Chapter XXIX: Appendix: The Geographical Results (2)

It was not long before Pedrarias removed his capital to Panama, and in 1519 and during the few following years his captains pushed their explorations northerly along the shores of the South Sea, as the new ocean had been at once called.

[Sidenote: 1515. Biru.]

[Sidenote: 1519. Panama founded.]

As early as 1515 Pizarro and Morales had wandered down the coast southward to a region called Biru by the natives, and this was as far as adventure had carried any Spaniard, during the ten years since Balboa's discovery. They had learned here of a rich region farther on, and it got to be spoken of by the same name, or by a perversion of it, as Peru. In this interval the town of Panama had been founded (1519), and Pizarro and Almagro, with the priest Luque, were among those to whom allotments were made.

[Sidenote: Peru.]

[Sidenote: Chili.]

[Sidenote: Chiloe.]

It was by these three associates, in 1524 and 1526, that the expeditions were organized which led to the exploration of the coasts of Peru and the conquest of the region. The equator was crossed in 1526; in 1527 they reached 9° south. It was not till 1535 that, in the progress of events, a knowledge of the coast was extended south to the neighborhood of Lima, which was founded in that year. In the autumn of 1535, Almagro started south to make conquest of Chili, and the bay of Valparaiso was occupied in September, 1536. Eight years later, in 1544, explorations were pushed south to 41°. It was only in 1557 that expeditions reached the archipelago of Chiloe, and the whole coast of South America on the Pacific was made out with some detail down to the region which Magellan had skirted, as will be shortly shown.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: 1508. Ocampo and Cuba.]

It will be remembered that in 1503 Columbus had struck the coast of Honduras west of Cape Gracias à Dios. He learned then of lands to the northwest from some Indians whom he met in a canoe, but his eagerness to find the strait of his dreams led him south. It was fourteen years before the promise of that canoe was revealed. In 1508 Ocampo had found the western extremity of Cuba, and made the oath of Columbus ridiculous.

[Sidenote: 1517. Yucatan.]

In 1517 a slave-hunting expedition, having steered towards the west from Cuba, discovered the shores of Yucatan; and the next year (1518) the real exploration of that region began when Juan de Grijalva, a nephew of the governor of Cuba, led thither an expedition which explored the coast of Yucatan and Mexico.

[Sidenote: 1518. Cortes.]

[Sidenote: 1519.]

When Grijalva returned to Cuba in 1518, it was to find an expedition already planned to follow up his discoveries, and Hernando Cortes, who had been in the New World since 1504, had been chosen to lead it, with instructions to make further explorations of the coast,--a purpose very soon to become obscured in other objects. He sailed on the 17th of November, and stopped along the coast of Cuba for recruits, so it was not till February 18, 1519, that he sunk the shores of Cuba behind him, and in March he was skirting the Yucatan shore and sailed on to San Juan de Uloa. In due time, forgetting his instructions, and caring for other conquests than those of discovery, he began his march inland. The story of the conquest of Mexico does not help us in the aim now in view, and we leave it untold.

[From Barcia's _Herrera_.]]

[Sidenote: Quinsay.]

It was not long after this conquest before belated apostles of the belief of Columbus appeared, urging that the capital of Montezuma was in reality the Quinsay of Marco Polo, with its great commercial interests, as was maintained by Schöner in his _Opusculum Geographicum_ in 1533.

[Sidenote: 1520. Garay.]

[Sidenote: Gulf of Mexico.]

[Sidenote: 1524. Cortes's Gulf of Mexico.]

[Sidenote: Yucatan as an island.]

