

A large map, to show the Portuguese discoveries during years then recent, was probably made for King Emanuel, and it has come down to us, being preserved now at Munich. This chart wholly omits the Spanish work of exploration, and records only the coasts coursed by Cabral in the south, and by the Cortereals in the north. We have a further and similar record in the chart of Pedro Reinel, which could not have been made far from the same time, and which introduces to us the same prominent cape which in La Cosa's map had been called the English cape as "Cavo Razo," a name preserved to us to-day in the Cape Race of Newfoundland.

THE SO-CALLED ADMIRAL'S MAP.

Spain and Portugal conceal their geographical secrets.

There is abundant evidence of the non-communicative policy of Spain. This secretiveness was understood at the time Robert Thorne, in 1527, complained, as well as Sir Humphrey Gilbert in his Discoverie, that a similar injunction was later laid by Portugal. In Veitia Linage's Norte we read of the cabinets in which these maps were preserved, and how the Spanish pilot major and royal cosmographer alone kept the keys. There exists a document by which one of the companions of Magellan was put under a penalty of two thousand ducats not to disclose the route he traversed in that famous voyage. We know how Columbus endeavored to conceal the route of his final voyage, in which he reached the coast of Veragua.

MÜNSTER, 1532.

GLOBUS MUNDI.

A strait to India.

In the two maps of nearly equal date, being the earliest engraved charts which we have, the Ruysch map of 1508 and the so-called Admiral's map of 1507 (1513), the question of a strait leading to the Asiatic seas, which Columbus had spent so much energy in trying to find during his last voyage, is treated differently. We have seen that La Cosa confessed his uncertain knowledge by covering the place with a vignette. In the Ruysch map there is left the possibility of such a passage; in the other there is none, for the main shore is that of Asia itself, whose coast line uninterruptedly connects with that of South America. The belief in such a strait in due time was fixed, and lingered even beyond the time when Cortes showed there was no ground for it. We find it in Schöner's globes, in the Tross gores, and even so late as 1532, in the belated map of Münster.

EDEN.

Earliest map to show America made north of the Alps.

The map of the Globus Mundi (Strassburg, 1509) has some significance as being the earliest issued north of the Alps, recording both the Portuguese and Spanish discoveries; though it merely gives the projecting angle of the South American coast as representing the developments of the west.

English references to America.

Richard Eden.

It is doubtful if any reference to the new discoveries had appeared in English literature before Alexander Barclay produced in 1509 a translation of Brant's Ship of Fools, and for a few years there were only chance references which made no impression on the literary instincts of the time. It was not till after the middle of the century, in 1553, that Richard Eden, translating a section of Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia, published it in London as a Treatyse of the newe India, and English-reading people first saw a considerable account of what the rest of Europe had been doing in contrast with the English maritime apathy. Two years later (1555), Eden, drawing this time upon Peter Martyr, did much in his Decades of the Newe World to enlarge the English conceptions.

The naming of America.

But the most striking and significant of all the literary movements which grew out of the new oceanic developments was that which gave a name to the New World, and has left a continent, which Columbus unwittingly found, the monument of another's fame.

1504. September. Letter of Vespucius.

It was in September, 1504, that Vespucius, remembering an old schoolmate in Florence, Piero Soderini, who was then the perpetual Gonfalonière of that city, took what it is supposed he had written out at length concerning his experiences in the New World, and made an abstract of it in Italian. Dating this on the 4th of that month, he dispatched it to Italy. It is a question whether the original of this abridged text of Vespucius is now known, though Varnhagen, with a confidence few scholars have shared, has claimed such authenticity for a text which he has printed.

St. Dié.

Duke René.

It concerns us chiefly to know that somehow a copy of this condensed narrative of Vespucius came into the hands of his fellow-townsman, Fra Giovanni Giocondo, then in Paris at work as an architect constructing a bridge over the Seine. It is to be allowed that R. H. Major, in tracing the origin of the French text, assumes something to complete his story, and that this precise genesis of the narrative which was received by Duke René of Lorraine is open to some question. The supposition that a young Alsatian, then in Paris, Mathias Ringmann, had been a friend of Giocondo, and had been the bearer of this new version to René, is likewise a conjecture. Whether Ringmann was such a messenger or not matters little, but the time was fast approaching when this young man was to be associated with a proposition made in the little village of St. Dié, in the Vosges, which was one of those obscure but far-reaching mental premonitions so often affecting the world's history, without the backing of great names or great events. This almost unknown place was within the domain of this same Duke René, a wise man, who liked scholars and scholarly tomes. His patronage had fostered there a small college and a printing-press. There had been grouped around these agencies a number of learned men, or those ambitious of knowledge. Scholars in other parts of Europe, when they heard of this little coterie, wondered how its members had congregated there. One Walter Lud, or Gualterus Ludovicus, as they liked to Latinize his name, a dependent and secretary of Duke René, was now a man not much under sixty, and he had been the grouper and manager of this body of scholars. There had lately been brought to join them this same Mathias Ringmann, who came from Paris with all the learning that he had tried to imbibe under the tutoring of Dr. John Faber. If we believe the story as Major has worked it out, Ringmann had come to this sparse community with all the fervor for the exploits of Vespucius which he got in the French capital from associating with that Florentine's admirer, the architect Giocondo.

VESPUCIUS.

Coming to St. Dié, Ringmann had been made a professor of Latin, and with the usual nominal alternation had become known as Philesius; and as such he appears a little later in connection with a Latin version of the French of Giocondo, which was soon made by another of the St. Dié scholars, a canon of the cathedral there, Jean Bassin de Sandacourt. Still another young man, Walter Waldseemüller, had not long before been made a teacher of geography in the college, and his name, as was the wont, had been classicized into Hylacomylus.

There have now been brought before the reader all the actors in this little St. Dié drama, upon which we, as Americans, must gaze back through the centuries as upon the baptismal scene of a continent.

Waldseemüller.

Cosmographiæ Introductio.

The Duke had emphasized the cosmographical studies of the age by this appointment of an energetic young student of geography, who seems to have had a deft hand at map-making. Waldseemüller had some hand, at least, in fashioning a map of the new discoveries at the west, and the Duke had caused the map to be engraved, and we find a stray note of sales of it singly as early as 1507, though it was not till 1513 that it fairly got before the world in the Ptolemy of that year. Waldseemüller had also developed out of these studies a little cosmographical treatise, which the college press was set to work upon, and to swell it to the dignity of a book, thin as it still was, the diminutive quarto was made to include Bassin's Latin version of the Vespucius narrative, set out with some Latin verses by Ringmann. The little book called Cosmographiæ Introductio was brought out at this obscure college press in St. Dié, in April and August, 1507. There were some varieties in each of these issues, while that part which constituted the Vespucius narrative was further issued in a separate publication.

TITLE OF THE COSMOGRAPHIÆ INTRODUCTIO.

