Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 69

Ramusio, in 1553, has inferred from such reports as he could get of Cartier's explorations, that his track had lain in channels bounded by islands, and a similar view had already been expressed in a portolano of 1536, preserved in the Bodleian, which Kohl a.s.sociates with Homem or Agnese. The oceanic expansion of the Saguenay is preserved as late as the Molineaux map of 1600.

[Sidenote: River of Norumbega.]

It is to the work of Allefonsce that we probably owe another confusion of this northern cartography in the sixteenth century. What we now know as Pen.o.bscot Bay and River was called by him the River of Norumbega, and he seems to have given some ground for believing that this river connected the waters of the Atlantic with the great river of Canada, just as we find it later shown upon Gastaldi's map in Ramusio, by Ruscelli in 1561, by Martines in 1578, by Lok in 1582, and by Jacques de Vaulx in 1584.

[Sidenote: Greenland connects Europe and America.]

While this idea of the north was developing, there came in another that made the peninsular Greenland of the ante-Columbian maps grow into a link of land connecting Europe with the Americo-Asiatic main, so that one might in truth perambulate the globe dryshod. We find this conception in the maps of the Bavarian Ziegler (1532), and in the Italians Ruscelli (1544) and Gastaldi (1548),--the last two represented in the Ptolemies of those years published in Italy. But these Italian cosmographers were by no means constant in their belief, as Ruscelli showed in his Ptolemy of 1561, and Gastaldi in his Ramusio map of 1550.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CARTA MARINA, 1548.]

[Sidenote: Asia and America joined in the higher lat.i.tudes.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MYRITIUS, 1590.]

As the Pacific explorations were stretched northward from Mexico, and the peninsula of California was brought into prominence, there remained for some time a suspicion that the western ocean made a great northerly bend, so as to sever North America from Asia except along the higher lat.i.tudes. We find this northerly extension of the Pacific in a map of copper preserved in the Carter-Brown library, which seems to have been the work of a Florentine goldsmith somewhere about 1535; in the Carta Marina of Gastaldi in 1548; and it even exists in maps of a later date, like that of Paolo de Furlani (1560) and that of Myritius (1587).

[Ill.u.s.tration: ZALTIeRE, 1566.]

[Sidenote: Entanglement of the American and Asiatic coasts.]

[Sidenote: 1728. Bering.]

This map of Myritius, which appeared in his _Opusculum Geographic.u.m_, published at Ingolstadt in 1590, is the work of, perhaps, the last of the geographers who did not leave more or less doubt about the connection of North America with Asia. So it took about a full century for the entanglement of the coasts of Asia and America, which Columbus had imagined, to be practically eradicated from the maps. Not that there were not doubters, even very early, but the faith in a new continent grew slowly and had many set-backs; nor did the Asiatic connection fade entirely out, as among the possibilities of geography, for considerably more than a century yet to come. The uncertainties of the higher lat.i.tudes kept knowledge in suspense, and even the English settlers on the northerly coasts of the United States were not quite sure. Thomas Morton, the chronicler of a colony on the Ma.s.sachusetts sh.o.r.es, felt it necessary, so late as 1636, to make a reservation that possibly the mainland of America bordered on the land of the Tartars. Indeed, no one could say positively, though much was conjectured, that there was not a terrestrial connection in the extreme northwest, under arctic lat.i.tudes, till Bering in 1728, two hundred and thirty-six years after Columbus offered his prayer at San Salvador, pa.s.sed from the Pacific into the polar waters. This became the solution of the fabled straits of Anian, an inheritance from the very earliest days of northern exploration, which, after the middle of the sixteenth century, was revived in the maps of Martines, Zaltiere, Mercator, Porcacchi, Furlani, and Wytfliet, prefiguring the channel which Bering pa.s.sed. Much in the same way as the southern apex of South America was a vision in men's minds long before Magellan found his way to the Pacific.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PORCACCHI, 1572.]