We have seen how Pineda's expedition to the northern parts of the Gulf of Mexico in 1519 had improved the knowledge of that shore, and we have a map embodying these explorations, which was sent to Spain in 1520 by Garay, then governor of Jamaica. It was now pretty clear that the blank spaces of earlier maps, leaving it uncertain if there was a passage westerly somewhere in the northwest corner of the gulf, should be filled compactly. Still, a belief that such a passage existed somewhere in the western contour of the gulf was not readily abandoned. Cortes, when he sent to Spain his sketch of the gulf, which was published there in 1524, was dwelling on the hope that some such channel existed near Yucatan, and his insular delineation of that peninsula, with a shadowy strait at its base, was eagerly grasped by the cartographers. Such a severance finds a place in the map of Maiollo of 1527, which is preserved in the Ambrosian library at Milan. Grijalva, some years earlier, had been sent, as we have seen, to sail round Yucatan; and though there are various theories about the origin of that name, it seems likely enough that the tendency to give it an insular form arose from a misconception of the Indian appellation. At all events, the island of Yucatan lingered long in the early maps.

[Sidenote: 1523. Cortes.]

In 1523 Cortes had sent expeditions up the Pacific, and one up the Atlantic side of North America, to find the wished-for passage; but in vain.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Spanish and Portuguese rivalries.]

Meanwhile, important movements were making by the Portuguese beyond that great sea of the south which Balboa had discovered. These movements were little suspected by the Spaniards till the development of them brought into contact these two great oceanic rivals.

[Sidenote: 1511. Moluccas.]

[Sidenote: A western passage sought at the south.]

The Portuguese, year after year, had extended farther and farther their conquests by the African route. Arabia, India, Malacca, Sumatra, fell under their sway, and their course was still eastward, until in 1511 the coveted land of spices, the clove and the nutmeg, was reached in the Molucca Islands. This progress of the Portuguese had been watched with a jealous eye by Spain. It was a question if, in passing to these islands, the Portuguese had not crossed the line of demarcation as carried to the antipodes. If they had, territory neighboring to the Spanish American discoveries had been appropriated by that rival power wholly unconfronted. This was simply because the Spanish navigators had not as yet succeeded in finding a passage through the opposing barrier of what they were beginning to suspect was after all an intervening land. Meanwhile, Columbus and all since his day having failed to find such a passage by way of the Caribbean Sea, and no one yet discovering any at the north, nothing was left but to seek it at the south. This was the only chance of contesting with the Portuguese the rights which occupation was establishing for them at the Moluccas.

[Sidenote: 1508. Pinzon and Solis.]

On the 29th of June, 1508, a new expedition left San Lucar under Pinzon and Solis. They made their landfall near Cape St. Augustine, and, passing south along the coast of what had now come to be commonly called Brazil, they traversed the opening of the broad estuary of the La Plata without knowing it, and went five degrees beyond (40° south latitude) without finding the sought-for passage.

[Sidenote: 1511. Portuguese at Rio de Janeiro.]

[Sidenote: Ferdinand Columbus and the western passage.]

There is some reason to suppose that as early as 1511 the Portuguese had become in some degree familiar with the coast about Rio de Janeiro, and there is a story of one Juan de Braza settling near this striking bay at this early day. It was during the same year (1511) that Ferdinand Columbus prepared his _Colon de Concordia_, and in this he maintained the theory of a passage to be found somewhere beyond the point towards the south which the explorers had thus far reached.

[Sidenote: 1516. Solis.]

[Sidenote: 1519. Magellan.]

A few years later (1516) the Spanish King sent Juan Diaz de Solis to search anew for a passage. He found the La Plata, and for a while hoped he had discovered the looked-for strait. Magellan, who had taken some umbrage during his Portuguese service, came finally to the Spanish King, and, on the plea that the Moluccas fell within the Spanish range under the line of demarcation, suggested an expedition to occupy them. He professed to be able to reach them by a strait which he could find somewhere to the south of the La Plata. It has long been a question if Magellan's anticipation was based simply on a conjecture that, as Africa had been found to end in a southern point, America would likewise be discovered to have a similar southern cape. It has also been a question if Magellan actually had any tidings from earlier voyages to afford a ground for believing in such a geographical fact. It is possible that other early discoverers had been less careful than Solis, and had been misled by the broad estuary of the La Plata to think that it was really an interoceanic passage. Some such intelligence would seem to have instigated the conditions portrayed in one early map, but the general notion of cartographers at the time terminates the known coast at Cape Frio, near Rio de Janeiro, as is seen to be the case in the Ptolemy map of 1513. There is a story, originating with Pigafetta, his historian, that Magellan had seen a map of Martin Behaim, showing a southern cape; but if this map existed, it revealed probably nothing more than a conjectural termination, as shown in the Lenox and earliest Schöner globes of 1515 and 1520. Still, Wieser and Nordenskiöld are far from being confident that some definite knowledge of such a cape had not been attained, probably, as it is thought, from private commercial voyage of which we may have a record in the _Newe Zeitung_ and in the _Luculentissima Descriptio_. It is to be feared that the fact, whatever it may have been, must remain shadowy.