It was in this form that Vespucius's narrative was for the first time, unless Varnhagen's judgment to the contrary is superior to all others, brought before the world. The most significant quality of the little book, however, was the proposition which Waldseemüller, with his anonymous views on cosmography, advanced in the introductory parts. It is assumed by writers on the subject that it was not Waldseemüller alone who was responsible for the plan there given to name that part of the New World which Americus Vespucius had described after the voyager who had so graphically told his experiences on its shores. The plan, it is supposed, met with the approval of, or was the outcome of the counsels of, this little band of St. Dié scholars collectively. It is not the belief of students generally that this coterie, any more than Vespucius himself, ever imagined that the new regions were really disjoined from the Asiatic main, though Varnhagen contends that Vespucius knew they were.

Mundus Novus.

One thing is certainly true: that there wasno intention to apply the name which was now proposed to anything more than the continental mass of the Brazilian shore which Vespucius had coasted, and which was looked upon as a distinct region from the islands which Columbus had traversed. It had come to be believed that the archipelago of Columbus was far from the paradise of luxury and wealth that his extravagant terms called for, and which the descriptions of Marco Polo had led the world to expect, supposing the regions of the overland and oceanic discoverers to be the same. Further than this, a new expectation had been aroused by the reports which had come to Europe of the vaster proportions and of the brilliant paroquets—for such trivial aspects gave emphasis—of the more southern regions. It was an instance of the eagerness with which deluded minds, to atone for their first disappointment, grasp at the chances of a newer satisfaction. This was the hope which was entertained of this Mundus Novus of Vespucius,—not a new world in the sense of a new continent.

The Española and its neighboring regions of Columbus, and the Baccalaos of Cabot and Cortereal, clothed in imagination with the descriptions of Marco Polo, were nothing but the Old World approached from the east instead of from the west. It was different with the Mundus Novus of Vespucius. Here was in reality a new life and habitation, doubtless connected, but how it was not known, with the great eastern world of the merchants. It corresponded with nothing, so far as understood, in the Asiatic chorography. It was ready for a new name, and it was alone associated with the man who had, in the autumn of 1502, so described it, and from no one else could its name be so acceptably taken. Europe and Asia were geographically contiguous, and so might be Asia and the new "America."

Eclipse of Columbus's name.

The sudden eclipse which the name of Columbus underwent, as the fame of Vespucius ran through the popular mind, was no unusual thing in the vicissitudes of reputations. Factitious prominence is gained without great difficulty by one or for one, if popular issues of the press are worked in his interest, and if a great variety of favoring circumstances unite in giving currency to rumors and reports which tend to invest him with exclusive interest. The curious public willingly lends itself to any end that taxes nothing but its credulity and good nature.

Fame of Vespucius.

We have associated with Vespucius just the elements of such a success, while the fame of Columbus was waning to the death, namely: a stretch of continental coast, promising something more than the scattered trifles of an insalubrious archipelago; a new southern heavens, offering other glimpses of immensity; descriptions that were calculated to replace in new variety and mystery the stale stories of Cipango and Cathay: the busy yearnings of a group of young and ardent spirits, having all the apparatus of a press to apply to the making of a public sentiment; and the enthusiasm of narrators who sought to season their marvels of discovery with new delights and honors.

The hold which Vespucius had seized upon the imagination of Europe, and which doubtless served to give him prominence in the popular appreciation, as it has served many a ready and picturesque writer since, was that glowing redundancy of description, both of the earth and the southern constellations, which forms so conspicuous a feature of his narratives. It was the later voyage of Vespucius, and not his alleged voyage of 1497, which raised, as Humboldt has pointed out, the great interest which his name suggested.

Columbus and Vespucius.

Just what the notion prevailing at the time was of the respective exploits of Columbus and Vespucius is easily gathered from a letter dated May 20, 1506, which appears in a Dyalogus Johannis Stamler de diversarum gencium sectis, et mundi regionibus, published in 1508. In this treatise a reference is made to the letters of Columbus (1493) and Vespucius (1503) as concerning an insular and continental space respectively. It speaks of "Cristofer Colom, the discoverer of new islands, and of Albericus Vespucius concerning the new discovered world, to both of whom our age is most largely indebted." It will be remembered that an early misnaming of Vespucius by calling him Albericus instead of Americus, which took place in one of the early editions of his narrative, remained for some time to confuse the copiers of them.

Vespucius on gravitation.

If we may judge from a diagram which Vespucius gives of a globe with two standing men on it ninety degrees apart, each dropping a line to the centre of the earth, this navigator had grasped, together with the idea of the sphericity of the globe, the essential conditions of gravitation. There could be no up-hill sailing when the zenith was always overhead. Curiously enough, the supposition of Columbus, when as he sailed on his third voyage he found the air grow colder, was that he was actually sailing up-hill, ascending a protuberance of the earth which was like the stem end of a pear, with the crowning region of the earthly paradise atop of all! Such contrasts show the lesser navigator to be the greater physicist, and they go not a small way in accounting for the levelness of head which gained the suffrages of the wise.

PART OF MAP IN THE PTOLEMY OF 1513.

PART OF MAP IN THE PTOLEMY OF 1513.

1508. Duke René died.

1509. Globus Mundi.

When Duke René, upon whom so much had depended in the little community at St. Dié, died, in 1508, the geographical printing schemes of Waldseemüller and his fellows received a severe reverse, and for a few years we hear nothing more of the edition of Ptolemy which had been planned. The next year (1509), Waldseemüller, now putting his name to his little treatise, was forced, because of the failure of the college press, to go to Strassburg to have a new edition of it printed (1509). The proposals for naming the continental discoveries of Vespucius seem not in the interim to have excited any question, and so they are repeated. We look in vain in the copy of this edition which Ferdinand Columbus bought at Venice in July, 1521, and which is preserved at Seville, for any marginal protest. The author of the Historie, how far soever Ferdinand may have been responsible for that book, is equally reticent. There was indeed no reason why he should take any exception. The fitness of the appellation was accepted as in no way invalidating the claim of Columbus to discoveries farther to the north; and in another little tract, printed at the same time at Grüniger's Strassburg press, the anonymous Globus Mundi, the name "America" is adopted in the text, though the small bit of the new coast shown in its map is called by a translation of Vespucius's own designation merely "Newe Welt."

1513. The Strassburg Ptolemy.

The Ptolemy scheme bore fruit at last, and at Strassburg, also, for here the edition whose maps are associated with the name of Waldseemüller, and whose text shows some of the influence of a Greek manuscript of the old geographer which Ringmann had earlier brought from Italy, came out in 1513. Here was a chance, in a book far more sure to have influence than the little anonymous tract of 1507, to impress the new name America upon the world of scholars and observers, and the opportunity was not seized. It is not easy to divine the cause of such an omission. The edition has two maps which show this Vespucian continent in precisely the same way, though but one of them shows also to its full extent the region of Columbus's explorations. On one of these maps the southern regions have no designation whatever, and on the other, the "Admiral's map," there is a legend stretched across it, assigning the discovery of the region to Columbus.

