Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 70

[Sidenote: Sea manuals.]

Meanwhile the most popular sea manuals of this period were Spanish; but they studiously avoided throwing much light on the new geography.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WYTFLIET, 1597.]

That of Martin Cortes was the first to suggest a magnetic pole as distinct from the terrestrial pole. Its rival, the _Arte de Navegar_ of Pedro de Medina, published at Valladolid in 1545, never reached the same degree of popularity, nor did it deserve to, for his notions were in some respects erratic.

The English in their theories of navigation had long depended on the teachings of the Spaniards, and Eden had translated the chief Spanish manual in his _Arte of Navigation_ of 1561.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WYTFLIET, 1597.]

[Sidenote: s.h.i.+p's log.]

A great advance was possible now, for a new principle had been devised, and an estimate of the progress of a s.h.i.+p was no longer dependent on visual observation. The log had made it possible to put dead reckoning on a pretty firm basis. This was the great new feature of the _Regiment of the Sea_, which the Englishman, William Bourne, published in 1573; and sixteen years later, in 1589, another Englishman, Blunderville, made popularly known the new instrument for taking meridian alt.i.tudes at sea, the cross-staff, which had very early superseded the astrolabe on s.h.i.+pboard.

The inclination or dip of the needle, showing by its increase an approach to a magnetic pole, was not scaled till 1576, when Robert Norman made his observations, and it is not without some service to-day in that combination of phenomena of which Columbus noted the earliest traces in his first voyage of 1492.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CROSS-STAFF.]

[Sidenote: Italian discoverers.]

[Sidenote: English discoverers.]

It is significant how large a part in the cardinal discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was taken by Italian navigators, seamen, s.h.i.+pwrights, mathematicians, and merchants, whether in Portugal or Spain, France or England. It is curious, too, to observe how, when the theoretical work and confirmatory explorations were finished, and the commercial spirit succeeded to that of science, England embarked with her adventurous spirit. The death of Queen Mary in 1558 was the signal for English exertion, and that exertion became ominous to all Europe in the reign of Elizabeth, accompanied by an intellectual movement, typified in Bacon and Shakespeare, similar to that which stirred the age of Columbus and the Italian renaissance.

[Sidenote: John Hawkins.]

John Hawkins and African marauders of his English kind were selling negro slaves in Espanola in 1562 and subsequent years, and from them we get our first English accounts of the Florida coast, which on their return voyages they skirted.

[Sidenote: New France.]

[Sidenote: Spanish settlements fail at the north.]

America had at this time been abandoned for a long while to Spain and France, and the latter power had only entered into compet.i.tion with Charles V., when Francis I., as we have seen, had sent out Verrazano in 1521 to take possession of the north Atlantic coasts. Out of this grew upon the maps the designation of New France, which was attached to the main portion of the North American continent. And this French claim is recognized in the maps, painted about 1562, on the walls of the geographical gallery in the Vatican. So the French stole upon the possession of Spain in the West Indies; and the English followed in their wake, when the death of Mary rendered it easier for the English to smother their inherited antipathy to France. This done, the English in due time joined the French in efforts to gain an ascendency over Spain in the Indies, to compensate for the loss of such power in Italy. The Spaniards, though they had attempted to make settlements along the Chesapeake at different times between 1566 and 1573, never succeeded in making any impression on the history of this northern region.

The cartography of the north was at this period subject to two new influences; and both of them make large demands upon the credulity of scholars.h.i.+p in these latter days.

[Sidenote: Andre Thevet.]

Attempts have been made to trace some portion of the development of the coasts of the northeastern parts of the United States to the publications of a mendacious monk, Andre Thevet. He had been sent out to the French colony of Rio de Janeiro in 1555, where he remained prostrated with illness till he was able to reembark for France, January 31, 1556. In 1558 he published his _Singularitez de la France Antarctique_, a descriptive and conglomerate work, patched together from all such sources as he could pillage, professing to follow more or less his experiences on this voyage. He says nothing in it of his tracking along the east coast of the present United States. Seeking notoriety and prestige for his country, he pretends, however, in his _Cosmographie_ published in 1575, to recount the experiences of the same voyage, and now he professes to have followed this same eastern coast to the region of Norumbega. Well-equipped scholars find no occasion to believe that these later statements were other than boldly conceived falsehoods, which he had endeavored to make plausible by the commingling of what he could filch from the narratives of others.

[Sidenote: The Zeni story.]

