Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 47

[Sidenote: 1501. Gaspar Cortereal again.]

King Emanuel had a va.s.sal in Gaspar Cortereal, who at this time was a man about fifty years old, and he had already in years past conducted explorations oceanward, though we have no definite knowledge of their results. It has been conjectured that Columbus may have known him; but there is nothing to make this certain. At any rate, there was little in the surroundings of Columbus at Espanola, when he was subjected to chains in the summer of 1500, to remind him of any northern rivalry, though the visits of Ojeda and Pinzon to that island were foreboding. It was just at that time that Cortereal sailed away from Portugal to the northwest. He discovered the Terra do Labrador, which he named apparently because he thought its natives would increase very handily the slave labor of Portugal. To follow up this quest, Gaspar sailed again with three s.h.i.+ps, May 15, 1501, which is the date given by Damian de Goes. Harrisse is not so sure, but finds that Gaspar was still in port April 21, 1501. Cortereal ran a course a little more to the west, and came to a coast, two thousand miles away, as was reckoned, and skirted it without finding any end. He decided from the volume of its rivers, that it was probably a continental area. The voyagers found in the hands of some natives whom they saw a broken sword and two silver earrings, evidently of Italian make. The natural inference is that they had fallen among tribes which Cabot had encountered on his second voyage, if indeed these relics did not represent earlier visitors.

Cortereal also found in a high lat.i.tude a country which he called _Terra Verde_. Two of the vessels returned safely, bringing home some of the natives, and the capture of such, to make good the name bestowed during the previous voyage, seems to have been the princ.i.p.al aim of the explorers. The third s.h.i.+p, with Gaspar on board, was never afterwards heard of.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MS. OF MIGUEL CORTEREAL.

[From Harrisse's _Cortereal, Postscriptum_.]]

[Sidenote: Original sources on the Cortereal voyages.]

[Sidenote: Portuguese habit of concealing information.]

It so happened that Pasqualigo, the Venetian amba.s.sador in Lisbon, made record of the return of the first of these vessels, in a letter which he wrote from Lisbon, October 19, 1501; and it is from this, which made part of the well-known _Paesi novamente retrovati_ (Vicenza, 1507), that we derive what little knowledge we have of these voyages. The reports have fortunately been supplemented by Harrisse in a dispatch dated October 17, 1501, which he has produced from the archives of Modena, in which one Alberto Cantino tells how he heard the captain of the vessel which arrived second tell the story to the king. This dispatch to the Duke of Ferrara was followed by a map showing the new discoveries. This cartographical record had been known for some years before it was reproduced by Harrisse on a large scale. It is apparent from this that the discoverers believed, or feigned to believe, that the new-found regions lay westward from Ireland half-way to the American coasts. The evidence that they feigned to believe rather than that they knew these lands to be east of their limitary line may not be found; but it was probably some such doubt of their honesty which induced Robert Thorne, of Bristol, to speak of the purpose which the Portuguese had in falsifying their maps. Nor were the frauds confined to maps.

Translations were distorted and narratives perverted. Biddle, in his _Life of Cabot_, points out a marked instance of this, where the simple language of Pasqualigo is twisted so as to convey the impression of a long acquaintance of the natives with Italian commodities, as proving that the Italians had formerly visited the region,--a hint which Biddle supposed the Zeni narrative at a later date was contrived to sustain, so as to deceive many writers. We shall soon revert to this Cantino map.

[Sidenote: 1501. Miguel Cortereal.]

The voyage which Miguel Cortereal is known to have undertaken in the summer of 1501, which has been connected with this series of northwest voyages, is held by Harrisse, in his revised opinions, not to have been to the New World at all, but to have been conducted against the Grand Turk, and Cortereal returned from it on November 4, 1501.

[Sidenote: 1502. Miguel Cortereal again.]

