The endeavors of the Portuguese in this direction did not end here; and the region thus brought by them to the attention of the cartographer soon acquired in their maps the name of Terre des Cortereal, or Terra dos Corte reals, or, as Latinized by Sylvanus, Regalis Domus. There is little, however, to connect these earliest ventures with later history, except perhaps that from their experiences it is that a vague cartographical conception of the fabled Straits of Anian confronts us in many of the maps of the latter half of the sixteenth century. No one has made it quite sure whence the appellation or even the idea of such a strait came. By some it has been thought to have grown out of Marco Polo's Ania, which was conceived to be in the north. By Navarrete, Humboldt, and others it has been made to grow in some way out of these Cortereal voyages, and Humboldt supposes that the entrance to Hudson Bay, under 60° north latitude, was thought at that time to lead to some sort of a transcontinental passage, going it is hardly known where. The name does not seem at first to have been magnified into all its later associations of a kingdom, or "regnum" of Anian, as the Latin nomenclature then had it. Its great city of Quivira did not appear till some time after the middle of the sixteenth century, and then it was not always quite certain to the cosmographical mind whether all this magnificence might not better be placed on the Asiatic side of such a strait. This imaginary channel was made for a long period to run along the parallels of latitudes somewhere in the northern regions of the New World, after America had begun generally to have its independent existence recognized, south of the Arctic regions at least. The next stage of the belief violently changed the course of the straits across the parallels, prefiguring the later discovered Bering's Straits; and this is made prominent in maps of Zalterius (1566) and Mercator (1569), and in the maps of those who copied these masters.
Spanish maps.
Maps of the Cortereal discoveries.
It took thirty years for the Cortereal discoveries to work their way into the conceptions of the Spanish map makers. Whether this dilatory belief came from lack of information, obliviousness, or simply from an heroic persistence in ignoring what was not their boast, is a question to be decided through an estimate of the Spanish character. There seems, however, to have been interest enough on the part of a single Italian noble to seek information at once, as we see from the Cantino map; but the knowledge was not, nevertheless, apparently a matter of such interest but it could escape Ruysch in 1508. Not till Sylvanus issued his edition of Ptolemy, in 1511, did any signs of these Cortereal expeditions appear on an engraved map.
THE CANTINO MAP.
The Cantino map. 1502.
Only a few years have passed since students of these cartographical fields were first allowed free study of this Cantino map. It is, after La Cosa, the most interesting of all the early maps of the American coast as its configuration had grown to be comprehended in the ten years which followed the first voyage of Columbus.
The Cortereal discoveries east of the line of demarcation.