Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 61

[Sidenote: 1507-8. The Ruysch map.]

This Ruysch map shows the African coast discoveries of the Portuguese, with the discoveries of Marco Polo towards the east. In connection with the latter, the same material which Behaim had used in his globe seems to have been equally accessible to Ruysch. The latter's map has a legend on the sea between Iceland and Greenland, saying that an island situated there was burnt up in 1456. This statement has been connected by some with another contained in the Sagas, that from an island in this channel both Greenland and Iceland could be seen.

We also learn from another legend that Portuguese vessels had pushed down the South American coast to 50 south lat.i.tude, and the historians of these early voyages have been unable to say who the pioneers were who have left us so early a description of Brazil.

[Sidenote: Columbus and the Ruysch map.]

It is inferred from a reference of Beneventa.n.u.s, in his Ptolemy, respecting this map, that some aid had been derived from a map made by one of the Columbuses, and a statement that Bartholomew Columbus, in Rome in 1505, gave a map of the new discoveries to a canon of San Giovanni di Laterano has been thought to refer to such a map, which would, if it could be established, closely connect the Ruysch map with Columbus. It is also supposed to have some relation to Cabot, since a voyage which Ruysch made to the new regions westward from England may have been, and probably was, with that navigator. In this case, the reference to that part of the coast of Asia which the English discovered may record Ruysch's personal experiences. If these things can be considered as reasonably established, it gives great interest to this map of Ruysch, and connects Columbus not only with the earliest ma.n.u.script map, La Cosa of 1500, but also with the earliest engraved map of the New World, as Ruysch's map was.

[Sidenote: Sources of the Ruysch map.]

In speaking of the Ruysch map, Henry Stevens thinks that the cartographer laid down the central archipelago of America from the printed letter of Columbus, because it was the only account in print in 1507; but why restrict the sources of information to those in print, when La Cosa's map might have been copied, or the material which La Cosa employed might have been used by others, and when the Cantino map is a familiar copy of Portuguese originals, all of which might well have been known in the varied circles with which Ruysch is seen by his map to have been familiar?

[Sidenote: Portuguese geography and maps.]

While it is a fact that central and northern Europe got its cartographical knowledge of the New World almost wholly from Portugal, owing, perhaps, to the exertions of Spain to preserve their explorers'

secrets, we do not, at the same time, find a single engraved Portuguese map of the early years of this period of discovery.

[Sidenote: Portuguese portolano.]

[Sidenote: Pedro Reinel.]

A large map, to show the Portuguese discoveries during years then recent, was probably made for King Emanuel, and it has come down to us, being preserved now at Munich. This chart wholly omits the Spanish work of exploration, and records only the coasts coursed by Cabral in the south, and by the Cortereals in the north. We have a further and similar record in the chart of Pedro Reinel, which could not have been made far from the same time, and which introduces to us the same prominent cape which in La Cosa's map had been called the English cape as "Cavo Razo,"

a name preserved to us to-day in the Cape Race of Newfoundland.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SO-CALLED ADMIRAL'S MAP.]

[Sidenote: Spain and Portugal conceal their geographical secrets.]

There is abundant evidence of the non-communicative policy of Spain.

This secretiveness was understood at the time Robert Thorne, in 1527, complained, as well as Sir Humphrey Gilbert in his _Discoverie_, that a similar injunction was later laid by Portugal. In Veitia Linage's _Norte_ we read of the cabinets in which these maps were preserved, and how the Spanish pilot major and royal cosmographer alone kept the keys.

There exists a doc.u.ment by which one of the companions of Magellan was put under a penalty of two thousand ducats not to disclose the route he traversed in that famous voyage. We know how Columbus endeavored to conceal the route of his final voyage, in which he reached the coast of Veragua.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MuNSTER, 1532.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: GLOBUS MUNDI.]

[Sidenote: A strait to India.]

In the two maps of nearly equal date, being the earliest engraved charts which we have, the Ruysch map of 1508 and the so-called Admiral's map of 1507 (1513), the question of a strait leading to the Asiatic seas, which Columbus had spent so much energy in trying to find during his last voyage, is treated differently. We have seen that La Cosa confessed his uncertain knowledge by covering the place with a vignette. In the Ruysch map there is left the possibility of such a pa.s.sage; in the other there is none, for the main sh.o.r.e is that of Asia itself, whose coast line uninterruptedly connects with that of South America. The belief in such a strait in due time was fixed, and lingered even beyond the time when Cortes showed there was no ground for it. We find it in Schoner's globes, in the Tross gores, and even so late as 1532, in the belated map of Munster.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EDEN.]

