We have thus suggested possible solutions of this continental shore above Florida. It must be confessed that the truth is far from patent, and we must yet wait perhaps a long time before we discover, if indeed we ever do, to whom this mapping of the coast, as shown in the Cantino map, was due.
Was the Florida coast known?
There are evidences other than those of this Cantino map that the Portuguese were in this Floridian region in the early years of the sixteenth century, and Lelewel tried to work out their discoveries from scattered data, in a conjectural map, which he marks 1501-1504, and which resembles the Ptolemy map of 1513. The bringing forward of the Cantino map confirms much of the supposed cartography.
There is one theory which to some minds gives a very easy solution of this problem, without requiring belief in any knowledge, clandestine or public, of such a land.
Brevoort in his Verrazano had already been inclined to the view later emphasized by Stevens in his Schöner, and reiterated by Coote in his editorial revision of that posthumous work.
Stevens is content to allow Ocampo, in 1508, to have been the earliest probable discoverer of this coast, and Ponce de Leon as the original attested finder in 1513.
This Cantino coast a duplicated Cuba.
The Stevens theory is that this seeming Florida arose from a Portuguese misconception of the first two voyages of Columbus, by which two regions were thought to have been coasted instead of different sides of the same, and that what others consider an early premonition of Florida and the upper coasts was simply a duplicated Cuba, to make good the Portuguese conception. It is not explained how so strange a misconception of very palpable truths could have arisen, or how a coast trending north and south so far could have been confounded with one stretching at right angles to such a course for so short a distance.
Stevens traces the influence of his "bogus Cuba" in a long series of maps based on Portuguese notions, in which he names those of Waldseemüller (1513), Stobnicza (1512), Schöner (1515, 1520), Reisch (1515), Bordone (1528), Solinus (1520), Friess (1522), and Grynæus (1532—made probably earlier), as opposed to the Spanish and more truthful view, which is expressed by Ruysch (1507-8) and Peter Martyr, (1511).
It is a proposition not to be dismissed lightly nor accepted triumphantly on our present knowledge. We must wait for further developments.