To search for the missing Gaspar Cortereal, Miguel, on May 10, 1502, again sailed to the northwest with two or three s.h.i.+ps. They found the same coast as before, searched it without success, and returned again without a leader; for Miguel's s.h.i.+p missed the others at a rendezvous and was never again heard of.

[Sidenote: Terre des Cortereal.]

[Sidenote: Straits of Anian.]

The endeavors of the Portuguese in this direction did not end here; and the region thus brought by them to the attention of the cartographer soon acquired in their maps the name of _Terre des Cortereal_, or _Terra dos Corte reals_, or, as Latinized by Sylva.n.u.s, _Regalis Domus_. There is little, however, to connect these earliest ventures with later history, except perhaps that from their experiences it is that a vague cartographical conception of the fabled Straits of Anian confronts us in many of the maps of the latter half of the sixteenth century. No one has made it quite sure whence the appellation or even the idea of such a strait came. By some it has been thought to have grown out of Marco Polo's Ania, which was conceived to be in the north. By Navarrete, Humboldt, and others it has been made to grow in some way out of these Cortereal voyages, and Humboldt supposes that the entrance to Hudson Bay, under 60 north lat.i.tude, was thought at that time to lead to some sort of a transcontinental pa.s.sage, going it is hardly known where. The name does not seem at first to have been magnified into all its later a.s.sociations of a kingdom, or "regnum" of Anian, as the Latin nomenclature then had it. Its great city of Quivira did not appear till some time after the middle of the sixteenth century, and then it was not always quite certain to the cosmographical mind whether all this magnificence might not better be placed on the Asiatic side of such a strait. This imaginary channel was made for a long period to run along the parallels of lat.i.tudes somewhere in the northern regions of the New World, after America had begun generally to have its independent existence recognized, south of the Arctic regions at least. The next stage of the belief violently changed the course of the straits across the parallels, prefiguring the later discovered Bering's Straits; and this is made prominent in maps of Zalterius (1566) and Mercator (1569), and in the maps of those who copied these masters.

[Sidenote: Spanish maps.]

[Sidenote: Maps of the Cortereal discoveries.]

It took thirty years for the Cortereal discoveries to work their way into the conceptions of the Spanish map makers. Whether this dilatory belief came from lack of information, obliviousness, or simply from an heroic persistence in ignoring what was not their boast, is a question to be decided through an estimate of the Spanish character. There seems, however, to have been interest enough on the part of a single Italian n.o.ble to seek information at once, as we see from the Cantino map; but the knowledge was not, nevertheless, apparently a matter of such interest but it could escape Ruysch in 1508. Not till Sylva.n.u.s issued his edition of Ptolemy, in 1511, did any signs of these Cortereal expeditions appear on an engraved map.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CANTINO MAP.]

[Sidenote: The Cantino map. 1502.]

Only a few years have pa.s.sed since students of these cartographical fields were first allowed free study of this Cantino map. It is, after La Cosa, the most interesting of all the early maps of the American coast as its configuration had grown to be comprehended in the ten years which followed the first voyage of Columbus.

[Sidenote: The Cortereal discoveries east of the line of demarcation.]

[Sidenote: Terra Verde.]

There are three special points of interest in this chart. The first is the evident purpose of the maker, when sending it (1502) to his correspondent in Italy, to render it clear that the coasts which the Portuguese had tracked in the northwest Atlantic were sufficiently protuberant towards the rising sun to throw them on the Portuguese side of the revised line of demarcation. It is by no means certain, however, in doing so, that they pretended their discoveries to have been other than neighboring to Asia, since a peninsula north of these regions is called a "point of Asia." The ordinary belief of geographers at that time was that our modern Greenland was an extension of northern Europe.

So it does not seem altogether certain that the _Terra Verde_ of Cortereal can be held to be identical with its namesake of the Sagas.

[Sidenote: Columbus and the Cantino map in the Paria region.]

[Sidenote: Columbus in want.]