We do not know, in all the contemporary literature which has come down to us, that up to 1513 there had been any rebuke at the ignorance or temerity which appeared in its large bearing to be depriving Columbus of a rightful honor. That in 1509 Waldseemüller should have enforced the credit given to Vespucius, and in 1513 revoked it in favor of Columbus, seems to indicate qualms of conscience of which we have no other trace. Perhaps, indeed, this reversion of sympathy is of itself an evidence that Waldseemüller had less to do with the edition than has been supposed. It is too much to assert that Waldseemüller repented of his haste, but the facts in one light would indicate it.

The name America begins to be accepted.

THE TROSS GORES.

Like many such headlong projects, however, the purpose had passed beyond the control of its promoters. The euphony, if not the fitness, of the name America had attracted attention, and there are several printed and manuscript globes and maps in existence which at an early date adopted that designation for the southern continent. Nordenskiöld (Facsimile Atlas, p. 42) quotes from the commentaries of the German Coclæus, contained in the Meteorologia Aristotelis of Jacobus Faber (Nuremberg, 1512) a passage referring to the "Nova Americi terra."

1516-17. First in a map.

To complicate matters still more, within a few years after this an undated edition of Waldseemüller's tract appeared at Lyons,—perhaps without his participation,—which was always found, down to 1881, without a map, though the copies known were very few; but in that year a copy with a map was discovered, now owned by an American collector, in which the proposition of the text is enforced with the name America on the representation of South America. A section of this map is here given as the Tross Gores. In the present condition of our knowledge of the matter, it was thus at a date somewhere about 1516-17 that the name appeared first in any printed map, unless, indeed, we allow a somewhat earlier date to two globes in the Hauslab collection at Vienna. On the date of these last objects there is, however, much difference of opinion, and one of them has been depicted and discussed in the Mittheilungen of the Geographische Gesellschaft (1886, p. 364) of Vienna. Here, as in the descriptive texts, it must be clearly kept in mind, however, that no one at this date thought of applying the name to more than the land which Vespucius had found stretching south beyond the equator on the east side of South America, and which Balboa had shown to have a similar trend on the west. The islands and region to the north, which Columbus and Cabot had been the pioneers in discovering, still remained a mystery in their relations to Asia, and there was yet a long time to elapse before the truth should be manifest to all, that a similar expanse of ocean lay westerly at the north, as was shown by Balboa to extend in the same direction at the south.

THE HAUSLAB GLOBE.

This Vespucian baptism of South America now easily worked its way to general recognition. It is found in a contemporary set of gores which Nordenskiöld has of late brought to light, and was soon adopted by the Nuremberg globe-maker, Schöner (1515, etc.); by Vadianus at Vienna, when editing Pomponius Mela (1515); by Apian on a map used in an edition of Solinus, edited by Camers (1520); and by Lorenz Friess, who had been of Duke René's coterie and a correspondent of Vespucius, on a map introduced into the Grüniger Ptolemy, published at Strassburg (1522), which also reproduced the Waldseemüller map of 1513. This is the earliest of the Ptolemies in which we find the name accepted on its maps.

1522. The name first in a Ptolemy.

THE NORDENSKIÖLD GORES.

APIANUS, 1520.

SCHÖNER GLOBE, 1515.

FRIESS (Frisius), IN THE PTOLEMY OF 1522.

There is one significant fact concerning the conflict of the Crown with the heirs of Columbus, which followed upon the Admiral's death, and in which the advocates of the government sought to prove that the claim of Columbus to have discovered the continental shore about the Gulf of Paria in 1498 was not to be sustained in view of visits by others at an earlier date. This significant fact is that Vespucius is not once mentioned during the litigation. It is of course possible, and perhaps probable, that it was for the interests of both parties to keep out of view a servant of Portugal trenching upon what was believed to be Spanish territories. The same impulse could hardly have influenced Ferdinand Columbus in the silent acquiescence which, as a contemporary informs us, was his attitude towards the action of the St. Dié professors. There seems little doubt of his acceptance of a view, then undoubtedly common, that there was no conflict of the claims of the respective navigators, because their different fields of exploration had not brought such claims in juxtaposition.

Who first landed on the southern main?

Vespucius's maps.

Vespucius not privy to the naming.

Following, however, upon the assertion of Waldseemüller, that Vespucius had "found" this continental tract needing a name, there grew up a belief in some quarters, and deducible from the very obscure chronology of his narrative, which formulated itself in a statement that Vespucius had really been the first to set foot on any part of this extended main. It was here that very soon the jealousy of those who had the good name of Columbus in their keeping began to manifest itself, and some time after 1527,—if we accept that year as the date of his beginning work on the Historie,—Las Casas, who had had some intimate relations with Columbus, tells us that the report was rife of Vespucius himself being privy to such pretensions. Unless Las Casas, or the reporters to whom he referred, had material of which no one now has knowledge, it is certain that there is no evidence connecting Vespucius with the St. Dié proposition, and it is equally certain that evidence fails to establish beyond doubt the publication of any map bearing the name America while Vespucius lived. He had been made pilot major of Spain March 22, 1508, and had died February 22, 1512. We have no chart made by Vespucius himself, though it is known that in 1518 such a chart was in the possession of Ferdinand, brother of Charles the Fifth. The recovery of this chart would doubtless render a signal service in illuminating this and other questions of early American cartography. It might show us how far, if at all, Vespucius "sinfully failed towards the Admiral," as Las Casas reports of him, and adds: "If Vespucius purposely gave currency to this belief of his first setting foot on the main, it was a great wickedness; and if it was not done intentionally, it looks like it." With all this predisposition, however, towards an implication of Vespucius, Las Casas was cautious enough to consider that, after all, it may have been the St. Dié coterie who were alone responsible for starting the rumor.

"America" not used in Spain.

1541. Mercator first applied the name to both North and South America.

It is very clear that in Spain there had been no recognition of the name "America," nor was it ever officially recognized by the Spanish government. Las Casas understood that it had been applied by "foreigners," who had, as he says, "called America what ought to be called Columba." Just what date should attach to this protest of Las Casas is not determinable. If it was later than the gore-map of Mercator in 1541, which was the first, so far as is known, to apply the name to both North and South America, there is certainly good reason for the disquietude of Las Casas. If it was before that, it was because, with the progress of discovery, it had become more and more clear that all parts of the new regions were component parts of an absolutely new continent, upon which the name of the first discoverer of any part of it, main or insular, ought to have been bestowed. That it should be left to "foreign writers," as Las Casas said, to give a name representing a rival interest to a world that Spanish enterprise had made known was no less an indignity to Spain than to her great though adopted Admiral.

Spread of the name in central Europe.

It happens that the suggestion which sprang up in the Vosges worked steadily onward through the whole of central Europe. That it had so successful a propagation is owing, beyond a doubt, as much to the exclusive spirit of the Spanish government in keeping to itself its hydrographical progress as to any other cause. We have seen how the name spread through Germany and Austria. It was taken up by Stobnicza in Poland in 1512, in a Cracow introduction to Ptolemy; and many other of the geographical writers of central and southern Europe adopted the designation. The New Interlude, published in England in 1519, had used it, and towards the middle of the century the fame of Vespucius had occupied England, so far as Sir Thomas More and William Cunningham represent it, to the almost total obscuration of Columbus.

