Terra Verde.
There are three special points of interest in this chart. The first is the evident purpose of the maker, when sending it (1502) to his correspondent in Italy, to render it clear that the coasts which the Portuguese had tracked in the northwest Atlantic were sufficiently protuberant towards the rising sun to throw them on the Portuguese side of the revised line of demarcation. It is by no means certain, however, in doing so, that they pretended their discoveries to have been other than neighboring to Asia, since a peninsula north of these regions is called a "point of Asia." The ordinary belief of geographers at that time was that our modern Greenland was an extension of northern Europe. So it does not seem altogether certain that the Terra Verde of Cortereal can be held to be identical with its namesake of the Sagas.
Columbus and the Cantino map in the Paria region.
Columbus in want.
The second point of interest is what seems to be the connection between this map and those which had emanated from the results of the Columbus voyages, directly or indirectly. Columbus had made a chart of his track through the Gulf of Paria, and had sent it to Spain, and Ojeda had coursed the same region by it. We know from a letter of Angelo Trivigiano, the secretary of the Venetian ambassador in Spain, dated at Granada, August 21, 1501, and addressed to Domenico Malipiero, that at that time Columbus, who had ingratiated himself with the writer of the letter, was living without money, in great want, and out of favor with the sovereigns. This letter-writer then speaks of his intercession with Peter Martyr to have copies of his narrative of the voyages of Columbus made, and of his pleading with Columbus himself to have transcripts of his own letters to his sovereigns given to him, as well as a map of the new discoveries from the Admiral's own charts, which he then had with him in Granada.
There are three letters of Trivigiano, but the originals are not known. Foscarini in 1752 used them in his Della Letteratura veneziana, as found in the library of Jacopo Soranzo; but both these originals and Foscarini's copies have eluded the search of Harrisse, who gives them as printed or abstracted by Zurla.
What we have is not supposed to be the entire text, and we may well regret the loss of the rest. Trivigiano says of the map that he expected it to be extremely well executed on a large scale, giving ample details of the country which had been discovered. He refers to the delays incident to sending to Palos to have it made, because persons capable of such work could only be found there.
No such copy as that made for Malipiero is now known. Harrisse thinks that if it is ever discovered it will be very like the Cantino map, with the Cortereal discoveries left out. This same commentator also points out that there are certainly indications in the Cantino map that the maker of it, in drafting the region about the Gulf of Paria at least, worked either from Columbus's map or from some copy of it, for his information seems to be more correct than that which La Cosa followed.
What is the coast north of Cuba?
The third point of interest in this Cantino map, and one which has given rise to opposing views, respects that coast which is drawn in it north of the completed Cuba, and which at first glance is taken with little question for the Atlantic coast of the United States from Florida up. Is it such? Did the cartographers of that time have anything more than conjecture by which to run such a coast line?