Note 22 — Chapter I

The geographical designation here employed has been thought by some to be very indefinite, inasmuch as the Spaniards, who discovered Florida, subsequently gave that name to the whole country northward and westward of the territory now bearing that name; but it must be remembered that that designation was not accepted by geographers of other nations. After the voyages of Verrazano and Cartier the name “La Nouvelle France” was applied by French geographers to the territory as far down as 40° N., and the name was sometimes applied to the whole of North America. The maps of the Italian geographer, Gastaldi, who made maps for Ramusio’s third volume, and of Ruscelli, his pupil, confined Florida to more southern limits; and so did Sebastian Cabot himself, if the map of 1544 was made by him. Indeed, in the conversation of these Italian savans at the house of Fracastor, that geographical status was assumed; that is to say, the country of Cabot’s landfall, and the land by which he sailed north and south, was not understood to be Florida, for the statement is that “he sailed down the coast by that land toward the equinoctial, and came to that part of this firm land which is now called Florida.” Of course the point which he reached is very indefinite. Peter Martyr had said, thirty-five years before, that Cabot told him that he went south almost to the latitude of the strait of Gibraltar, which is in 36° N. Nobody knows whether these two accounts relate to the same voyage. That to which the conversation refers is assumed by the narrator to be the voyage of discovery. Indeed, for two hundred years and more there was no suspicion that a voyage by the Cabots followed immediately the voyage of discovery; though some incidents are related which may have taken place in a subsequent voyage, and others which never took place at all. Modern critics, who accept the above story as to the latitude reached at the south, generally agree that it was only on the second voyage that this was accomplished.