[Sidenote: Earliest map to show America made north of the Alps.]

The map of the _Globus Mundi_ (Stra.s.sburg, 1509) has some significance as being the earliest issued north of the Alps, recording both the Portuguese and Spanish discoveries; though it merely gives the projecting angle of the South American coast as representing the developments of the west.

[Sidenote: English references to America.]

[Sidenote: Richard Eden.]

It is doubtful if any reference to the new discoveries had appeared in English literature before Alexander Barclay produced in 1509 a translation of Brant's _s.h.i.+p of Fools_, and for a few years there were only chance references which made no impression on the literary instincts of the time. It was not till after the middle of the century, in 1553, that Richard Eden, translating a section of Sebastian Munster's _Cosmographia_, published it in London as a _Treatyse of the newe India_, and English-reading people first saw a considerable account of what the rest of Europe had been doing in contrast with the English maritime apathy. Two years later (1555), Eden, drawing this time upon Peter Martyr, did much in his _Decades of the Newe World_ to enlarge the English conceptions.

[Sidenote: The naming of America.]

But the most striking and significant of all the literary movements which grew out of the new oceanic developments was that which gave a name to the New World, and has left a continent, which Columbus unwittingly found, the monument of another's fame.

[Sidenote: 1504. September. Letter of Vespucius.]

It was in September, 1504, that Vespucius, remembering an old schoolmate in Florence, Piero Soderini, who was then the perpetual Gonfaloniere of that city, took what it is supposed he had written out at length concerning his experiences in the New World, and made an abstract of it in Italian. Dating this on the 4th of that month, he dispatched it to Italy. It is a question whether the original of this abridged text of Vespucius is now known, though Varnhagen, with a confidence few scholars have shared, has claimed such authenticity for a text which he has printed.

[Sidenote: St. Die.]

[Sidenote: Duke Rene.]

It concerns us chiefly to know that somehow a copy of this condensed narrative of Vespucius came into the hands of his fellow-townsman, Fra Giovanni Giocondo, then in Paris at work as an architect constructing a bridge over the Seine. It is to be allowed that R. H. Major, in tracing the origin of the French text, a.s.sumes something to complete his story, and that this precise genesis of the narrative which was received by Duke Rene of Lorraine is open to some question. The supposition that a young Alsatian, then in Paris, Mathias Ringmann, had been a friend of Giocondo, and had been the bearer of this new version to Rene, is likewise a conjecture. Whether Ringmann was such a messenger or not matters little, but the time was fast approaching when this young man was to be a.s.sociated with a proposition made in the little village of St. Die, in the Vosges, which was one of those obscure but far-reaching mental premonitions so often affecting the world's history, without the backing of great names or great events. This almost unknown place was within the domain of this same Duke Rene, a wise man, who liked scholars and scholarly tomes. His patronage had fostered there a small college and a printing-press. There had been grouped around these agencies a number of learned men, or those ambitious of knowledge.

Scholars in other parts of Europe, when they heard of this little coterie, wondered how its members had congregated there. One Walter Lud, or Gualterus Ludovicus, as they liked to Latinize his name, a dependent and secretary of Duke Rene, was now a man not much under sixty, and he had been the grouper and manager of this body of scholars. There had lately been brought to join them this same Mathias Ringmann, who came from Paris with all the learning that he had tried to imbibe under the tutoring of Dr. John Faber. If we believe the story as Major has worked it out, Ringmann had come to this spa.r.s.e community with all the fervor for the exploits of Vespucius which he got in the French capital from a.s.sociating with that Florentine's admirer, the architect Giocondo.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VESPUCIUS.]

Coming to St. Die, Ringmann had been made a professor of Latin, and with the usual nominal alternation had become known as Philesius; and as such he appears a little later in connection with a Latin version of the French of Giocondo, which was soon made by another of the St. Die scholars, a canon of the cathedral there, Jean Ba.s.sin de Sandacourt.