[Sidenote: 1536. Chaves.]

[Sidenote: 1538. Mercator.]

[Sidenote: 1540. Hartmann gores.]

But we have antic.i.p.ated a little. Coincident with the efforts of Cartier to discover this northern pa.s.sage we mark other navigators working at the same problem. The Spaniard Alonso de Chaves made a chart of this eastern coast in 1536; but we only know of its existence from the description of it written by Oviedo in 1537. In the earliest map which we have from the hand of Gerard Mercator, and of which the only copy known was discovered some years ago by the late James Carson Brevoort, of New York, we find the northern pa.s.sage well defined in 1538, and a broad channel separating the western coast of America from a parallel coast of Asia,--a kind of delineation which is followed in some globe-gores of about 1540, which Nordenskiold thinks may have been the work of George Hartmann, of Nuremberg. This map is evidently based on Portuguese information, and that Swedish scholar finds no ground for a.s.sociating it with the lost globe of Schoner, as Stevens has done. A facsimile of part of it has already been given.

[Sidenote: 1540-45. Munster.]

Sebastian Munster, in his maps in the Ptolemy of 1540-45, makes a clear seaway to the Moluccas somewhere in the lat.i.tude of the Strait of Belle Isle. Munster was in many ways antiquated in his notions. He often resorted to the old device of the Middle Ages by supplying the place of geographical details with figures of savages and monsters.

We come now to two significant maps in the early history of American cartography.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MERCATOR'S GLOBE OF 1538.]

Columbus had been dead five and thirty years when a natural result grew out of those circ.u.mstances which conspired to name the largest part of the new discoveries after a secondary pathfinder. We have seen that there seemed at first no injustice in the name of America being applied to a region in the main external to the range of Columbus's own explorations, and how it took nearly a half century before public opinion, as expressed in the protest of Schoner in 1533, recognized the injustice of using another's name.

[Sidenote: 1541. Mercator.]

Whether that protest was prompted by a tendency, already shown, to give the name to the whole western hemisphere is not clear; but certainly within eight years such a general application was publicly made, when Mercator, in drafting in 1541 some gores for a globe, divided the name AME--RICA so that it covered both North and South America, and qualified its application by a legend which says that the continent is "called to-day by many, New India." Thus a name that in the beginning was given to a part in distinction merely and without any reference to the entire field of the new explorations, was now become, by implication, an injustice to the great first discoverer of all. The mischief, aided by accident and by a not unaccountable evolution, was not to be undone, and, in the singular mutations of fate, a people inhabiting a region of which neither Columbus nor Vespucius had any conception are now distinctively known in the world's history as Americans.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MERCATOR'S GLOBE OF 1538.]

These 1541 gores of Mercator were first made known to scholars a few years ago, when the Belgian government issued a facsimile edition of the only copy then known, which the Royal Library at Brussels had just acquired; but since there have been two other copies brought to light,--one at St. Nicholas in Belgium, and the other in the Imperial library at Vienna.

[Sidenote: Henry II. map.]

[Sidenote: 1544. Cabot map.]

There are some indications on Spanish globes of about 1540, and in the Desceliers or Henry II. map of 1546, that the Spanish government had sent explorers to the region of Canada not long after Cartier's earliest explorations, and it is significant that the earliest published map to show these Cartier discoveries is the other of the two maps already referred to, namely, the Cabot mappemonde of 1544, which has been supposed a Spanish cartographical waif. Early publications of southern and middle Europe showed little recognition of the same knowledge.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MuNSTER, 1545.]

The Cabot map has been an enigma to scholars ever since it was discovered in Germany, in 1843, by Von Martius. It was deposited the next year in the great library at Paris. It is a large elliptical world-map, struck from an engraved plate, and it bears sundry elucidating inscriptions, some of which must needs have come from Sebastian Cabot, others seem hardly to merit his authors.h.i.+p, and one acknowledges him as the maker of the map. There is, accordingly, a composite character to the production, not easily to be a.n.a.lyzed so as to show the credible and the incredible by clear lines of demarcation.

