PART OF MAP IN THE PTOLEMY OF 1513.
PART OF MAP IN THE PTOLEMY OF 1513.
1508. Duke René died.
1509. Globus Mundi.
When Duke René, upon whom so much had depended in the little community at St. Dié, died, in 1508, the geographical printing schemes of Waldseemüller and his fellows received a severe reverse, and for a few years we hear nothing more of the edition of Ptolemy which had been planned. The next year (1509), Waldseemüller, now putting his name to his little treatise, was forced, because of the failure of the college press, to go to Strassburg to have a new edition of it printed (1509). The proposals for naming the continental discoveries of Vespucius seem not in the interim to have excited any question, and so they are repeated. We look in vain in the copy of this edition which Ferdinand Columbus bought at Venice in July, 1521, and which is preserved at Seville, for any marginal protest. The author of the Historie, how far soever Ferdinand may have been responsible for that book, is equally reticent. There was indeed no reason why he should take any exception. The fitness of the appellation was accepted as in no way invalidating the claim of Columbus to discoveries farther to the north; and in another little tract, printed at the same time at Grüniger's Strassburg press, the anonymous Globus Mundi, the name "America" is adopted in the text, though the small bit of the new coast shown in its map is called by a translation of Vespucius's own designation merely "Newe Welt."
1513. The Strassburg Ptolemy.
The Ptolemy scheme bore fruit at last, and at Strassburg, also, for here the edition whose maps are associated with the name of Waldseemüller, and whose text shows some of the influence of a Greek manuscript of the old geographer which Ringmann had earlier brought from Italy, came out in 1513. Here was a chance, in a book far more sure to have influence than the little anonymous tract of 1507, to impress the new name America upon the world of scholars and observers, and the opportunity was not seized. It is not easy to divine the cause of such an omission. The edition has two maps which show this Vespucian continent in precisely the same way, though but one of them shows also to its full extent the region of Columbus's explorations. On one of these maps the southern regions have no designation whatever, and on the other, the "Admiral's map," there is a legend stretched across it, assigning the discovery of the region to Columbus.