RIBERO'S ANTILLES, 1529.

The Admiral's belief, bolstered after his own fashion by suborning his crew, was far from being accepted by all.

Peter Martyr not long afterward voiced the hesitancy which was growing. It was beginning to be believed that the earth was larger than Columbus thought, and that his discoveries had not taken him as far as Cathay. Every new report veered the vane on this old gossiper's steeple, and he went on believing one day and disbelieving the next.

WYTFLIET'S CUBA.
[left side]
[WYTFLIET'S CUBA. (complete view)]

We may perhaps question now if the official promulgation of the Cuban circumnavigation by Sebastian Ocampo in 1508 was much more than the Spanish acknowledgment of its insularity, when they could no longer deny it. Henry Stevens has claimed to put La Cosa's island of Cuba in accord with Columbus, or at least partly so. He finds this western limit of Cuba on the La Cosa map drawn with "a dash of green paint," which he holds to be a color used to define unknown coasts. He studied the map in Jomard's colored facsimile, and trusted it, not having examined the original to this end,—though he had apparently seen it in the Paris auction-room in 1853, when, as a competitor, he had run up the price which the Spanish government paid for it. He says that the same green emblem of unknown lands is also placed upon the coast of Asia, where a peninsular Cuba would have joined it. He seems to forget that he should have found, to support his theory, a gap rather than a supposable coast, and should rather have pointed to the vignette of St. Christopher as affording that gap.

WYTFLIET'S CUBA.
[right side]
[WYTFLIET'S CUBA. (complete view)]

Ruysch in 1507 marked in his map this unknown western limit with a conventional scroll, while he made his north coast not unlike the Asiatic coast of Mauro (1457) and Behaim (1492), and with no gap. Stevens also interprets the St. Dié map of 1508-13 as showing this peninsular Cuba in what is there placed as the main, with a duplicated insular Cuba in what is called Isabella. The warrant for this supposition is the transfer under disguises of the La Cosa and Ruysch names of their Cuba to the continental coast of the St. Dié map, leaving the "Isabella" entirely devoid of names.