Magellan's fleet was ready in August, 1519. His preparation had been watched with jealousy by Portugal, and it was even hinted that if the expedition sailed a matrimonial alliance of Spain and Portugal which was contemplated must be broken off. Magellan was appealed to by the Portuguese ambassador to abandon his purpose, as one likely to embroil the two countries. The stubborn navigator was not to be persuaded, and the Spanish King made him governor of all countries he might discover on the "back side" of the New World.

In the late days of 1519, Magellan touched the coast at Rio de Janeiro, where, remaining awhile, he enjoyed the fruits of its equable climate. Then, passing on, he crossed the mouth of the La Plata, and soon found that he had reached a colder climate and was sailing along a different coast. The verdure which had followed the warm currents from the equatorial north gave way to the concomitants of an icy flow from the Antarctic regions which made the landscape sterile. So on he went along this inhospitable region, seeking the expected strait. His search in every inlet was so faithful that he neared the southern goal but slowly. The sternness of winter caught his little barks in a harbor near 50° south latitude, and his Spanish crews, restless under the command of a Portuguese, revolted. The rebels were soon more numerous than the faithful. The position was more threatening than any Columbus had encountered, but the Portuguese had a hardy courage and majesty of command that the Genoese never could summon. Magellan confronted the rebels so boldly that they soon quailed. He was in unquestioned command of his own vessels from that time forward. The fate of the conquered rioters, Juan de Carthagena and Sanchez de la Reina, cast on the inhospitable shore of Patagonia in expiation of their offense, is in strong contrast to the easy victory which Columbus too often yielded, to those who questioned his authority. The story of Magellan's pushing his fleet southward and through the strait with a reluctant crew is that of one of the royally courageous acts of the age of discovery.

[Sidenote: 1520. October. Magellan enters the strait.]

On October 21, 1520, the ships entered the longed-for strait, and on the 28th of November they sailed into the new sea; then stretching their course nearly north, keeping well in sight of the coast till the Chiloe Archipelago was passed, the ships steered west of Juan Fernandez without seeing it, and subsequently gradually turned their prows towards the west.

[The north is at the bottom.]]

[Sidenote: The western way discovered.]

It is not necessary for our present purpose to follow the incidents of the rest of this wondrous voyage,--the reaching the Ladrones and the Asiatic islands, Magellan's own life sacrificed, all his ships but one abandoned or lost, the passing of the Cape of Good Hope by the "Victoria," and her arrival on September 6, 1522, under Del Cano, at the Spanish harbor from which the fleet had sailed. The Emperor bestowed on this lucky first of circumnavigators the proud motto, inscribed on a globe, "Primus circumdedisti me." The Spaniards' western way to the Moluccas was now disclosed.

[Sidenote: Pacific Ocean.]

The South Sea of Balboa, as soon as Magellan had established its extension farther south, took from Magellan's company the name Pacific, though the original name which Balboa had applied to it did not entirely go out of vogue for a long time in those portions contiguous to the waters bounding the isthmus and its adjacent lands.

[Sidenote: North America and Asia held to be one.]