We learn from it how it proclaimed for the first time the real agency of John Cabot in the discovery of North America, confirmed when Hakluyt, in 1582, printed the patent from Henry VII. There is an unaccountable year given for that discovery, namely, 1494, but we seem to get the true date when Michael Lok, in 1582, puts down "J. Cabot. 1497," against Cape Breton in his map of that year. As this last map appeared in Hakluyt's _Divers Voyages_, and as Hakluyt tells us of the existence of Cabot's maps and of his seeing them, we may presume that we have in this date of 1497 an authoritative statement. We learn also from this map of 1544 that the land first seen was the point of the island now called Cape Breton. Without the aid of this map, Biddle, who wrote before its discovery, had contended for Labrador as the landfall.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MERCATOR, 1541.

[Sketched from his gores.]]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM THE SEBASTIAN CABOT MAPPEMONDE. 1514.]

[Sidenote: Scarcity of Spanish printed maps.]

We know, on the testimony of Robert Thorne in 1527, if from no other source, that it was a settled policy of the Spanish government to allow no one but proper cartographical designers to make its maps, "for that peradventure it would not sound well to them that a stranger should know or discover their secrets." This doubtless accounts for the fact that, in the two hundred maps mentioned by Ortelius in 1570 as used by him in compiling his atlas, not one was published in Spain; and every bibliographer knows that not a single edition of Ptolemy, the best known channel of communicating geographical knowledge in this age of discovery, bears a Spanish imprint. The two general maps of America during the sixteenth century, which Dr. Kohl could trace to Spanish presses, were that of Medina in 1545 and that of Gomara in 1554, and these were not of a scale to be of any service in navigating.

[Sidenote: Cabot's connection with the map of 1544.]

There seem to be insuperable objections to considering that Sebastian Cabot had direct influence in the production of the map now under consideration. It is full of a lack of knowledge which it is not possible to ascribe to him. That it is based upon some drafts of Cabot is most probably true; but they are clearly drafts, confused and in some ways perverted, and eked out by whatever could be picked up from other sources.

That the Cabot map was issued in more than one edition is inferred partly from the fact that the legends which Chytraeus quotes from it differ somewhat from those now in the copy preserved in Paris; and indeed Harrisse finds reason to suppose that there may have been four different editions. That in some form or other it was better known in England than elsewhere is deduced from certain relations sustained with that country on the part of those who have mentioned the map,--Livio Sanuto, Ortelius, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Richard Willes, Hakluyt, and Purchas.

Whoever its author and whatever its minor defects, this so-called Cabot map of 1544 may reasonably be accepted as the earliest really honest, unimaginative exhibition of the American continent which had been made.

There was in it no attempt to fancy a northwest pa.s.sage; no confidence in the marine or terrestrial actuality of the region now known to be covered by the north Pacific; no certainty about the entire western coast line of South America, though this might have been decided upon if the maker of the map had been posted to date for that region. The maker of it further showed nothing of that presumption, which soon became prevalent, of making Tierra del Fuego merely but one of the various promontories of an immense Antarctic continent, which later stood in the planispheres of Ortelius and Wytfliet.

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

[Sidenote: Geographical study transferred to Italy.]

This map of Cabot was the last of the princ.i.p.al cartographical monuments made north of the Alps in this early half of the sixteenth century. The centre of geographical study was now transferred to Italy, where it had begun with the opening of the interest in oceanic discovery. For the next score years and more we must look mainly to Venice for the newer development.

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

[Sidenote: 1548, Gastaldi.]

In the Venice Ptolemy of 1548, we have for the first time a _series_ of maps of the New World by Gastaldi, which were simply enlarged by Ruscelli in the edition of 1561, except in a few instances, where new details were added, like the making of Yucatan a peninsula instead of the island which Gastaldi had drawn. They were repeated in the edition of 1562.