The Weimar Map
Nordenskiöld, practically applying his test of the presence of Antillia and arranging his materials in chronological order, heads his list of “The Oldest Maps of the New Hemisphere”[254] with the anonymous map preserved in the Grand Ducal library in Weimar and credited to 1424.[255] But it seems that this map does not deserve that position, for it is not entitled to the date; Humboldt, inspecting the original, made out certain fragments of words and the Roman characters for that year on a band running from south to north between the Azores and Antillia; also, in more modern ink, the date 1424 on the margin. Whatever the explanation, he was convinced of error by subsequent correspondence with the Weimar librarian and admitted that it was probably the work of Conde Freducci not earlier than 1481. Apart from all considerations of workmanship and map outlines, the use of “insule” instead of “insulle” and of “brandani” instead of “brandany” in the inscription concerning the Madeiras marks the map as almost certainly belonging to the last quarter, not the first quarter, of the fifteenth century.