For a long time after it was known that South America was severed, as Magellan proved, from Asia, the belief was still commonly held that North America and Asia were one and continuous. While no one ventures to suspect that Columbus had any prescience of these later developments, there are those like Varnhagen who claim a distinct insight for Vespucius; but it is by no means clear, in the passages which are cited, that Vespucius thought the continental mass of South America more distinct from Asia than Columbus did, when the volume of water poured out by the Orinoco convinced the Admiral that he was skirting a continent, and not an island. That Columbus thought to place there the region of the Biblical paradise shows that its continental features did not dissociate it from Asia. The New World of Vespucius was established by his own testimony as hardly more than a new part of Asia.

[Sidenote: 1525. Loyasa.]

[Sidenote: De Hoces discovers Cape Horn.]

In 1525 Loyasa was sent to make further examination of Magellan's Strait. It was at this time that one of his ships, commanded by Francisco de Hoces, was driven south in February, 1526, and discovered Cape Horn, rendering the insular character of Tierra del Fuego all but certain. The fact was kept secret, and the map makers were not generally made aware of this terminal cape till Drake saw it, fifty-two years later. It was not till 1615-17 that Schouten and Lemaire made clear the eastern limits of Tierra del Fuego when they discovered the passage between that island and Staten Island, and during the same interval Schouten doubled Cape Horn for the first time. It was in 1618-19 that the observations of Nodal first gave the easterly bend to the southern extremity of the continent.

[Sidenote: 1535. Chili.]

The last stretch of the main coast of South America to be made out was that on the Pacific side from the point where Magellan turned away from it up to the bounds of Peru, where Pizarro and his followers had mapped it. This trend of the coast began to be understood about 1535; but it was some years before its details got into maps. The final definition of it came from Camargo's voyage in 1540, and was first embodied with something like accuracy in Juan Freire's map of 1546, and was later helped by explorations from the north. But this proximate precision gave way in 1569 to a protuberant angle of the Chili coast, as drawn by Mercator, which in turn lingered on the chart till the next century.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Cartographical views.]

We need now to turn from these records of the voyagers to see what impression their discoveries had been making upon the cartographers and geographers of Europe.

[Sidenote: Sylvanus's Ptolemy. 1511.]

Bernardus Sylvanus Ebolensis, in a new edition of Ptolemy which was issued at Venice in 1511, paid great attention to the changes necessary to make Ptolemy's descriptions correspond to later explorations in the Old World, but less attention to the more important developments of the New World. Nordenskiöld thinks that this condition of Sylvanus's mind shows how little had been the impression yet made at Venice by the discoveries of Columbus and Da Gama. The maps of this Ptolemy are woodcuts, with type let in for the names, which are printed in red, in contrast with the black impressed from the block.

[Sidenote: Nordenskiöld gores.]

Sylvanus's map is the second engraved map showing the new discoveries, and the earliest of the heart-shaped projections. It has in "Regalis Domus" the earliest allusion to the Cortereal voyage in a printed map. Sylvanus follows Ruysch in making Greenland a part of Asia. The rude map gores of about the same date which Nordenskiöld has brought to the attention of scholars, and which he considers to have been made at Ingolstadt, agree mainly with this map of Sylvanus, and in respect to the western world both of these maps, as well as the Schöner globe of 1515, seem to have been based on much the same material.

[Sidenote: 1512. Stobnicza map.]

