Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 66

We could hardly expect, indeed, to find in these maps of the Ptolemy of 1513 the results of Balboa's discovery at the isthmus; but that the maps were left to do service in the edition of 1520 indicates that the discovery of the South Sea had by no means unsettled the public mind as to the Asiatic connection of the regions both north and south of the Antilles. Within the next few years several maps indicate the enduring strength of this conviction. A Portuguese portolano of 1516-20, in the Royal Library at Munich, shows Moslem flags on the coasts of Venezuela and Nicaragua. A map of Ayllon's discoveries on the Atlantic coast in 1520, preserved in the British Museum, has a Chinaman and an elephant delineated on the empty s.p.a.ces of the continent. Still, geographical opinions had become divided, and the independent continental ma.s.ses of Stobnicza were having some ready advocates.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VADIa.n.u.s.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: APIa.n.u.s.

[From Reusner's _Icones_.]]

[Sidenote: Vienna geographers.]

[Sidenote: Pomponius Mela.]

[Sidenote: Solinus.]

[Sidenote: Vadia.n.u.s.]

[Sidenote: 1520. Apia.n.u.s.]

There was at this time a circle of geographers working at Vienna, reediting the ancient cosmographers, and bringing them into relations with the new results of discovery. Two of these early writers thus attracting attention were Pomponius Mela, whose _Cosmographia_ dated back to the first century, and Solinus, whose _Polyhistor_ was of the third. The Mela fell to the care of Johann Camers, who published it as _De Situ Orbis_ at Vienna in 1512, at the press of Singrein; and this was followed in 1518 by another issue, taken in hand by Joachim Watt, better known under the Latinized name of Vadia.n.u.s, who had been born in Switzerland, and who was one of the earlier helpers in popularizing the name of America. The Solinus, the care of which was undertaken by Camers, the teacher of Watt, was produced under these new auspices at the same time. Two years later (1520) both of these old writers attained new currency while issued together and accompanied by a map of Apia.n.u.s,--as the German Bienewitz cla.s.sicized his name,--in which further iteration was given to the name of America by attaching it to the southern continent of the west.

[Sidenote: A strait at the Isthmus of Panama.]

[Sidenote: 1515. Schoner.]

[Sidenote: Antarctic continent.]

In this map Apia.n.u.s, in 1520, was combining views of the western hemisphere, which had within the few antecedent years found advocacy among a new school of cartographers. These students represented the northern and southern continents as independent ent.i.ties, disconnected at the isthmus, where Columbus had hoped to find his strait. This is shown in the earliest of the Schoner globes, the three copies of which known to us are preserved, one at Frankfort and two at Weimar. It is in the _Luculentissima Descriptio_, which was written to accompany this Schoner globe of 1515, where we find that statement already referred to, which chronicles, as Wieser thinks, an earlier voyage than Magellan's to the southern strait, which separated the "America" of Vespucius from that great Antarctic continent which did not entirely disappear from our maps till after the voyage of Cook.

[Sidenote: 1515. Reisch.]

[Sidenote: Brazil.]

It is a striking instance of careless contemporary observation, which the student of this early cartography has often to confront, that while Reisch, in his popular cyclopaedia of the _Margarita Philosophica_ which he published first in 1503, gave not the slightest intimation of the discoveries of Columbus, he did not much improve matters in 1515, when he ignored the discoveries of Balboa, and reproduced in the main the so-called "Admiral's map" of the Ptolemy of 1513. It is to be observed, however, that Reisch was in this reproduced map of 1515 the first of map makers to offer in the word "Prisilia" on the coast of Vespucius the prototype of the modern Brazil. It will be remembered that Cabral had supposed it an island, and had named it the Isla de Santa Cruz. The change of name induced a pious Portuguese to believe it an instigation of the devil to supplant the remembrance of the holy and sacred wood of the great martyr by the worldly wood, which was commonly used to give a red color to cloth!

[Sidenote: Theories of seamans.h.i.+p.]

In 1519, in the _Suma de Geographia_ of Fernandez d'Enciso, published later at Seville, in 1530, we have the experience of one of Ojeda's companions in 1509. This little folio, now a scarce book, is of interest as first formulating for practical use some of the new theories of seamans.h.i.+p as developed under the long voyages at this time becoming common. It has also a marked interest as being the earliest book of the Spanish press which had given consideration at any length to the new possessions of Spain.

[Sidenote: 1522. Frisius.]

We again find a similar indisposition to keep abreast of discovery, so perplexing to later scholars, in the new-cast edition of Ptolemy in 1522, which contains the well-known map of Laurentius Frisius. It is called by Nordenskiold, in subjecting it to a.n.a.lysis in his _Facsimile Atlas_, "an original work, but bad beyond all criticism, as well from a geographical as from a xylographical point of view." One sees, indeed, in the maps of this edition, no knowledge of the increase of geographical knowledge during later years. We observe, too, that they go back to Behaim's interpretation of Marco Polo's India, for the eastern sh.o.r.es of Asia. The publisher, Thomas Ancuparius, seems never to have heard of Columbus, or at least fails to mention him, while he awards the discovery of the New World to Vespucius. The maps, reduced in the main from those of the edition of 1513, were repeated in those of 1525, 1535, and 1541, without change and from the same blocks.

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

The results of the voyage of Magellan and Del Cano promptly attained a more authentic record than usually fell to the lot of these early ocean experiences.

[Sidenote: 1523. Magellan's voyage described.]