It was but a question of time when Vespucius would be charged with promoting his own glory by borrowing the plumes of Columbus. Whether Las Casas, in what has been quoted, initiated such accusations or not, the account of that writer was in manuscript and could have had but small currency.

1533. Schöner accuses Vespucius of participation in the injustice.

The first accusation in print, so far as has been discovered, came from the German geographer, Johann Schöner, who, having already in his earlier globes adopted the name America, now in a tract called Opusculum Geographicum, which he printed at Nuremberg in 1533, openly charged Vespucius with attaching his own name to a region of India Superior. Two years later, Servetus, while he repeated in his Ptolemy of 1535 the earlier maps bearing the name America, entered in his text a protest against its use by alleging distinctly that Columbus was earlier than Vespucius in finding the new main.

Within a little more than a year from the death of Vespucius, and while the maps assigned to Waldseemüller were pressed on the attention of scholars, the integralness of the great southern continent, to which a name commemorating Americus had been given, was made manifest, or at least probable, by the discovery of Balboa.

A barrier suspected.

Let us now see how the course of discovery was finding record during these early years of the sixteenth century in respect to the great but unsuspected barrier which actually interposed in the way of those who sought Asia over against Spain.

Discoveries in the north.

1504. Normans and Bretons.

In the north, the discoveries of the English under Cabot, and of the Portuguese under the Cortereals, soon led the Normans and Bretons from Dieppe and Saint Malo to follow in the wake of such predecessors. As early as 1504 the fishermen of these latter peoples seem to have been on the northern coasts, and we owe to them the name of Cape Breton, which is thought to be the oldest French name in our American geography. It is the "Gran Capitano" of Ramusio who credits the Bretons with these early visits at the north, though we get no positive cartographical record of such visits till 1520, in a map which is given by Kunstmann in his Atlas.

1505. Portuguese.

Again, in 1505, some Portuguese appear to have been on the Newfoundland coast under the royal patronage of Henry VII. of England, and by 1506 the Portuguese fishermen were regular frequenters of the Newfoundland banks. We find in the old maps Portuguese names somewhat widely scattered on the neighboring coast lines, for the frequenting of the region by the fishermen of that nation continued well towards the close of the century.

1506. Spaniards.

There are also stories of one Velasco, a Spaniard, visiting the St. Lawrence in 1506, and Juan de Agramonte in 1511 entered into an agreement with the Spanish King to pursue discovery in these parts more actively, but we have no definite knowledge of results.

1517. Sebastian Cabot.

1521. Portuguese.

The death of Ferdinand, January 23, 1516, would seem to have put a stop to a voyage which had already been planned for Spain by Sebastian Cabot, to find a northwest passage; but the next year (1517) Cabot, in behalf of England, had sailed to Hudson's Strait, and thence north to 67° 30', finding "no night there," and observing extraordinary variations of the compass. Somewhat later there are the very doubtful claims of the Portuguese to explorations under Fagundes about the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1521.

1506. Ango's captains.

Denys's map.

1518. Léry.

By 1506 also there is something like certainty respecting the Normans, and under the influence of a notable Dieppese, Jean Ango, we soon meet a class of adventurous mariners tempting distant and marvelous seas. We read of Pierre Crignon, and Thomas Aubert, both of Dieppe, Jean Denys of Honfleur, and Jean Parmentier, all of whom have come down to us through the pages of Ramusio. It is of Jean Denys in 1506, and of Thomas Aubert a little later, that we find the fullest recitals. To Denys there has been ascribed a mysterious chart of the Gulf of St. Lawrence; but if the copy which is preserved represents it, there can be no hesitation in discarding it as a much later cartographical record. The original is said to have been found in the archives of the ministry of war in Paris so late as 1854, but no such map is found there now. The copy which was made for the Canadian archives is at Ottawa, and I have been favored by the authorities there with a tracing of it. No one of authority will be inclined to dispute the judgment of Harrisse that it is apocryphal. We are accordingly left in uncertainty just how far at this time the contour of the Golfo Quadrago, as the Gulf of St. Lawrence was called, was made out. Aubert is said to have brought to France seven of the natives of the region in 1509. Ten years or more later (1519, etc.), the Baron de Léry is thought to have attempted a French settlement thereabouts, of which perhaps the only traces were some European cattle, the descendants of his small herd landed there in 1528, which were found on Sable Island many years later.

1526. Nicholas Don.

We know from Herrera that in 1526 Nicholas Don, a Breton, was fishing off Baccalaos, and Rut tells us that in 1527 Norman and Breton vessels were pulling fish on the shores of Newfoundland. Such mentions mark the early French knowledge of these northern coasts, but there is little in it all to show any contribution to geographical developments.

PETER MARTYR, 1511.

PONCE DE LEON. [From Barcia's Herrera.]

Attempts to connect the northern discoveries with those of the Spanish.

1511. Peter Martyr's map.

1512. Ponce de Leon.

1513. March.

Florida.

Before this, however, the first serious attempt of which we have incontrovertible evidence was made to connect these discoveries in the north with those of the Spanish in the Antilles. As early as 1511 the map given by Peter Martyr had shown that, from the native reports or otherwise, a notion had arisen of lands lying north of Cuba. In 1512 Ponce de Leon was seeking a commission to authorize him to go and see what this reported land was like, with its fountain of youth. He got it February 23, 1512, when Ferdinand commissioned him "to find and settle the island of Bimini," if none had already been there, or if Portugal had not already acquired possession in any part that he sought. Delays in preparation postponed the actual departure of his expedition from Porto Rico till March, 1513. On the 23d of that month, Easter Sunday, he struck the mainland somewhere opposite the Bahamas, and named the country Florida, from the day of the calendar. He tracked the coast northward to a little above 30° north latitude. Then he retraced his way, and rounding the southern cape, went well up the western side of the peninsula. Whether any stray explorers had been before along this shore may be a question. Private Spanish or Portuguese adventurers, or even Englishmen, had not been unknown in neighboring waters some years earlier, as we have evidence. We find certainly in this voyage of Ponce de Leon for the first time an unmistakable official undertaking, which we might expect would soon have produced its cartographical record. The interdicts of the Council of the Indies were, however, too powerful, and the old lines of the Cantino map still lingered in the maps for some years, though by 1520 the Floridian peninsula began to take recognizable shape in certain Spanish maps.

PONCE DE LEON'S TRACK.

Bimini.

Just what stood for Bimini in the reports of this expedition is not clear; but there seems to have been a vague notion of its not being the same as Florida, for when Ponce de Leon got a new patent in September, 1514, he was authorized to settle both "islands," Bimini and Florida, and Diego Colon as viceroy was directed to help on the expedition. Seven years, however, passed in delays, so that it was not till 1521 that he attempted to make a settlement, but just at what point is not known. Sickness and loss in encounters with the Indians soon discouraged him, and he returned to Cuba to die of an arrow wound received in one of the forays of the natives.

