Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 68

[Sidenote: Ferdinand Columbus.]

Ferdinand Columbus was at this time in Seville, engaged in completing a house and library for himself, and in planting the park about them with trees brought from the New World, a single one of which, a West Indian sapodilla, was still standing in 1871. It was in this house that the convention sat, and Ferdinand Columbus presided over it, while the examinations of the pilots were conducted by Diego Ribero and Alonso de Chaves.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HOUSE AND LIBRARY OF FERDINAND COLUMBUS.]

[Sidenote: 1527-29. Maps.]

There have come down to us two monumental maps, the outgrowth of this convention. One of these is dated at Seville, in 1527, purporting to be the work of the royal cosmographer, and has been usually known by the name of Ferdinand Columbus; and the other, dated 1529, is known to have been made by Diego Ribero, also a royal cosmographer. These maps closely resemble each other.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SPANISH MAP, 1527.

[After sketch in E. Mayer's _Die Entwicklung der Seekarten_ (Wien, 1877).]]

The Weimar chart of 1527, which Kohl, Stevens, and others have a.s.signed to Ferdinand Columbus, has been ascribed by Harrisse to Nuno Garcia de Toreno, but by Coote, in editing Stevens on _Schoner_, it is a.s.signed to Ribero, as a precursor of his undoubted production of 1529.

[Sidenote: Idea of a new continent spreading.]

We have seen how, succeeding to the belief of Columbus that the new regions were Asia, there had grown up, a few years after his death, in spite of his audacious notarial act at Cuba, a strong presumption among geographical students that a new continent had been found. We have seen this conception taking form with more or less uncertainty as to its western confines immediately upon, and even antic.i.p.ating, the discovery of the actual South Sea by Balboa, and can follow it down in the maps or globes of Stobnicza and Da Vinci, in that known as the Lenox globe, in those called the Tross and Nordenskiold gores, the Schoner and Hauslab globes, the Ptolemy map of 1513, and in those of Reisch, Apia.n.u.s, Laurentius Frisius, Maiollo, Bordone, Homem, and Munster,--not to name some others. In twenty years it had come to be a prevalent belief, and men's minds were turned to a consideration of the possibility of this revealed continent having been, after all, known to the ancients, as Glarea.n.u.s, quoting Virgil, was the earliest to a.s.sert in 1527.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE NANCY GLOBE.]

[Sidenote: Reaction in the monk Franciscus.]

About 1525 there came a partial reaction, as if the discovery of Balboa had been pushed too far in its supposed results. We find this taking form in 1526, in an identification of North America with eastern Asia in a map ascribed to the monk Franciscus, while South America is laid down as a continental island, separated from India by a strait only. The strait is soon succeeded by an isthmus, and in this way we get a solution of the problem which had some currency for half a century or more.

[Sidenote: Orontius Finaeus.]

Orontius Finaeus was one of these later compromisers in cartography, in a map which he is supposed to have made in 1531, but which appeared the next year in the _Novus...o...b..s_ (1532) of Simon Grynaeus, and was used in some later publications also. We find in this map, about the Gulf of Mexico, the names which Cortes had applied in his map of 1520 mingled with those of the Asiatic coast of Marco Polo. We annex a sketch of this map as reduced by Brevoort to Mercator's projection. A map very similar to this and of about the same date is preserved in the British Museum among the Sloane ma.n.u.scripts, and the same bold solution of the difficulty is found in the Nancy globe of about 1540, and in the globe of Gaspar Vopel of 1543.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE NANCY GLOBE.]

[Sidenote: Johann Schoner.]

There is a good instance of the instability of geographical knowledge at this time in the conversion of Johann Schoner from a belief in an insular North America, to which he had clung in his globes of 1515 and 1520, to a position which he took in 1533, in his _Opusculum Geographic.u.m_, where he maintains that the city of Mexico is the Quinsay of Marco Polo.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ORONTIUS FINaeUS, 1532.

[After Cimelinus's Copperplate of 1566.]]

[Ill.u.s.tration: ORONTIUS FINaeUS, 1531.

[Reduced by Brevoort to Mercator's projection.]]

[Sidenote: The Pacific explored.]

[Sidenote: California.]

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

Previous to Cortes's departure for Spain in 1528, he had, as we have seen, dispatched vessels from Tehuantepec to the Moluccas, but nothing was done to explore the Pacific coast northward till his return to Mexico. In the spring or early summer of 1532 he sent Hurtado de Mendoza up the coast; but little success attending the exploration, Cortes himself proceeded to Tehuantepec and constructed other vessels, which sailed in October, 1533. A gale drove them to the west, and when they succeeded in working back and making the coast, they found themselves well up what proved to be the California peninsula. They now coasted south and developed its shape, which was further brought out in detail by an expedition led by Cortes himself in 1535, and by a later one sent by him under Francisco de Ulloa in 1539. Cortes had supposed the peninsula an island, but this expedition of 1539 demonstrated the fact that no pa.s.sage to the outer sea existed at the head of the gulf, which these earliest navigators had called the Sea of Cortes. The conqueror of Mexico had now made his last expedition on the Pacific, and his name was not destined to be long connected with this new field of discovery, unless, indeed, it was a prompting of Cortes--hardly proved, however--which attached to this peninsular region the euphonious name of California, and which, after an interval when the gulf was called the Red Sea, was applied to that water also. The views of Ulloa were confirmed in part, at least, by Castillo in 1540, who has left us a map of the gulf.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CASTILLO'S CALIFORNIA.]

