Note 9 — EXPLORATIONS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COAST PREVIOUS TO THE VOYAGE OF HENRY HUDSON.

To convince himself of this fact the reader may compare the reconstructed Map of Chaves with the coast surveys, when the main difference will be found to consist in the exaggeration of Sandy Hook. The “Narrative and Critical History of America,” dealing with this point, suppresses all allusion to the fact that Kohl recognizes the cape on the Map of Chaves with the names “Santiago” and “Arenas” as Sandy Hook, which follows, as the river inside of the Hook he identifies with the Hudson. Dr. Kohl, though generally very acute, failed to see that Oviedo’s description of the Map of Chaves was, substantially, the description of Ribeiro, and that in identifying, as he chanced to, the “Arenas” of Ribeiro with Cape Cod, he stultified his own reasoning. Nor did he consider this, that if the great Cape “Arenas” was intended for Cape Cod, there is no representation whatever of Sandy Hook and the Hudson in the old cartography and that all the voyages to this region geographically went for nothing. Credat Judaeus Appellus! This exaggeration of Sandy Hook is conceded, yet the inlets along the New Jersey shore may have been viewed as connected by Gomez; and indeed, so great have been the changes along the coast that no one can well deny that they were connected in 1525, and formed a long bay running down behind Sandy Hook. It will prove more historic to follow the writer, who says, “that the coast of New York and the neighboring district were known to Europeans almost a century before Hudson ascended the ‘Great River of the North,’ and that this knowledge is proved by various maps made in the course of the sixteenth century. Nearly all of them place the mouth of a river between the fortieth and forty-first degrees of latitude, or what should be this latitude, but which imperfect instruments have placed farther north.”—Nar. and Crit. His. of Amer., 4: 432.