We find in 1512, where we might least expect it, one of the most remarkable of the early maps, which was made for an introduction to Ptolemy, published at this date at Cracow, in Poland, by Stobnicza. This cartographer was the earliest to introduce into the plane delineation of the globe the now palpable division of its surface into an eastern and western hemisphere. His map, for some reason, is rarely found in the book to which it belongs. Nordenskiöld says he has examined many copies of the book in the libraries of Scandinavia, Russia, and Poland, without finding a copy with it; but it is found in other copies in the great libraries at Vienna and Munich. He thinks the map may have been excluded from most of the editions because of its rudeness, or "on account of its being contrary to the old doctrines of the Church." Its importance in the growth of the ideas respecting the new discoveries in the western hemisphere is, however, very great, since for the first time it gives a north and south continent connected by an isthmus, and represents as never before in an engraved map the western hemisphere as an entirety. This is remarkable, as it was published a year before Balboa made his discovery of the Pacific Ocean. It is not difficult to see the truth of Nordenskiöld's statement that the map divides the waters of the globe into two almost equal oceans, "communicating only in the extreme south and in the extreme north," but the south communication which is unmistakable is by the Cape of Good Hope. The extremity of South America is not reached because of the marginal scale, and because of the same scale it is not apparent that there is any connection between the Pacific and Indian oceans, and for similar reasons connection is not always clear at the north. There must have been information at hand to the maker of this map of which modern scholars can find no other trace, or else there was a wild speculative spirit which directed the pencil in some singular though crude correspondence to actual fact. This is apparent in its straight conjectural lines on the west coast of South America, which prefigure the discoveries following upon the enterprise of Balboa and the voyage of Magellan.

[Sidenote: The Lenox globe.]

[Sidenote: Da Vinci globe.]

If Stobnicza, apparently, had not dared to carry the southern extremity of South America to a point, there had been no such hesitancy in the makers of two globes of about the same date,--the little copper sphere picked up by Richard M. Hunt, the architect, in an old shop in Paris, and now in the Lenox Library in New York, and the rude sketch, giving quartered hemispheres separated on the line of the equator, which is preserved in the cabinet of Queen Victoria, at Windsor, among the papers of Leonardo da Vinci. This little draft has a singular interest both from its association with so great a name as Da Vinci's, and because it bears at what is, perhaps, the earliest date to be connected with such cartographical use the name America lettered on the South American continent. Major has contended for its being the work of Da Vinci himself, but Nordenskiöld demurs. This Swedish geographer is rather inclined to think it the work of a not very well informed copier working on some Portuguese prototype.

[Sidenote: 1507-13. Admiral's map.]

[Sidenote: 1515. Reisch's map.]

It is worthy of remark that, in the same year with the discovery of the South Sea by Balboa, an edition of Ptolemy made popular a map which had indeed been cut in its first state as early as 1507, but which still preserved the contiguity of the Antilles to the region of the Ganges and its three mouths. This was the well-known "Admiral's map," usually associated with the name of Waldseemüller, and if this same cartographer, as Franz Wieser conjectures, is responsible for the map in Reisch's _Margarita philosophica_ (1515), a sort of cyclopædia, he had in the interim awaked to the significance of the discovery of Balboa, for the Ganges has disappeared, and Cipango is made to lie in an ocean beyond the continental Zoana Mela (America), which has an undefined western limit, as it had already been depicted in the Stobnicza map of 1512.

[_Combination._]]

[Sidenote: First modern atlas.]

It was in this Strassburg Ptolemy of 1513 that Ringmann, who had been concerned in inventing the name of America, revised the Latin of Angelus, using a Greek manuscript of Ptolemy for the purpose. Nordenskiöld speaks of this edition as the first modern atlas of the world, extended so as to give in two of its maps--that known as the "Admiral's map," and another of Africa--the results following upon the discoveries of Columbus and Da Gama. This "Admiral's map," which has been so often associated with Columbus, is hardly a fair representation of the knowledge that Columbus had attained, and seems rather to be the embodiment of the discoveries of many, as the description of it, indeed, would leave us to infer; while the other American chart of the volume is clearly of Portuguese rather than of Spanish origin, as may be inferred by the lavish display of the coast connected with the descriptions by Vespucius. On the other hand, nothing but the islands of Española and Cuba stand in it for the explorations of Columbus. Both of these maps are given elsewhere in this Appendix.

[From Bunbury's _Ancient Geography_.]]

[Sidenote: Asiatic connection of North America.]

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 spaces of the continent. Still, geographical opinions had become divided, and the independent continental masses of Stobnicza were having some ready advocates.

[From Reusner's _Icones_.]]

