Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery

by Justin Winsor

A letter of Pasqualigo, dated at Lisbon, October 18, 1501, and found by Von Ranke at Venice in the diary of Marino Sanuto,—a running record of events, which begins in 1496,—has been interpreted by Humboldt as signifying that at this time it was known among the Portuguese observers of the maritime reports that a continental stretch of coast connected the Spanish discoveries in the Antilles with those of the Portuguese at the north. Harrisse questions this interpretation, and considers that what Humboldt thinks knowledge was simply a tentative conjecture. If this knowledge is represented in the Cantino map, there is certainly too great remoteness in the regions of the Cortereal discoveries to form such a connection. It is of course possible that the map is a falsification in this respect, to make the line of demarcation serve the Portuguese interests, and such falsification is by no means improbable.

The Cantino and La Cosa maps at variance.

Bimini.

It will be remembered that the La Cosa map showed no hesitancy in placing the Antilles on the coast of Asia, and put the region of the Cabot landfall on the coast of Cathay. Consequently, the difference between the La Cosa and the Cantino maps for this region north of Cuba is phenomenal. In these two or three years (1500-1502), something had come to pass which seemed to raise the suspicion that this northern continental line might possibly not be Asiatic after all, or at least it might not have the trend or contour which had before been given it on the Asiatic theory. It is an interesting question from whom this information could have come. Was this coast in the Cantino map indeed not North American, but the coast of Yucatan, misplaced, as one conjecture has been? But this involves a recognition of some voyage on the Yucatan coast of which we have no record. Was it the result of one of the voyages of Vespucius, and was Varnhagen right in tracking that navigator up the east Florida shore? Was it drawn by some unauthorized Spanish mariners, who were—we know Columbus complained of such—invading his vested rights, or perhaps by some of those to whom he was finally induced to concede the privilege of exploration? Was it found by some English explorer who answers the description of Ojeda in 1501, when he complains that people of this nation had been in these regions some years before? Was it the discovery of some of those against whom a royal prohibition of discovery was issued by the Catholic kings, September 3, 1501? Was it anything more than the result of some vague information from the Lucayan Indians, aided by a sprinkling of supposable names, respecting a land called Bimini lying there away? Eight or nine years later, Peter Martyr, in the map which he published in 1511, seems to have thought so, and certain stories of a fountain of youth in regions lying in that direction were already prevalent, as Martyr also shows us. The fact seems to be that we have no Spanish map between the making of La Cosa's in 1500 and this one of Peter Martyr in 1511, to indicate any Spanish acquaintance with such a northern coast.

Peter Martyr's map. 1511.

This map of 1511, if it is honest enough to show what the Spanish government knew of Florida, is indicative of but the vaguest information, and its divulgence of that coast may, in Brevoort's opinion, account for the rarity of the chart, in view of the determination of Spain to keep control as far as she could of all cartographical records of what her explorers found out.

It is evident, if we accept the theory of this Cantino map showing the coast of the United States, that we have in it a delineation nearer the source by several years than those which modern students have longer known in the Waldseemüller map of 1508, the Stobnicza map of 1512, the Reisch map of 1515, and the so-called Admiral's map of 1513,—all which arose, it is very clear, from much the same source as this of Cantino. What is that source? There are some things that seem to indicate that this source was the description of Portuguese rather than of other seamen. This belief falls in with what we know of the cordial relations of Portugal and Duke René, under whose auspices Waldseemüller at least worked. Thus it would seem that while Spain was impeding cartographical knowledge through the rest of Europe, Portugal was so assiduously helping it that for many years the Ptolemies and other central and southern European publications were making known the cosmographical ideas which originated in Portugal.

It has been already said that Humboldt in his Examen Critique (iv. 262) refers to a letter which indicates that in October, 1501, the Portuguese had already learned, or it may be only conjectured, that the coast from the region of the Antilles ran uninterruptedly north till it united with the snowy shores of the northern discoveries. This, then, seems to indicate that it was a Portuguese source that supplied conjecture, if not fact, to the maker of the Cantino map. Harrisse's solution of this matter, as also mentioned already, is that the letter found by Von Ranke and the letter which we know Pasqualigo sent to Venice about the Cortereal voyages were one and the same, and that it was rather conjecture than fact that the Portuguese possessed at this time.

The obvious difficulty in the cartographical problem for the Portuguese was, as has been said, to make it appear that they were not disregarding the agreement at Tordesillas while they were securing a region for sovereignty. We have already said that this accounts for the extreme eastern position found in the Cantino and the cognate maps of the Newfoundland region, which, as thus drawn, it was not easy to connect with the coast line of eastern Florida. Hence the open sea-gap which exists between them in the maps, while the evidence of the descriptions would make the coast line continuous.