Note 722 — Chapter II

Nordenskjöld’s Om bröderna Zenos resor och de äldsta kartor öfner Norden was published at Stockholm in 1883, as an address on leaving the presidency of the Swedish Academy, April 12, 1882; and in the same year, at the Copenhagen meeting of the Congrès des Américanistes, he presented his Trois Cartes précolumbiennes, représentant une partie de l’Amérique (Greenland), which included facsimiles of the Zeno (1558) and Donis (1482) maps with that of Claudius Clavus (1427). This last represents “Islandia” lying midway alone in the sea between “Norwegica Regio” and “Gronlandia provincia.” The “Congelatum mare” is made to flow north of Norway, so as almost to meet the northern Baltic, while north of this frozen sea is an Arctic region, of which Greenland is but an extension south and west. The student will find these and other maps making part of the address already referred to, which also makes part in German of his Studien und Forschungen veranlasst durch meine Reisen im hohen Norden, autorisirte deutsche Ausgabe (Leipzig, 1885). The maps accompanying it not already referred to are the usual Ptolemy map of the north of Europe, based on a MS. of the fourteenth century; the “Scandinavia” from the Isolario of Bordone, 1547; that of the world in the MS. Insularium illustratum of Henricus Martellus, of the fifteenth century, in the British Museum, copied from the sketch in José de Lacerda’s Exame dos Viagens do Doutor Livingstone (Lisbon, 1867); the “Scandinavia” and the “Carta Marina” in the Venetian Ptolemy of 1548; the map of Olaus Magnus in 1567; the chart of Andrea Bianco (1436); the map of the Basle ed. (1532) of Grynæus’ Novis Orbis; that of Laurentius Frisius (1524). He gives these maps as the material possible to be used in 1558 in compiling a map, and to show the superiority of the Zeno chart. Cf. Nature, xxviii. 14; and Major in Royal Geog. Soc. Proc., 1883, p. 473.