1519. Pineda.

It was still a question if Florida connected with any adjacent lands. Several minor expeditions had added something to the stretch of coast, but the main problem still stood unsolved. In 1519 Pineda had made the circuit of the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and at the river Panuco he had been challenged by Cortes as trenching on his government. Turning again eastward, Pineda found the mouth of the river named by him Del Espiritu Santo, which passes with many modern students as the first indication in history of the great Mississippi, while others trace the first signs of that river to Cabeça de Vaca in 1528, or to the passage higher up its current by De Soto in 1541. Believing it at first the long-looked-for strait to pass to the Indies, Pineda entered it, only to be satisfied that it must gather the watershed of a continent, which in this part was now named Amichel. It seemed accordingly certain that no passage to the west was to be found in this part of the gulf, and that Florida must be more than an island.

1520. Ayllon.

Spaniards in Virginia.

While these explorations were going on in the gulf, others were conducted on the Atlantic side of Florida. If the Pompey Stone which has been found in New York State, to the confusion of historical students, be accepted as genuine, it is evidence that the Spaniard had in 1520 penetrated from some point on the coast to that region. In 1520 we get demonstrable proof, when Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon sent a caravel under Gordillo, which joined company on the way with another vessel bound on a slave-hunting expedition, and the two, proceeding northward, sighted the main coast at a river which they found to be in thirty-three and a half degrees of north latitude, on the South Carolina coast. They returned without further exploration. Ayllon, without great success, attempted further explorations in 1525; but in 1526 he went again with greater preparations, and made his landfall a little farther north, near the mouth of the Wateree River, which he called the Jordan, and sailed on to the Chesapeake, where, with the help of negro slaves, then first introduced into this region, he began the building of a town at or near the spot where the English in the next century founded Jamestown; or at least this is the conjecture of Dr. Shea. Here Ayllon died of a pestilential fever October 18, 1526, when the disheartened colonists, one hundred and fifty out of the original five hundred, returned to Santo Domingo.

THE AYLLON MAP.

1524. Gomez.

Chaves's map.

1529. Ribero's map.

While these unfortunate experiences were in progress, Estevan Gomez, sent by the Spanish government, after the close of the conference at Badajos, to make sure that there was no passage to the Moluccas anywhere along this Atlantic coast, started in the autumn of 1524, if the data we have admit of that conclusion as to the time, from Corunna, in the north of Spain. He proceeded at once, as Charles V. had directed him, to the Baccalaos region, striking the mainland possibly at Labrador, and then turned south, carefully examining all inlets. We have no authoritative narrative sanctioned by his name, or by that of any one accompanying the expedition; nor has the map which Alonso Chaves made to conform to what was reported by Gomez been preserved, but the essential features of the exploration are apparently embodied in the great map of Ribero (1529), and we have sundry stray references in the later chroniclers. From all this it would seem that Gomez followed the coast southward to the point of Florida, and made it certain to most minds that no such passage to India existed, though there was a lingering suspicion that the Gulf of St. Lawrence had not been sufficiently explored.

Shores of the Caribbean Sea.

Ojeda and Nicuessa.

Let us turn now to the southern shores of the Caribbean Sea. New efforts at colonizing here were undertaken in 1508-9. By this time the coast had been pretty carefully made out as far as Honduras, largely through the explorations of Ojeda and Juan de la Cosa. The scheme was a dual one, and introduces us to two new designations of the regions separated by that indentation of the coast known as the Gulf of Uraba. Here Ojeda and Nicuessa were sent to organize governments, and rule their respective provinces of Nueva Andalusia and Castilla del Oro for the period of four years. Mention has already been made of this in the preceding chapter. They delayed getting to their governments, quarreled for a while about their bounds on each other, fought the natives with desperation but not with much profit, lost La Cosa in one of the encounters, and were thwarted in their purpose of holding Jamaica as a granary and in getting settlers from Española by the alertness of Diego Colon, who preferred to be tributary to no one.

All this had driven Ojeda to great stress in the little colony of San Sebastian which he had founded. He attempted to return for aid to Española, and was wrecked on the voyage. This caused him to miss his lieutenant Enciso, who was on his way to him with recruits. So Ojeda passes out of history, except so far as he tells his story in the testimony he gave in the suit of the heirs of Columbus in 1513-15.

Pizarro.

New heroes were coming on. A certain Pizarro had been left in command by Ojeda,—not many years afterwards to be heard of. One Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, a poor and debt-burdened fugitive, was on board of Enciso's ship, and had wit enough to suggest that a region like San Sebastian, inhabited by tribes which used poisoned arrows, was not the place for a colony struggling for existence and dependent on foraging. So they removed the remnants of the colony, which Enciso had turned back as they were escaping, to the other side of the bay, and in this way the new settlement came within the jurisdiction of Nicuessa, whom a combination soon deposed and shipped to sea, never to be heard of. It was in these commotions that Vasco Nuñez de Balboa brought himself into a prominence that ended in his being commissioned by Diego Colon as governor of the new colony. He had, meanwhile, got more knowledge of a great sea at the westward than Columbus had acquired on the coast of Veragua in 1503. Balboa rightly divined that its discovery, if he could effect it, would serve him a good purpose in quieting any jealousies of his rule, of which he was beginning to observe symptoms.

BALBOA. [From Barcia's Herrera.]

1513. Balboa and the South Sea.

So on the 1st of September, 1513, he set out in the direction which the natives hadindicated, and by the 24th he had reached a mountain from the topof which his guides told him he would behold the sea. On the 25th his party ascended, himself in front, and it was not long before he stood gazing upon the distant ocean, the first of Europeans to discern the long-coveted sea. Down the other slope the Spaniards went. The path was a difficult one, and it was three days before one of his advanced squads reached the beach. Not till the next day, the 29th, did Vasco Nuñez himself join those in advance, when, striding into the tide, he took possession of the sea and its bordering lands in the name of his sovereigns. It was on Saint Miguel's Day, and the Bay of Saint Miguel marks the spot to-day. Towards the end of January, 1514, he was again with the colony at Antigua del Darien. Thence, in March, he dispatched a messenger to Spain with news of the great discovery.

Pedrarias.

1517. Balboa executed.

This courier did not reach Europe till after a new expedition had been dispatched under Pedrarias, and with him went a number of followers, who did in due time their part in thridding and designating these new paths of exploration. We recognize among them Hernando de Soto, Bernal Diaz, the chronicler of the exploits of Cortes, and Oviedo, the historian. It was from April till June, 1514, that Pedrarias was on his way, and it was not long before the new governor with his imposing array of strength brought the recusant Balboa to trial, out of which he emerged burdened with heavy fines. The new governor planned at once to reap the fruits of Balboa's discovery. An expedition was sent along his track, which embarked on the new sea and gathered spoils where it could. Pedrarias soon grew jealous of Balboa, for it was not without justice that the state of the augmented colony was held to compare unfavorably with the conditions which Balboa had maintained during his rule. But constancy was never of much prevalence in these days, and Balboa's chains, lately imposed, were stricken off to give him charge of an exploration of the sea which he had discovered. Once here, Balboa planned new conquests and a new independency. Pedrarias, hearing of it through a false friend of Balboa, enticed the latter into his neighborhood, and a trial was soon set on foot, which ended in the execution of Balboa and his abettors. This was in 1517.