The outer coast of the peninsula as far north as 28 30' had been established in 1533. It was ten years later, in 1543, that Cabrillo, making his landfall in the neighborhood of 33, just within the southern bounds of the present State of California, coasted up to Cape Mendocino, and perhaps to 44, or nearly, to that spot, in the present State of Oregon. If Cabrillo, who had died January 3, 1543, did not himself go so high, the credit belongs to Ferrelo, his chief pilot.

Late in 1542 Mendoza sent an expedition under Ruy Lopez de Villalobos, across the Pacific, and if a map of Juan Freire, made in 1546, is an indication of his route, he seems to have gone higher up the coast than any previous explorer.

[Sidenote: The Atlantic coast of North America.]

While this development of the northwest coast of North America was going on, there were other discoverers still endeavoring on the Atlantic side to connect the waters of the two oceans.

[Sidenote: 1534. Cartier.]

In April, 1534, Jacques Cartier, a jovial and roistering fellow, as Father Jouon des Longrais, his latest biographer, makes him out (_Jacques Cartier_, Paris, 1888), and who had led the roving life of a corsair in the recent wars of France, was now turning his energy to solve the great problem of this western pa.s.sage. He sailed from St.

Malo, and for the first time laid open, by an official examination, the inner s.p.a.ces of the St. Lawrence Gulf, which might have been, indeed, and probably were, known earlier to the hardy Breton and Norman fishermen. We are deficient in a knowledge of the early frequenting of these coasts because the charts of such fishermen, and of those who visited the region for trade in peltries, have not come down to us, though Kohl thinks there is some likelihood of such records being preserved in a portolano of the British Museum.

The track of Cartier about the Gulf of St. Lawrence has caused some discussion and difference of opinion in the publications of Kohl, De Costa, Laverdiere, and W. F. Ganong, the latter writer claiming, in a careful paper in the _Transactions_ of the Royal Society of Canada for 1889, that in the correct interpretation of Cartier's first voyage we find a key to the cartography of the gulf for almost a century.

The Rotz map of 1542 seems to be the earliest map which we know to show a knowledge of Cartier's first voyage. The Henri II. map of 1542 still more develops his work of exploration.

The chance of further discovery in this direction induced the French king once more to commission Cartier, October 30, 1534, and early in 1535 his little fleet sailed, and by August, after some discouragements, not lessened when he found the water freshening, he began to ascend the St. Lawrence River, reaching the site of Montreal. No map by Cartier himself is preserved, though it is known that he made such.

Thenceforward the cartography of this northeastern region showed the St.

Lawrence Gulf in a better development of the earlier so-called Square Gulf and of the great river of Canada. It is of record that Francis I., in commissioning Cartier, considered that he was dispatching him to ascend an Asiatic river, and the name of Lachine even to-day is preserved as evidence of the belief which Cartier entertained that he was within the bounds of China.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SKETCH FROM A PORTOLANO IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM.]

[Sidenote: John Rotz's map.]

John Rotz's _Boke of Idiography_--a ma.n.u.script of 1542, preserved in the British Museum--shows, in his drawing of the region about the Gulf of St. Lawrence, certain signs, as Kohl thinks, of having had access to the charts of Cartier, and Harrisse traces in them the combined influence of the Portuguese and Dieppe navigators.

The Cartier voyages seem to have made little impression outside of France, and we find for some years few traces of his discoveries in the portolanos of Italy and in the maps of the rest of Europe. It was only when the expedition of Roberval, in 1540-41, excited attention that the rest of Europe seemed to recognize these French efforts.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HOMEM, 1558.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: ZIEGLER'S SCHONDIA.]

[Sidenote: Cartier's later voyages.]

[Sidenote: Allefonsce.]

The later voyages of Cartier, in 1541 and 1543, revealed nothing more of general geographical interest. Indeed, the hope of a western pa.s.sage in this direction had been abandoned in effect after Cartier's second voyage, although the pilot Allefonsce, who accompanied a later expedition, had been detailed to explore the Labrador coast to that end, and had been turned back by ice. After this he seems to have gone south into a great bay, under 42, the end of which he did not reach. This may have been the large expanse partly shut in by Cape Sable (Nova Scotia) and Cape Cod, now called in the coast survey charts the Gulf of Maine; or perhaps it may conform, taking into account his registered lat.i.tude, to the inner bight of it called Ma.s.sachusetts Bay. At all events, Allefonsce believed himself on coasts contiguous to Tartary, through which he had hopes to find access to the more hospitable orient (occident) farther south. He apparently had something of the same notion regarding the westerly stretch of water which he found below Cape Cod, extending he knew not where, along the inclosure of the present Long Island Sound.

In the years both before and after the middle of the century, French vessels were on this coast in considerable numbers for purposes of trade or for protecting French interests, but we know nothing of any accessions to geographical knowledge which they made.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RUSCELLI, 1544.]

Allefonsce speaks of the Saguenay as widening, when he went up, till it seemed to be an arm of the sea, and "I think the same," he adds, "runs into the Sea of Cathay;" and so he draws it on one of his maps,--an idea made more general in the map of Homem in 1558, where the St. Lawrence really becomes a channel, locked by islands, bordering an Arctic Sea.