The Beccario Map of 1435
The addition to fifteenth-century geography of a great group of large western islands roughly corresponding to a part of the West Indies and Florida rests mainly on the testimony of the following maps now to be discussed: Beccario 1435, Bianco 1436, Pareto 1455, Roselli 1468, Benincasa 1482, and the anonymous Weimar map probably by Freducci and dating somewhere after 1481. Of these the most complete as well as the earliest is Beccario’s[256] ([Fig. 20]). He gives the islands the collective title of “Insulle a novo rep’te” (newly reported islands), which may refer to the discovery recorded by Behaim for 1414 or to some more recent experience. The interval would not be much greater than that between the first landing of Columbus and the narrative of Peter Martyr beginning with equivalent words. It is likely, however, that some lost map or maps preceded Beccario’s, for the artificially regular outlines of his islands, though in accord with the fashion of cartography in his time, seem rather out of keeping with a first appearance. The type had somehow fixed itself with curious minuteness and was repeated faithfully by his successors. In spite of these impossibly symmetrical details and some discrepancies as to individual direction of elongation and latitude, the fact remains that in the Atlantic there is no such great group except the Antilles and that the general correspondence is too surprising to be explained by mere accident or conjecture. Surely some mariner had visited Cuba and some of its neighbors before 1435.
Fig. 20—Section of the Beccario map of 1435 showing the four islands of the Antilles, St. Brendan’s Islands, Daculi, and others. (After Uzielli’s photographic facsimile.)
This map of Beccario had been somewhat neglected, with misreading of the names, before it was taken in hand by the Italian Geographical Society and reproduced very carefully by photo-lithography. As regards the island names in particular, this eliminated some misunderstanding and confusion and made their meaning plain. Thus rendered, the map affords a convenient standard for the others, which, indeed, differ from it very little as to these “Islands of Antillia.”