It was not long before Pedrarias removed his capital to Panama, and in 1519 and during the few following years his captains pushed their explorations northerly along the shores of the South Sea, as the new ocean had been at once called.

1515. Biru.

1519. Panama founded.

As early as 1515 Pizarro and Morales had wandered down the coast southward to a region called Biru by the natives, and this was as far as adventure had carried any Spaniard, during the ten years since Balboa's discovery. They had learned here of a rich region farther on, and it got to be spoken of by the same name, or by a perversion of it, as Peru. In this interval the town of Panama had been founded (1519), and Pizarro and Almagro, with the priest Luque, were among those to whom allotments were made.

Peru.

Chili.

Chiloe.

It was by these three associates, in 1524 and 1526, that the expeditions were organized which led to the exploration of the coasts of Peru and the conquest of the region. The equator was crossed in 1526; in 1527 they reached 9° south. It was not till 1535 that, in the progress of events, a knowledge of the coast was extended south to the neighborhood of Lima, which was founded in that year. In the autumn of 1535, Almagro started south to make conquest of Chili, and the bay of Valparaiso was occupied in September, 1536. Eight years later, in 1544, explorations were pushed south to 41°. It was only in 1557 that expeditions reached the archipelago of Chiloe, and the whole coast of South America on the Pacific was made out with some detail down to the region which Magellan had skirted, as will be shortly shown.

1508. Ocampo and Cuba.

It will be remembered that in 1503 Columbus had struck the coast of Honduras west of Cape Gracias à Dios. He learned then of lands to the northwest from some Indians whom he met in a canoe, but his eagerness to find the strait of his dreams led him south. It was fourteen years before the promise of that canoe was revealed. In 1508 Ocampo had found the western extremity of Cuba, and made the oath of Columbus ridiculous.

1517. Yucatan.

In 1517 a slave-hunting expedition, having steered towards the west from Cuba, discovered the shores of Yucatan; and the next year (1518) the real exploration of that region began when Juan de Grijalva, a nephew of the governor of Cuba, led thither an expedition which explored the coast of Yucatan and Mexico.

1518. Cortes.

1519.

When Grijalva returned to Cuba in 1518, it was to find an expedition already planned to follow up his discoveries, and Hernando Cortes, who had been in the New World since 1504, had been chosen to lead it, with instructions to make further explorations of the coast,—a purpose very soon to become obscured in other objects. He sailed on the 17th of November, and stopped along the coast of Cuba for recruits, so it was not till February 18, 1519, that he sunk the shores of Cuba behind him, and in March he was skirting the Yucatan shore and sailed on to San Juan de Uloa. In due time, forgetting his instructions, and caring for other conquests than those of discovery, he began his march inland. The story of the conquest of Mexico does not help us in the aim now in view, and we leave it untold.

GRIJALVA. [From Barcia's Herrera.]

Quinsay.

It was not long after this conquest before belated apostles of the belief of Columbus appeared, urging that the capital of Montezuma was in reality the Quinsay of Marco Polo, with its great commercial interests, as was maintained by Schöner in his Opusculum Geographicum in 1533.

GLOBE GIVEN IN SCHÖNER'S OPUSCULUM GEOGRAPHICUM, 1533.

1520. Garay.

Gulf of Mexico.

1524. Cortes's Gulf of Mexico.

Yucatan as an island.

We have seen how Pineda's expedition to the northern parts of the Gulf of Mexico in 1519 had improved the knowledge of that shore, and we have a map embodying these explorations, which was sent to Spain in 1520 by Garay, then governor of Jamaica. It was now pretty clear that the blank spaces of earlier maps, leaving it uncertain if there was a passage westerly somewhere in the northwest corner of the gulf, should be filled compactly. Still, a belief that such a passage existed somewhere in the western contour of the gulf was not readily abandoned. Cortes, when he sent to Spain his sketch of the gulf, which was published there in 1524, was dwelling on the hope that some such channel existed near Yucatan, and his insular delineation of that peninsula, with a shadowy strait at its base, was eagerly grasped by the cartographers. Such a severance finds a place in the map of Maiollo of 1527, which is preserved in the Ambrosian library at Milan. Grijalva, some years earlier, had been sent, as we have seen, to sail round Yucatan; and though there are various theories about the origin of that name, it seems likely enough that the tendency to give it an insular form arose from a misconception of the Indian appellation. At all events, the island of Yucatan lingered long in the early maps.

GULF OF MEXICO, 1520.

1523. Cortes.

In 1523 Cortes had sent expeditions up the Pacific, and one up the Atlantic side of North America, to find the wished-for passage; but in vain.

Spanish and Portuguese rivalries.

Meanwhile, important movements were making by the Portuguese beyond that great sea of the south which Balboa had discovered. These movements were little suspected by the Spaniards till the development of them brought into contact these two great oceanic rivals.

GULF OF MEXICO, BY CORTES.

1511. Moluccas.

A western passage sought at the south.

The Portuguese, year after year, had extended farther and farther their conquests by the African route. Arabia, India, Malacca, Sumatra, fell under their sway, and their course was still eastward, until in 1511 the coveted land of spices, the clove and the nutmeg, was reached in the Molucca Islands. This progress of the Portuguese had been watched with a jealous eye by Spain. It was a question if, in passing to these islands, the Portuguese had not crossed the line of demarcation as carried to the antipodes. If they had, territory neighboring to the Spanish American discoveries had been appropriated by that rival power wholly unconfronted. This was simply because the Spanish navigators had not as yet succeeded in finding a passage through the opposing barrier of what they were beginning to suspect was after all an intervening land. Meanwhile, Columbus and all since his day having failed to find such a passage by way of the Caribbean Sea, and no one yet discovering any at the north, nothing was left but to seek it at the south. This was the only chance of contesting with the Portuguese the rights which occupation was establishing for them at the Moluccas.

1508. Pinzon and Solis.

On the 29th of June, 1508, a new expedition left San Lucar under Pinzon and Solis. They made their landfall near Cape St. Augustine, and, passing south along the coast of what had now come to be commonly called Brazil, they traversed the opening of the broad estuary of the La Plata without knowing it, and went five degrees beyond (40° south latitude) without finding the sought-for passage.

MAIOLLO MAP, 1527.

1511. Portuguese at Rio de Janeiro.

Ferdinand Columbus and the western passage.

There is some reason to suppose that as early as 1511 the Portuguese had become in some degree familiar with the coast about Rio de Janeiro, and there is a story of one Juan de Braza settling near this striking bay at this early day. It was during the same year (1511) that Ferdinand Columbus prepared his Colon de Concordia, and in this he maintained the theory of a passage to be found somewhere beyond the point towards the south which the explorers had thus far reached.

DE COSTA'S DRAWING FROM THE LENOX GLOBE.

SCHÖNER'S GLOBE, 1520.