[Sidenote: Vienna geographers.]

[Sidenote: Pomponius Mela.]

[Sidenote: Solinus.]

[Sidenote: Vadianus.]

[Sidenote: 1520. Apianus.]

There was at this time a circle of geographers working at Vienna, reëditing 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 Vadianus, 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 Apianus,--as the German Bienewitz classicized 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. Schöner.]

[Sidenote: Antarctic continent.]

In this map Apianus, 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 entities, disconnected at the isthmus, where Columbus had hoped to find his strait. This is shown in the earliest of the Schöner 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 Schöner 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 cyclopædia 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 seamanship.]

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 seamanship 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 Nordenskiöld, in subjecting it to analysis 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 shores 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.

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, Maximilianus Transylvanus 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. Schöner.]

[Sidenote: Rosenthal gores.]

Schöner 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 Timiripæ, 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 Schöner 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 Schöner. Stevens, in a posthumous book on _Johann Schöner_, expressed a similar belief. This was a view which Stevens's editor, C. H. Coote, accepted. The opinion, however, is open to question, and Nordenskiöld finds that the Rosenthal gores have nothing to do with the lost globe of Schöner, 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 passage, but he was not to trespass 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.]

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 passage. 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 latitude 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 passage 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 establishing 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 ships 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 ships 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, pass 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.

[Sidenote: North America, east coast.]

[Sidenote: Verrazano.]

We come next to some further developments on the eastern coast of North America. A certain French corsair, known from his Florentine birth as Juan Florin, had become a terror by preying on the Spanish commerce in the Indies. In January, 1524, he was on his way, under the name of Verrazano, in the expedition which has given him fame, and has supplied not a little ground for contention, and even for total distrust of the voyage as a fact. He struck the coast of North Carolina, turned south, but, finding no harbor, retraced his course, and, making several landings farther north, finally entered, as it would seem from his description, the harbor of New York. The only point that he names is a triangular island which he saw as he went still farther to the east, and which has been supposed to be Block Island, or possibly Martha's Vineyard. At all events, the name Luisa which he gave to it after the mother of Francis I. clung to an island in this neighborhood in the maps for some time longer. So he went on, and, if his landings have been rightly identified, he touched at Newport, then at some place evidently near Portsmouth in New Hampshire, and then, skirting the islands of the Maine coast, he reached the country which he recognized as that where the Bretons had been. He now ended what he considered the exploration of seven hundred leagues of an unknown land, and bore away for France, reaching Dieppe in July, whence, on the 9th, he wrote the letter to the King which is the source of our information. Attempts have been made, especially by the late Henry C. Murphy, to prove this letter a forgery, but in the opinion of most scholars without success.

[Sidenote: The Verrazano map.]

Fortunately for the student, Hieronimo da Verrazano made, in 1529, a map, still preserved in the college of the Propaganda at Rome, in which the discoveries of his brother, Giovanni, are laid down. In this the name of Nova Gallia supplants that of Francesca, which had been used in the map of Maiollo (1527), supposed, also, to have some relation to the Verrazano voyage.

The most distinguishing feature of the Verrazano map is a great inland expanse of water, which was taken to be a part of some western ocean, and which remained for a long while in some form or other in the maps. It was made to approach so near the Atlantic that at one point there was nothing but a slender isthmus connecting the discoveries of the north with the country of Ponce de Leon and Ayllon at the south.

[Sidenote: The sea of Verrazano.]