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

It was at this time also (1558) that there was published at Venice the strange and riddle-like narrative which purports to give the experiences of the brothers Zeni in the north Atlantic waters in the fourteenth century. The publication came at a time when, with the transfer of cartographical interest from over the Alps to the home of its earliest growth, the countrymen of Columbus were seeking to reinstate their credit as explorers, which during the fifteenth century and the early part of the sixteenth they had lost to the peoples of the Iberian peninsula. Anything, therefore, which could emphasize their claims was a welcome solace. This accounts both for the bringing forward at this time of the long-concealed Zeni narrative,--granting its genuineness,--and for the influence which its accompanying map had upon contemporary cartography. This map professed to be based upon the discoveries made by the Zeni brothers, and upon the knowledge acquired by them at the north in the fourteenth century. It accordingly indicated the existence of countries called Estotiland and Drogeo, lying to the west, which it was now easy to identify with the Baccalaos of the Cabots, and with the New France of the later French.

[Sidenote: The Zeni map.]

"If this remarkable map," says Nordenskiold, "had not received extensive circulation under the sanction of Ptolemy's name," for it was copied in the edition of 1561 of that geographer, "it would probably have been soon forgotten. During nearly a whole century it had exercised an influence on the mapping of the northern countries to which there are few parallels to be found in the history of cartography." It is Nordenskiold's further opinion that the Zeni map was drawn from an old map of the north made in the thirteenth century, from which the map found in the Warsaw Codex of Ptolemy of 1467 was also drawn. He further infers that some changes and additions were imposed to make it correspond with the text of the Zeni narrative.

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

The year 1569 is marked by a stride in cartographical science, of which we have not yet outgrown the necessity.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WARSAW CODEX, 1467; after Nordenskiold.]

[Sidenote: 1569. Mercator's projection.]

The plotting of courses and distances, as practiced by the early explorers, was subject to all the errors which necessarily accompany the lack of well-established principles, in representing the curved surface of the globe on a plane chart. c.u.mbrous and rude globes were made to do duty as best they could; but they were ill adapted to use at sea.

Nordenskiold (_Facsimile Atlas_, p. 22) has pointed out that Pirckheimer, in the Ptolemy of 1525, had seemingly antic.i.p.ated the theory which Mercator now with some sort of prevision developed into a principle, which was applied in his great plane chart of 1569. The principle, however, was not definite enough in his mind for the clear exposition of formulae, and he seems not to have attempted to do more than rough-hew the idea. The hint was a good one, and it was left for the Englishman Edward Wright to put its principles into a formulated problem in 1599, a century and more after Columbus had dared to track the ocean by following lat.i.tudinal lines in the simplest manner.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WARSAW CODEX, 1467; after Nordenskiold.]

It has been supposed that Wright had the fas.h.i.+oning of the large map which, on this same Mercator projection, Hakluyt had included in his _Princ.i.p.all Navigations_ in 1599. Hondius had also adopted a like method in his _mappemonde_ of the same year.

[Sidenote: 1570. The _Theatrum_ of Ortelius.]

[Sidenote: Decline of Ptolemy.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MERCATOR, 1569.]

In 1570 the publication of the great atlas of Abraham Ortelius showed that the centre of map-making had again pa.s.sed from Italy, and had found a lodgment in the Netherlands. The _Theatrum_ of Ortelius was the signal for the downfall of the Ptolemy series as the leading exemplar of geographical ideas. The editions of that old cartographer, with their newer revisions, never again attained the influence with which they had been invested since the invention of printing. This influence had been so great that Nordenskiold finds that between 1520 and 1550 the Ptolemy maps had been five times as numerous as any other. They had now pa.s.sed away; and it is curious to observe that Ortelius seems to have been ignorant of some of the typical maps anterior to his time, and which we now look to in tracing the history of American cartography, like those of Ruysch, Stobnicza, Agnese, Apia.n.u.s, Vadia.n.u.s, and Girava.

[Sidenote: Ortelius.]

It has already been mentioned that when Ortelius published his _Theatrum_, and gave a list of ninety-nine makers of maps whom he had consulted, not a solitary one of Spanish make was to be found among them. It shows how effectually the Council of the Indies had concealed the cartographical records of their office.

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

[Sidenote: 1577. English explorations.]

[Sidenote: 1548. Sebastian Cabot.]

It was eighty years since the English under John Cabot had undertaken a voyage of discovery in the New World. The interval pa.s.sed not without preparation for new efforts, which had for a time, however, been extended to the northwest rather than to the northeast. In 1548 Sebastian Cabot had returned to his native land to a.s.sume the first place in her maritime world. His influence in directing, and that of Richard Eden in informing, the English mind prepared the way for the advent of Frobisher, the younger Hawkins, and Drake.

[Sidenote: 1576. Frobisher.]

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

[Sidenote: 1577-78. Frobisher.]

Frobisher's voyage of 1576 was the true beginning of the arctic search for a northwest pa.s.sage, all earlier efforts having been in lower lat.i.tudes. He had sought, by leaving Greenland on the right, to pa.s.s north of the great American barrier, and thus reach the land of spices.