1516. Solis.

1519. Magellan.

A few years later (1516) the Spanish King sent Juan Diaz de Solis to search anew for a passage. He found the La Plata, and for a while hoped he had discovered the looked-for strait. Magellan, who had taken some umbrage during his Portuguese service, came finally to the Spanish King, and, on the plea that the Moluccas fell within the Spanish range under the line of demarcation, suggested an expedition to occupy them. He professed to be able to reach them by a strait which he could find somewhere to the south of the La Plata. It has long been a question if Magellan's anticipation was based simply on a conjecture that, as Africa had been found to end in a southern point, America would likewise be discovered to have a similar southern cape. It has also been a question if Magellan actually had any tidings from earlier voyages to afford a ground for believing in such a geographical fact. It is possible that other early discoverers had been less careful than Solis, and had been misled by the broad estuary of the La Plata to think that it was really an interoceanic passage. Some such intelligence would seem to have instigated the conditions portrayed in one early map, but the general notion of cartographers at the time terminates the known coast at Cape Frio, near Rio de Janeiro, as is seen to be the case in the Ptolemy map of 1513. There is a story, originating with Pigafetta, his historian, that Magellan had seen a map of Martin Behaim, showing a southern cape; but if this map existed, it revealed probably nothing more than a conjectural termination, as shown in the Lenox and earliest Schöner globes of 1515 and 1520. Still, Wieser and Nordenskiöld are far from being confident that some definite knowledge of such a cape had not been attained, probably, as it is thought, from private commercial voyage of which we may have a record in the Newe Zeitung and in the Luculentissima Descriptio. It is to be feared that the fact, whatever it may have been, must remain shadowy.

MAGELLAN.

Magellan's fleet was ready in August, 1519. His preparation had been watched with jealousy by Portugal, and it was even hinted that if the expedition sailed a matrimonial alliance of Spain and Portugal which was contemplated must be broken off. Magellan was appealed to by the Portuguese ambassador to abandon his purpose, as one likely to embroil the two countries. The stubborn navigator was not to be persuaded, and the Spanish King made him governor of all countries he might discover on the "back side" of the New World.

In the late days of 1519, Magellan touched the coast at Rio de Janeiro, where, remaining awhile, he enjoyed the fruits of its equable climate. Then, passing on, he crossed the mouth of the La Plata, and soon found that he had reached a colder climate and was sailing along a different coast. The verdure which had followed the warm currents from the equatorial north gave way to the concomitants of an icy flow from the Antarctic regions which made the landscape sterile. So on he went along this inhospitable region, seeking the expected strait. His search in every inlet was so faithful that he neared the southern goal but slowly. The sternness of winter caught his little barks in a harbor near 50° south latitude, and his Spanish crews, restless under the command of a Portuguese, revolted. The rebels were soon more numerous than the faithful. The position was more threatening than any Columbus had encountered, but the Portuguese had a hardy courage and majesty of command that the Genoese never could summon. Magellan confronted the rebels so boldly that they soon quailed. He was in unquestioned command of his own vessels from that time forward. The fate of the conquered rioters, Juan de Carthagena and Sanchez de la Reina, cast on the inhospitable shore of Patagonia in expiation of their offense, is in strong contrast to the easy victory which Columbus too often yielded, to those who questioned his authority. The story of Magellan's pushing his fleet southward and through the strait with a reluctant crew is that of one of the royally courageous acts of the age of discovery.

1520. October. Magellan enters the strait.

On October 21, 1520, the ships entered the longed-for strait, and on the 28th of November they sailed into the new sea; then stretching their course nearly north, keeping well in sight of the coast till the Chiloe Archipelago was passed, the ships steered west of Juan Fernandez without seeing it, and subsequently gradually turned their prows towards the west.

MAGELLAN'S STRAITS BY PIZAFETTA. [The north is at the bottom.]

The western way discovered.

It is not necessary for our present purpose to follow the incidents of the rest of this wondrous voyage,—the reaching the Ladrones and the Asiatic islands, Magellan's own life sacrificed, all his ships but one abandoned or lost, the passing of the Cape of Good Hope by the "Victoria," and her arrival on September 6, 1522, under Del Cano, at the Spanish harbor from which the fleet had sailed. The Emperor bestowed on this lucky first of circumnavigators the proud motto, inscribed on a globe, "Primus circumdedisti me." The Spaniards' western way to the Moluccas was now disclosed.

MAGELLAN'S STRAIT.

Pacific Ocean.

The South Sea of Balboa, as soon as Magellan had established its extension farther south, took from Magellan's company the name Pacific, though the original name which Balboa had applied to it did not entirely go out of vogue for a long time in those portions contiguous to the waters bounding the isthmus and its adjacent lands.

North America and Asia held to be one.

For a long time after it was known that South America was severed, as Magellan proved, from Asia, the belief was still commonly held that North America and Asia were one and continuous. While no one ventures to suspect that Columbus had any prescience of these later developments, there are those like Varnhagen who claim a distinct insight for Vespucius; but it is by no means clear, in the passages which are cited, that Vespucius thought the continental mass of South America more distinct from Asia than Columbus did, when the volume of water poured out by the Orinoco convinced the Admiral that he was skirting a continent, and not an island. That Columbus thought to place there the region of the Biblical paradise shows that its continental features did not dissociate it from Asia. The New World of Vespucius was established by his own testimony as hardly more than a new part of Asia.

1525. Loyasa.

De Hoces discovers Cape Horn.

In 1525 Loyasa was sent to make further examination of Magellan's Strait. It was at this time that one of his ships, commanded by Francisco de Hoces, was driven south in February, 1526, and discovered Cape Horn, rendering the insular character of Tierra del Fuego all but certain. The fact was kept secret, and the map makers were not generally made aware of this terminal cape till Drake saw it, fifty-two years later. It was not till 1615-17 that Schouten and Lemaire made clear the eastern limits of Tierra del Fuego when they discovered the passage between that island and Staten Island, and during the same interval Schouten doubled Cape Horn for the first time. It was in 1618-19 that the observations of Nodal first gave the easterly bend to the southern extremity of the continent.

1535. Chili.

The last stretch of the main coast of South America to be made out was that on the Pacific side from the point where Magellan turned away from it up to the bounds of Peru, where Pizarro and his followers had mapped it. This trend of the coast began to be understood about 1535; but it was some years before its details got into maps. The final definition of it came from Camargo's voyage in 1540, and was first embodied with something like accuracy in Juan Freire's map of 1546, and was later helped by explorations from the north. But this proximate precision gave way in 1569 to a protuberant angle of the Chili coast, as drawn by Mercator, which in turn lingered on the chart till the next century.

Cartographical views.

We need now to turn from these records of the voyagers to see what impression their discoveries had been making upon the cartographers and geographers of Europe.

Sylvanus's Ptolemy. 1511.

Bernardus Sylvanus Ebolensis, in a new edition of Ptolemy which was issued at Venice in 1511, paid great attention to the changes necessary to make Ptolemy's descriptions correspond to later explorations in the Old World, but less attention to the more important developments of the New World. Nordenskiöld thinks that this condition of Sylvanus's mind shows how little had been the impression yet made at Venice by the discoveries of Columbus and Da Gama. The maps of this Ptolemy are woodcuts, with type let in for the names, which are printed in red, in contrast with the black impressed from the block.

