Note 87 — Chapter I

Bernaldez tells us that Columbus was a reader of Ptolemy and of John de Mandeville. Cf. on the spreading of Ptolemy’s views at this time Lelewel, Géographie du moyen âge, ii. p. 122; Thomassy, Les papes géographes, pp. 15, 34. There are copies of the 1475 edition of Ptolemy in the Library of Congress and the Carter-Brown Library (cf. also Murphy Catalogue, no. 2,044); of the 1478 edition, the only copy in this country, so far as known, is the one in the Carter-Brown Library, added to that collection since its catalogue was printed. The Perkins copy in 1873 brought £80 (cf. Livres payés en vente publique 1,000 francs, etc., p. 137). It was the first edition with maps. Lelewel (vol. ii. p. 124) had traced the influence of the Agathodæmon (Ptolemean) maps on the cartography of the Middle Ages. The maps representing the growth of geographical ideas anterior to Columbus will be examined in another place. The Ulm edition of Ptolemy, 1482, showed in its map of the world a part of what is now called America in representing Greenland; but it gave it a distinct relation to Europe, by making Greenland a peninsula of the Scandinavian north. There seems reason to believe that this map was made in 1471, and it passes for the earliest engraved map to show that northern region,—“Engrone-land,” as it is called. If we reject the Zeno map with its alleged date of 1400 or thereabout (published long after Columbus, in 1558), the oldest known delineations of Greenland (which there is no evidence that Columbus ever saw, and from which if he had seen them, he could have inferred nothing to advantage) are a Genoese manuscript map in the Pitti palace, which Santarem (Histoire de la Cartographie, vol. iii. p. xix) dates 1417, but which seems instead to be properly credited to 1447, the peninsula here being “Grinlandia” (cf. Lelewel, Epilogue, p. 167; Magazine of American History, April, 1883, p. 290); and the map of Claudius Clavus, assigned to 1427, which belongs to a manuscript of Ptolemy, preserved in the library at Nancy. This, with the Zeno map and that in the Ptolemy of 1482, is given in Trois cartes précolombiennes représentant Groenland, fac-simile présentés au Congrès des Américanistes à Copenhague; par A. E. Nordenskiöld, Stockholm, 1883. In the Laon globe (1486-1487) “Grolandia” is put down as an island off the Norway coast. There is a copy of this 1482 edition of Ptolemy in the Carter-Brown Library, and another is noted in the Murphy Catalogue, no. 2,046. Its maps were repeated in the 1486 edition, also published at Ulm; and of this there was a copy in the Murphy Collection (no. 2,047,—bought by President White, of Cornell); and another belongs to the late G. W. Riggs, of Washington. In 1490 the Roman edition of 1478 was reproduced with the same maps; and of this there is a copy in the Carter-Brown Library; and another is shown in the Murphy Catalogue (no. 2,048). A splendidly illuminated copy of this edition sold in the Sunderland sale (part v. no. 13,770) has since been held by Quaritch at £600. See further on these early editions of Ptolemy in Winsor’s Bibliography of Ptolemy’s Geography, published by Harvard University.