Note 415 — Chapter I · (continued 2)

Printed for the first time in Harrisse, Les Cortereal, app. xvii. From Pasqualigo and Cantino down to the time of Gomara we find no mention of these events; and Gomara, writing fifty years later, seems to confound the events of 1500 with those of 1501. Gomara also seems to have had some Portuguese charts, which we do not now know, when he says that Cortereal gave his name to some islands in the entrance of the gulf “Cuadrado” (St. Lawrence?), lying under 50° north latitude. Further than this, Gomara, as well as Ramusio, seems to have depended mainly on the Pasqualigo letter; and Herrera followed Gomara (Harrisse, Les Cortereal, p. 59). Harrisse can now collate, as he does (p. 65), the two narratives of Pasqualigo and Cantino for the first time, and finds Cortereal’s explorations to have covered the Atlantic coast from Delaware Bay to Baffin’s Bay, if not farther to the north.