Nordenskiöld gores.

Sylvanus's map is the second engraved map showing the new discoveries, and the earliest of the heart-shaped projections. It has in "Regalis Domus" the earliest allusion to the Cortereal voyage in a printed map. Sylvanus follows Ruysch in making Greenland a part of Asia. The rude map gores of about the same date which Nordenskiöld has brought to the attention of scholars, and which he considers to have been made at Ingolstadt, agree mainly with this map of Sylvanus, and in respect to the western world both of these maps, as well as the Schöner globe of 1515, seem to have been based on much the same material.

FREIRE'S MAP, 1546.

SYLVANUS'S PTOLEMY OF 1511.

STOBNICZA'S MAP.

1512. Stobnicza map.

We find in 1512, where we might least expect it, one of the most remarkable of the early maps, which was made for an introduction to Ptolemy, published at this date at Cracow, in Poland, by Stobnicza. This cartographer was the earliest to introduce into the plane delineation of the globe the now palpable division of its surface into an eastern and western hemisphere. His map, for some reason, is rarely found in the book to which it belongs. Nordenskiöld says he has examined many copies of the book in the libraries of Scandinavia, Russia, and Poland, without finding a copy with it; but it is found in other copies in the great libraries at Vienna and Munich. He thinks the map may have been excluded from most of the editions because of its rudeness, or "on account of its being contrary to the old doctrines of the Church." Its importance in the growth of the ideas respecting the new discoveries in the western hemisphere is, however, very great, since for the first time it gives a north and south continent connected by an isthmus, and represents as never before in an engraved map the western hemisphere as an entirety. This is remarkable, as it was published a year before Balboa made his discovery of the Pacific Ocean. It is not difficult to see the truth of Nordenskiöld's statement that the map divides the waters of the globe into two almost equal oceans, "communicating only in the extreme south and in the extreme north," but the south communication which is unmistakable is by the Cape of Good Hope. The extremity of South America is not reached because of the marginal scale, and because of the same scale it is not apparent that there is any connection between the Pacific and Indian oceans, and for similar reasons connection is not always clear at the north. There must have been information at hand to the maker of this map of which modern scholars can find no other trace, or else there was a wild speculative spirit which directed the pencil in some singular though crude correspondence to actual fact. This is apparent in its straight conjectural lines on the west coast of South America, which prefigure the discoveries following upon the enterprise of Balboa and the voyage of Magellan.

The Lenox globe.

Da Vinci globe.

If Stobnicza, apparently, had not dared to carry the southern extremity of South America to a point, there had been no such hesitancy in the makers of two globes of about the same date,—the little copper sphere picked up by Richard M. Hunt, the architect, in an old shop in Paris, and now in the Lenox Library in New York, and the rude sketch, giving quartered hemispheres separated on the line of the equator, which is preserved in the cabinet of Queen Victoria, at Windsor, among the papers of Leonardo da Vinci. This little draft has a singular interest both from its association with so great a name as Da Vinci's, and because it bears at what is, perhaps, the earliest date to be connected with such cartographical use the name America lettered on the South American continent. Major has contended for its being the work of Da Vinci himself, but Nordenskiöld demurs. This Swedish geographer is rather inclined to think it the work of a not very well informed copier working on some Portuguese prototype.

1507-13. Admiral's map.

1515. Reisch's map.

It is worthy of remark that, in the same year with the discovery of the South Sea by Balboa, an edition of Ptolemy made popular a map which had indeed been cut in its first state as early as 1507, but which still preserved the contiguity of the Antilles to the region of the Ganges and its three mouths. This was the well-known "Admiral's map," usually associated with the name of Waldseemüller, and if this same cartographer, as Franz Wieser conjectures, is responsible for the map in Reisch's Margarita philosophica (1515), a sort of cyclopædia, he had in the interim awaked to the significance of the discovery of Balboa, for the Ganges has disappeared, and Cipango is made to lie in an ocean beyond the continental Zoana Mela (America), which has an undefined western limit, as it had already been depicted in the Stobnicza map of 1512.

THE ALLEGED DA VINCI SKETCH. [Combination.]

First modern atlas.

It was in this Strassburg Ptolemy of 1513 that Ringmann, who had been concerned in inventing the name of America, revised the Latin of Angelus, using a Greek manuscript of Ptolemy for the purpose. Nordenskiöld speaks of this edition as the first modern atlas of the world, extended so as to give in two of its maps—that known as the "Admiral's map," and another of Africa—the results following upon the discoveries of Columbus and Da Gama. This "Admiral's map," which has been so often associated with Columbus, is hardly a fair representation of the knowledge that Columbus had attained, and seems rather to be the embodiment of the discoveries of many, as the description of it, indeed, would leave us to infer; while the other American chart of the volume is clearly of Portuguese rather than of Spanish origin, as may be inferred by the lavish display of the coast connected with the descriptions by Vespucius. On the other hand, nothing but the islands of Española and Cuba stand in it for the explorations of Columbus. Both of these maps are given elsewhere in this Appendix.

REISCH, 1515.

THE WORLD OF POMPONIUS MELA. [From Bunbury's Ancient Geography.]

Asiatic connection of North America.

We could hardly expect, indeed, to find in these maps of the Ptolemy of 1513 the results of Balboa's discovery at the isthmus; but that the maps were left to do service in the edition of 1520 indicates that the discovery of the South Sea had by no means unsettled the public mind as to the Asiatic connection of the regions both north and south of the Antilles. Within the next few years several maps indicate the enduring strength of this conviction. A Portuguese portolano of 1516-20, in the Royal Library at Munich, shows Moslem flags on the coasts of Venezuela and Nicaragua. A map of Ayllon's discoveries on the Atlantic coast in 1520, preserved in the British Museum, has a Chinaman and an elephant delineated on the empty spaces of the continent. Still, geographical opinions had become divided, and the independent continental masses of Stobnicza were having some ready advocates.

VADIANUS.

APIANUS. [From Reusner's Icones.]

Vienna geographers.

Pomponius Mela.

Solinus.

Vadianus.

1520. Apianus.

There was at this time a circle of geographers working at Vienna, 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.

A strait at the Isthmus of Panama.

1515. Schöner.

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.

1515. Reisch.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

1523. Schöner.

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.

Political aspects of Magellan's voyage.

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.

Dispute over the Moluccas.

Congress at Badajos.

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.

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.

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.

1526. Cortes sends ships to the Moluccas.

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.

MARTYR-OVIEDO MAP, 1534.

MARTYR-OVIEDO MAP, 1534.

North America, east coast.

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.

THE VERRAZANO MAP

AGNESE, 1536.

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.

MÜNSTER, 1540. [1st part] MÜNSTER, 1540. (complete view)

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.

MÜNSTER, 1540. [2nd part] MÜNSTER, 1540. (complete view)

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.

MICHAEL LOK, 1582.

JOHN WHITE'S MAP. [Communicated by Dr. Edward Eggleston.]

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.