The second point of interest is what seems to be the connection between this map and those which had emanated from the results of the Columbus voyages, directly or indirectly. Columbus had made a chart of his track through the Gulf of Paria, and had sent it to Spain, and Ojeda had coursed the same region by it. We know from a letter of Angelo Trivigiano, the secretary of the Venetian amba.s.sador in Spain, dated at Granada, August 21, 1501, and addressed to Domenico Malipiero, that at that time Columbus, who had ingratiated himself with the writer of the letter, was living without money, in great want, and out of favor with the sovereigns. This letter-writer then speaks of his intercession with Peter Martyr to have copies of his narrative of the voyages of Columbus made, and of his pleading with Columbus himself to have transcripts of his own letters to his sovereigns given to him, as well as a map of the new discoveries from the Admiral's own charts, which he then had with him in Granada.

There are three letters of Trivigiano, but the originals are not known.

Foscarini in 1752 used them in his _Della Letteratura veneziana_, as found in the library of Jacopo Soranzo; but both these originals and Foscarini's copies have eluded the search of Harrisse, who gives them as printed or abstracted by Zurla.

What we have is not supposed to be the entire text, and we may well regret the loss of the rest. Trivigiano says of the map that he expected it to be extremely well executed on a large scale, giving ample details of the country which had been discovered. He refers to the delays incident to sending to Palos to have it made, because persons capable of such work could only be found there.

No such copy as that made for Malipiero is now known. Harrisse thinks that if it is ever discovered it will be very like the Cantino map, with the Cortereal discoveries left out. This same commentator also points out that there are certainly indications in the Cantino map that the maker of it, in drafting the region about the Gulf of Paria at least, worked either from Columbus's map or from some copy of it, for his information seems to be more correct than that which La Cosa followed.

[Sidenote: What is the coast north of Cuba?]

The third point of interest in this Cantino map, and one which has given rise to opposing views, respects that coast which is drawn in it north of the completed Cuba, and which at first glance is taken with little question for the Atlantic coast of the United States from Florida up. Is it such? Did the cartographers of that time have anything more than conjecture by which to run such a coast line?

A letter of Pasqualigo, dated at Lisbon, October 18, 1501, and found by Von Ranke at Venice in the diary of Marino Sanuto,--a running record of events, which begins in 1496,--has been interpreted by Humboldt as signifying that at this time it was known among the Portuguese observers of the maritime reports that a continental stretch of coast connected the Spanish discoveries in the Antilles with those of the Portuguese at the north. Harrisse questions this interpretation, and considers that what Humboldt thinks knowledge was simply a tentative conjecture. If this knowledge is represented in the Cantino map, there is certainly too great remoteness in the regions of the Cortereal discoveries to form such a connection. It is of course possible that the map is a falsification in this respect, to make the line of demarcation serve the Portuguese interests, and such falsification is by no means improbable.

[Sidenote: The Cantino and La Cosa maps at variance.]

[Sidenote: Bimini.]

It will be remembered that the La Cosa map showed no hesitancy in placing the Antilles on the coast of Asia, and put the region of the Cabot landfall on the coast of Cathay. Consequently, the difference between the La Cosa and the Cantino maps for this region north of Cuba is phenomenal. In these two or three years (1500-1502), something had come to pa.s.s which seemed to raise the suspicion that this northern continental line might possibly not be Asiatic after all, or at least it might not have the trend or contour which had before been given it on the Asiatic theory. It is an interesting question from whom this information could have come. Was this coast in the Cantino map indeed not North American, but the coast of Yucatan, misplaced, as one conjecture has been? But this involves a recognition of some voyage on the Yucatan coast of which we have no record. Was it the result of one of the voyages of Vespucius, and was Varnhagen right in tracking that navigator up the east Florida sh.o.r.e? Was it drawn by some unauthorized Spanish mariners, who were--we know Columbus complained of such--invading his vested rights, or perhaps by some of those to whom he was finally induced to concede the privilege of exploration? Was it found by some English explorer who answers the description of Ojeda in 1501, when he complains that people of this nation had been in these regions some years before? Was it the discovery of some of those against whom a royal prohibition of discovery was issued by the Catholic kings, September 3, 1501? Was it anything more than the result of some vague information from the Lucayan Indians, aided by a sprinkling of supposable names, respecting a land called Bimini lying there away?

