There is abundant evidence of the non-communicative policy of Spain. This secretiveness was understood at the time Robert Thorne, in 1527, complained, as well as Sir Humphrey Gilbert in his Discoverie, that a similar injunction was later laid by Portugal. In Veitia Linage's Norte we read of the cabinets in which these maps were preserved, and how the Spanish pilot major and royal cosmographer alone kept the keys. There exists a document by which one of the companions of Magellan was put under a penalty of two thousand ducats not to disclose the route he traversed in that famous voyage. We know how Columbus endeavored to conceal the route of his final voyage, in which he reached the coast of Veragua.
MÜNSTER, 1532.
GLOBUS MUNDI.
A strait to India.
In the two maps of nearly equal date, being the earliest engraved charts which we have, the Ruysch map of 1508 and the so-called Admiral's map of 1507 (1513), the question of a strait leading to the Asiatic seas, which Columbus had spent so much energy in trying to find during his last voyage, is treated differently. We have seen that La Cosa confessed his uncertain knowledge by covering the place with a vignette. In the Ruysch map there is left the possibility of such a passage; in the other there is none, for the main shore is that of Asia itself, whose coast line uninterruptedly connects with that of South America. The belief in such a strait in due time was fixed, and lingered even beyond the time when Cortes showed there was no ground for it. We find it in Schöner's globes, in the Tross gores, and even so late as 1532, in the belated map of Münster.
EDEN.