Note 17 — Chapter I

It is supposed that a new edition of this map was published in 1549, the year after Sebastian Cabot returned to England. The only evidence of this is contained in a thick duodecimo volume first published in 1594, at Herborn, in Nassau, edited by Nathan Chytræus, entitled Variorum in Europa Itinerum Deliciæ,—a work consisting of monumental and other inscriptions, antique legends, and curious bits of antiquity in prose and verse, picked up by the diligent compiler in almost every country in Europe. He was in England in 1565; and apparently at Oxford he saw a document, “a geographical table,” under which he found several inscriptions in not very elegant Latin, which he copied and printed in his volume, filling twenty-two pages of the book. They are wholly in Latin, and correspond substantially with the Latin inscriptions on the Paris map described above. There is this difference. The inscriptions here are but nineteen in number, whereas on the Paris map there are twenty-two, five of them in Spanish only. No. xviii., of Chytræus, is in the body only of the map, and in Spanish; and No. xix. appears only in Spanish. In Chytræus each inscription has a title prefixed, wanting, as a rule, on the Paris map. There are some verbal variations in the text, owing probably to the contingencies of transcription and of printing. In the legend, No. xvii., which has the title, “Inscriptio sev titulus Auctoris,” the date 1549 is inserted as the year in which the map to which the inscriptions belonged was composed, instead of 1544, as in the Paris map.