Eight or nine years later, Peter Martyr, in the map which he published in 1511, seems to have thought so, and certain stories of a fountain of youth in regions lying in that direction were already prevalent, as Martyr also shows us. The fact seems to be that we have no Spanish map between the making of La Cosa's in 1500 and this one of Peter Martyr in 1511, to indicate any Spanish acquaintance with such a northern coast.

[Sidenote: Peter Martyr's map. 1511.]

This map of 1511, if it is honest enough to show what the Spanish government knew of Florida, is indicative of but the vaguest information, and its divulgence of that coast may, in Brevoort's opinion, account for the rarity of the chart, in view of the determination of Spain to keep control as far as she could of all cartographical records of what her explorers found out.

It is evident, if we accept the theory of this Cantino map showing the coast of the United States, that we have in it a delineation nearer the source by several years than those which modern students have longer known in the Waldseemuller map of 1508, the Stobnicza map of 1512, the Reisch map of 1515, and the so-called Admiral's map of 1513,--all which arose, it is very clear, from much the same source as this of Cantino.

What is that source? There are some things that seem to indicate that this source was the description of Portuguese rather than of other seamen. This belief falls in with what we know of the cordial relations of Portugal and Duke Rene, under whose auspices Waldseemuller at least worked. Thus it would seem that while Spain was impeding cartographical knowledge through the rest of Europe, Portugal was so a.s.siduously helping it that for many years the Ptolemies and other central and southern European publications were making known the cosmographical ideas which originated in Portugal.

It has been already said that Humboldt in his _Examen Critique_ (iv.

262) refers to a letter which indicates that in October, 1501, the Portuguese had already learned, or it may be only conjectured, that the coast from the region of the Antilles ran uninterruptedly north till it united with the snowy sh.o.r.es of the northern discoveries. This, then, seems to indicate that it was a Portuguese source that supplied conjecture, if not fact, to the maker of the Cantino map. Harrisse's solution of this matter, as also mentioned already, is that the letter found by Von Ranke and the letter which we know Pasqualigo sent to Venice about the Cortereal voyages were one and the same, and that it was rather conjecture than fact that the Portuguese possessed at this time.

The obvious difficulty in the cartographical problem for the Portuguese was, as has been said, to make it appear that they were not disregarding the agreement at Tordesillas while they were securing a region for sovereignty. We have already said that this accounts for the extreme eastern position found in the Cantino and the cognate maps of the Newfoundland region, which, as thus drawn, it was not easy to connect with the coast line of eastern Florida. Hence the open sea-gap which exists between them in the maps, while the evidence of the descriptions would make the coast line continuous.

We have thus suggested possible solutions of this continental sh.o.r.e above Florida. It must be confessed that the truth is far from patent, and we must yet wait perhaps a long time before we discover, if indeed we ever do, to whom this mapping of the coast, as shown in the Cantino map, was due.

[Sidenote: Was the Florida coast known?]

There are evidences other than those of this Cantino map that the Portuguese were in this Floridian region in the early years of the sixteenth century, and Lelewel tried to work out their discoveries from scattered data, in a conjectural map, which he marks 1501-1504, and which resembles the Ptolemy map of 1513. The bringing forward of the Cantino map confirms much of the supposed cartography.

There is one theory which to some minds gives a very easy solution of this problem, without requiring belief in any knowledge, clandestine or public, of such a land.

Brevoort in his _Verrazano_ had already been inclined to the view later emphasized by Stevens in his _Schoner_, and reiterated by Coote in his editorial revision of that posthumous work.

Stevens is content to allow Ocampo, in 1508, to have been the earliest probable discoverer of this coast, and Ponce de Leon as the original attested finder in 1513.