It is in the _Sumario_ (1526) of Oviedo that we get the first idea of this sea of Verrazano, as Brevoort contends, and we see it in the Maiollo map of the next year, called "Mare Indicum," as if it were an indentation of the great western ocean of Balboa. It was a favorite fancy of Baptista Agnese, in the series of portolanos associated with his name during the middle of the century, and in which he usually indicated supposable ocean routes to Asia. As time went on, the idea was so far modified that this indentation took the shape of a loop of the Arctic seas, or of that stretch of water which at the north connected the Atlantic and Pacific, as shown in the Münster map in the Ptolemy of 1540,--a map apparently based on the portolanos of Agnese,--though the older form of the sea seems to be adopted in the globe of Ulpius (1542). This idea of a Carolinian isthmus prevailed for some years, and may have grown out of a misconception of the Carolina sounds, though it is sometimes carried far enough north, as in the Lok map of 1582, to seem as if Buzzard's Bay were in some way thought to stretch westerly into its depths. The last trace of this mysterious inner ocean, so far as I have discovered, is in a map made by one of Ralegh's colonists in 1585, and preserved among the drawings of John White in the De Bry collection of the British Museum, and brought to light by Dr. Edward Eggleston. This drawing makes for the only time that I have observed it, an actual channel at "Port Royal," leading to this oceanic expanse, which was later interpreted as an inland lake. Thus it was that this geographical blunder lived more or less constantly in a succession of maps for about sixty years, until sometimes it vanished in a large lake in Carolina, or in the north it dwindled until it began to take a new lease of life in an incipient Hudson's Bay, as in the great Lake of Tadenac, figured in the Molineaux map of 1600, and in the Lago Dagolesme in the Botero map of 1603.

[Communicated by Dr. Edward Eggleston.]]

[Sidenote: Norumbega.]

It was apparently during the voyage of Verrazano that an Indian name which was understood as "Aranbega" was picked up along the northern coasts as designating the region, and which a little later was reported by others as "Norumbega," and so passed into the mysterious and fabled nomenclature of the coast with a good deal of the unstableness that attended the fabulous islands of the Atlantic in the fancy of the geographers of the Middle Ages. As a definition of territory it gradually grew to have a more and more restricted application, coming down mainly after a while to the limits of the later New England, and at last finding, as Dr. Dee (1580), Molineaux (1600), and Champlain (1604) understood it, a home on the Penobscot. Still the region it represented contracted and expanded in people's notions, and on maps the name seemed to have a license to wander.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The English on the coast.]

[Sidenote: William Hawkins.]

During this period the English also were up and down the coast, but they contributed little to our geographical knowledge. Slave-catching on the coast of Guinea, and lucrative sales of the human plunder in the Spanish West Indies and neighboring regions, seem to have taken William Hawkins and others of his countrymen to these coasts not infrequently between 1525 and 1540.

[Sidenote: John Rut.]

There is some reason to believe that John Rut, an Englishman, may have explored the northeast coasts of the present United States in 1527, a proposition, however, open to argument, as the counter reasonings of Dr. Kohl and Dr. De Costa show. It is certain that at this time Robert Thorne, an English merchant living in Seville, was gaining what knowledge he could to promote English enterprise in the north, and there has come down to us the map which in 1527 he gave to the English ambassador in Spain, Edward Leigh, to be transmitted to Henry VIII.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Progress of maritime art.]

It was in 1526 when the Spanish authorities thought that the time was fitting for making a sort of register of the progress of discovery and of the attendant cartographical advances. Nordenskiöld says that "from the beginning of the printing of maps the graduations of latitude and longitude were marked down in most printed maps, at least in the margin;" the most conspicuous example of omitting these being, perhaps, in the work of Sebastian Münster, at a period a little later than the one we have now reached.

[Sidenote: Latitude and longitude.]

In 1503 Reisch for the first time settled upon something like the modern methods of indicating latitude and longitude in the map which he annexed to his _Margarita philosophica_ at Freiburg, though so far as climatic lines could stand for latitudinal notions, Pierre d'Ailly had set an example of scaling the zones from the equator in his map of 1410. The Spaniards, however, did not fall into the method of Reisch, so far as published maps are concerned, till long afterwards (1534).

[Sidenote: Italian maps.]

Up to the time when the Strassburg Ptolemy was issued, in 1513, the chief activity in map-making had been in Italy. The cartographers of that country got what they could from Spain, but the main dependence was on Portuguese sources, though the rivals of Spain were not always free in imparting the knowledge of their hydrographical offices, since we find Robert Thorne, in 1527, charging the Portuguese with having falsified their records. It is worthy of remark that no official map of the Indies was published in Spain till 1790.