The company which reached Spain in the "Victoria" went at once to Valladolid to report to the Emperor, and while there a pupil and secretary of Peter Martyr, then at Court, Maximilia.n.u.s Transylva.n.u.s by name, got from these men the particulars of their discoveries, and, writing them out in Latin, he sent the missive to his father, the Archbishop of Salzburg,--the young man was a natural son of this prelate,--and in some way the narrative got into print at Cologne and Rome in 1523.

[Sidenote: 1523. Schoner.]

[Sidenote: Rosenthal gores.]

Schoner printed in 1523 a little tract, _De nuper ... repertis insulis ac regionibus_ to elucidate a globe which he had at that time constructed. It was published at Timiripae, as the imprint reads, which has been identified by Coote as the Grecized form of the name of a small village not far from Bamberg, where Schoner was at that time a parochial vicar. When a new set of engraved gores were first brought to light by Ludwig Rosenthal, in Munich, in 1885, they were considered by Wieser, who published an account of them in 1888, as the lost globe of Schoner.

Stevens, in a posthumous book on _Johann Schoner_, expressed a similar belief. This was a view which Stevens's editor, C. H. Coote, accepted.

The opinion, however, is open to question, and Nordenskiold finds that the Rosenthal gores have nothing to do with the lost globe of Schoner, and puts them much later, as having been printed at Nuremberg about 1540.

[Sidenote: Political aspects of Magellan's voyage.]

[Sidenote: Gomez.]

The voyage of Magellan had reopened the controversy of Spain with Portugal, stayed but not settled by the treaty of Tordesillas. Estevan Gomez, a recusant captain of Magellan's fleet, who had deserted him just as he was entering the straits, had arrived in Spain May 6, 1521, and had his own way for some time in making representation of the foolhardiness of Magellan's undertaking.

On March 27, 1523, Gomez received a concession from the Emperor to go on a small armed vessel for a year's cruise in the northwest, to make farther search for a pa.s.sage, but he was not to trespa.s.s on any Portuguese possession. The disputes between Portugal and Spain intensifying, Gomez's voyage was in the mean time put off for a while.

[Sidenote: Dispute over the Moluccas.]

[Sidenote: Congress at Badajos.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROSENTHAL OR NUREMBERG GORES.]

Gomara tells us that, in the opinion of his time, the Spaniards had gained the Moluccas, at the conference at Tordesillas, by yielding to the demands of the Portuguese, so that what Portugal gained in Brazil and Newfoundland she lost in Asia and adjacent parts. The Portuguese historian, Osorius, viewed it differently; he counted in the American gain for his country, but he denied the Spanish rights at the antipodes.

So the longitude of the Moluccas became a sharp political dispute, which there was an attempt to settle in 1524 in a congress of the two nations that was convened alternately at Badajos and Elvas, situated on opposite sides of the Caya, a stream which separates the two countries.

[Sidenote: Council of the Indies.]

Ferdinand Columbus, by a decree of February 19, 1524, had been made one of the arbiters. After two months of wrangling, each side stood stiff in its own opinions, and it was found best to break up the congress.

Following upon the dissolution of this body, the Spanish government was impelled to make the management of the Indies more effective than it had been under the commissions which had existed, and on August 18, 1524, the Council of the Indies was reorganized in more permanent form.

[Sidenote: Gomez's voyage.]

An immediate result of the interchange of views at Badajos was a renewal of the Gomez project, to examine more carefully the eastern coast of what is now the United States, in the hopes of yet discovering a western pa.s.sage. Of that voyage, which is first mentioned in the _Sumario_ of Oviedo in 1526, and of the failure of its chief aim, enough has already been said in the early part of this appendix.

It has been supposed by Harrisse that the results of this voyage were embodied in the earliest printed Spanish map which we have showing lines of lat.i.tude and longitude,--that found in a joint edition of Martyr and Oviedo (1534), and which is only known in a copy now in the Lenox Library.

The purpose which followed upon the congress of Badajos, to penetrate the Atlantic coast line and find a pa.s.sage to the western sea, was communicated to Cortes, then in Mexico, some time before the date of his fourth letter, October 15, 1524. The news found him already convinced of the desirableness of establis.h.i.+ng a port on the great sea of the west, and he selected Zucatula as a station for the fleets which he undertook to build.

[Sidenote: 1526. Cortes sends s.h.i.+ps to the Moluccas.]

[Sidenote: The Moluccas sold to Portugal.]

Other projects delayed the preparations which were planned, and it was not till September 3, 1526, that Cortes signified to the Emperor his readiness to send his s.h.i.+ps to the Moluccas. After a brief experimental trip up the coast from Zucatula, three of his vessels were finally dispatched, in October, 1527, on a disastrous voyage to those islands, where the purpose was to confront the Portuguese pretensions. It so happened, meanwhile, that Charles V. needed money for his projects in Italy, and he called Ferdinand Columbus to Court to consult with him about a sale of his rights in the Moluccas to Portugal. Ferdinand made a report, which has not come down to us, but a decision to sell was reached, and the Portuguese King agreed to the price of purchase on June 20, 1530. Thus the Moluccas, which had been so long the goal of Spanish ambition, pa.s.s out of view in connection with American discovery.

There is some ground for the suspicion, if not belief, that the Portuguese from the Moluccas had before this pushed eastward across the Pacific, and had even struck the western verge of that continent which separated them from the Spanish explorers on the Atlantic side.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARTYR-OVIEDO]