Mythical Location of the Seven Cities on the Mainland
The citations thus far given identify the Island of the Seven Cities with some legendary, but generally believed-in patch of land afar out in the ocean—sometimes with the Island of Brazil, more often with Antillia. But the earliest of them dates six or seven centuries after the supposed fact, and it may well be that a distinction was made at first, which became lost afterward by blending. In a still later stage of development the name of the Seven Cities becomes separate and strangely migratory, not avoiding even the mainland. We know, for instance, what power the Seven Cities of Cibola had to draw Coronado and his followers northward through the mountains and deserts of our still arid Southwest until all that was real of them stood revealed as the even then antiquated and rather uncleanly terraced villages of sun-dried brick which are picturesquely familiar on railway folders and in the pages of illustrated magazines.
But this was not the only part of North America on which the romantic myth alighted. The British Museum contains in MS. 2803 of the Egerton collection an anonymous world map,[131] ([Fig. 8]), forming part of a portolan atlas attributed by conjecture to 1508, which shows, somewhat as in La Cosa’s map of 1500, the Atlantic coast distorted to a nearly westward trend, with the Seven Cities (Septem Civitates), represented by conventional indications of miters, scattered along a seaboard tract from a point considerably west of “terra de los bacalos” and the Bay of Fundy to a point nearly opposite the western end of Cuba. The cartographer’s ideas of geography were exceedingly vague, but apparently he conceived of Portuguese episcopal domination for the coastal country between lower New England and Florida as we know them now. Perhaps, however, he merely meant to set down his cities somewhere on the eastern shore of temperate North America and has strewn them along at convenience.
Fig. 8—Section of the world map in the portolan atlas of about 1508 known as Egerton MS. 2803 in the British Museum, placing the Seven Cities in North America and the name “Antiglia” in South America. (After Stevenson’s photographic facsimile.)
Incidentally, this map is also interesting as one of a few which inscribe Antillia, with slight changes of orthography, on some part of the mainland of South America. In this instance “Antiglia” occupies a tract of the northwestern coastal country apparently corresponding to contiguous portions of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.