Still another young man, Walter Waldseemuller, had not long before been made a teacher of geography in the college, and his name, as was the wont, had been cla.s.sicized into Hylacomylus.

There have now been brought before the reader all the actors in this little St. Die drama, upon which we, as Americans, must gaze back through the centuries as upon the baptismal scene of a continent.

[Sidenote: Waldseemuller.]

[Sidenote: _Cosmographiae Introductio._]

The Duke had emphasized the cosmographical studies of the age by this appointment of an energetic young student of geography, who seems to have had a deft hand at map-making. Waldseemuller had some hand, at least, in fas.h.i.+oning a map of the new discoveries at the west, and the Duke had caused the map to be engraved, and we find a stray note of sales of it singly as early as 1507, though it was not till 1513 that it fairly got before the world in the Ptolemy of that year. Waldseemuller had also developed out of these studies a little cosmographical treatise, which the college press was set to work upon, and to swell it to the dignity of a book, thin as it still was, the diminutive quarto was made to include Ba.s.sin's Latin version of the Vespucius narrative, set out with some Latin verses by Ringmann. The little book called _Cosmographiae Introductio_ was brought out at this obscure college press in St. Die, in April and August, 1507. There were some varieties in each of these issues, while that part which const.i.tuted the Vespucius narrative was further issued in a separate publication.

[Ill.u.s.tration: t.i.tLE OF THE COSMOGRAPHIae INTRODUCTIO.]

It was in this form that Vespucius's narrative was for the first time, unless Varnhagen's judgment to the contrary is superior to all others, brought before the world. The most significant quality of the little book, however, was the proposition which Waldseemuller, with his anonymous views on cosmography, advanced in the introductory parts. It is a.s.sumed by writers on the subject that it was not Waldseemuller alone who was responsible for the plan there given to name that part of the New World which Americus Vespucius had described after the voyager who had so graphically told his experiences on its sh.o.r.es. The plan, it is supposed, met with the approval of, or was the outcome of the counsels of, this little band of St. Die scholars collectively. It is not the belief of students generally that this coterie, any more than Vespucius himself, ever imagined that the new regions were really disjoined from the Asiatic main, though Varnhagen contends that Vespucius knew they were.

[Sidenote:_Mundus Novus._]

One thing is certainly true: that there wasno intention to apply the name which was now proposed to anything more than the continental ma.s.s of the Brazilian sh.o.r.e which Vespucius had coasted, and which was looked upon as a distinct region from the islands which Columbus had traversed.

It had come to be believed that the archipelago of Columbus was far from the paradise of luxury and wealth that his extravagant terms called for, and which the descriptions of Marco Polo had led the world to expect, supposing the regions of the overland and oceanic discoverers to be the same. Further than this, a new expectation had been aroused by the reports which had come to Europe of the vaster proportions and of the brilliant paroquets--for such trivial aspects gave emphasis--of the more southern regions. It was an instance of the eagerness with which deluded minds, to atone for their first disappointment, grasp at the chances of a newer satisfaction. This was the hope which was entertained of this _Mundus Novus_ of Vespucius,--not a new world in the sense of a new continent.

The Espanola and its neighboring regions of Columbus, and the Baccalaos of Cabot and Cortereal, clothed in imagination with the descriptions of Marco Polo, were nothing but the Old World approached from the east instead of from the west. It was different with the _Mundus Novus_ of Vespucius. Here was in reality a new life and habitation, doubtless connected, but how it was not known, with the great eastern world of the merchants. It corresponded with nothing, so far as understood, in the Asiatic chorography. It was ready for a new name, and it was alone a.s.sociated with the man who had, in the autumn of 1502, so described it, and from no one else could its name be so acceptably taken. Europe and Asia were geographically contiguous, and so might be Asia and the new "America."

[Sidenote: Eclipse of Columbus's name.]

The sudden eclipse which the name of Columbus underwent, as the fame of Vespucius ran through the popular mind, was no unusual thing in the vicissitudes of reputations. Fact.i.tious prominence is gained without great difficulty by one or for one, if popular issues of the press are worked in his interest, and if a great variety of favoring circ.u.mstances unite in giving currency to rumors and reports which tend to invest him with exclusive interest. The curious public willingly lends itself to any end that taxes nothing but its credulity and good nature.