[From Reusner's _Icones_, 1590.]]

[Sidenote: Cartographical activity north of the Alps.]

[Sidenote: Map projections.]

After 1513, and so on to the middle of the century, it was to the north of the Alps that the cosmographical students turned for the latest light upon all oceanic movements. The question of longitude was the serious one which both navigators and map makers encountered. The cartographers were trying all sorts of experiments in representing the converging meridians on a plane surface, so as not to distort the geography, and in order to afford some manifest method for the guidance of ships.

[Sidenote: Lunar observations.]

[Sidenote: Chronometers.]

These experiments resulted, as Nordenskiöld counts, in something like twenty different projections being devised before 1600. For the seaman the difficulty was no less burdensome in trying to place his ship at sea, or to map the contours of the coasts he was following. The navigator's main dependence was the course he was steering and an estimate of his progress. He made such allowance as he could for his drift in the currents. We have seen how the imperfection of his instruments and the defects of his lunar tables misled Columbus egregiously in the attempts which he made to define the longitude of the Antilles. He placed Española at 70° west of Seville, and La Cosa came near him in counting it about 68°, so far as one can interpret his map. The Dutch at this time were beginning to grasp the idea of a chronometer, which was the device finally to prove the most satisfactory in these efforts.

[Sidenote: Earliest sea-atlas.]

Reinerus Gemma of Friesland, known better as Gemma Frisius, began to make the Dutch nautical views better known when he suggested, a few years later, the carrying of time in running off the longitudes, and something of his impress on the epoch was shown in the stand which a pupil, Mercator, took in geographical science. The _Spieghel der Zeevaardt_ of Lucas Wagenaer, in 1584 (Leyden), was the first sea-atlas ever printed, and showed again the Dutch advance.

There were also other requirements of sea service that were not forgotten, among which was a knowledge of prevalent winds and ocean currents, and this was so satisfactorily acquired that the return voyage from the Antilles came, within thirty years after Columbus, to be made with remarkable ease. Oviedo tells us that in 1525 two caravels were but twenty-five days in passing from San Domingo to the river of Seville.

Two of the duties imposed by the Spanish government upon the Casa de la Contratacion, soon after the discovery of the New World, were to patronize invention to the end of discovering a process for making fresh water out of salt, and to improve ships' pumps,--the last a conception not to take effective shape till Ribero, the royal cosmographer, secured a royal pension for such an invention in 1526.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Congress of pilots at Seville.]

It was in the midst of these developments, both of the practical parts of seamanship and of the progress of oceanic discovery, that in 1526 there was held at Seville a convention of pilots and cosmographers, called by royal order, to consolidate and correlate all the cartographical data which had accumulated up to that time respecting the new discoveries.

[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.

[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.

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

The Weimar chart of 1527, which Kohl, Stevens, and others have assigned to Ferdinand Columbus, has been ascribed by Harrisse to Nuño Garcia de Toreno, but by Coote, in editing Stevens on _Schöner_, it is assigned 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 anticipating, 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 Nordenskiöld gores, the Schöner and Hauslab globes, the Ptolemy map of 1513, and in those of Reisch, Apianus, Laurentius Frisius, Maiollo, Bordone, Homem, and Münster,--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 Glareanus, quoting Virgil, was the earliest to assert in 1527.

[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 Finæus.]

Orontius Finæus 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 Orbis_ (1532) of Simon Grynæus, 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 manuscripts, 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.

[Sidenote: Johann Schöner.]

There is a good instance of the instability of geographical knowledge at this time in the conversion of Johann Schöner 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 Geographicum_, where he maintains that the city of Mexico is the Quinsay of Marco Polo.

[After Cimelinus's Copperplate of 1566.]]

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

[Sidenote: The Pacific explored.]

[Sidenote: California.]

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 passage 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.