We do not know, in all the contemporary literature which has come down to us, that up to 1513 there had been any rebuke at the ignorance or temerity which appeared in its large bearing to be depriving Columbus of a rightful honor. That in 1509 Waldseemüller should have enforced the credit given to Vespucius, and in 1513 revoked it in favor of Columbus, seems to indicate qualms of conscience of which we have no other trace. Perhaps, indeed, this reversion of sympathy is of itself an evidence that Waldseemüller had less to do with the edition than has been supposed. It is too much to assert that Waldseemüller repented of his haste, but the facts in one light would indicate it.
The name America begins to be accepted.
THE TROSS GORES.
Like many such headlong projects, however, the purpose had passed beyond the control of its promoters. The euphony, if not the fitness, of the name America had attracted attention, and there are several printed and manuscript globes and maps in existence which at an early date adopted that designation for the southern continent. Nordenskiöld (Facsimile Atlas, p. 42) quotes from the commentaries of the German Coclæus, contained in the Meteorologia Aristotelis of Jacobus Faber (Nuremberg, 1512) a passage referring to the "Nova Americi terra."
1516-17. First in a map.
To complicate matters still more, within a few years after this an undated edition of Waldseemüller's tract appeared at Lyons,—perhaps without his participation,—which was always found, down to 1881, without a map, though the copies known were very few; but in that year a copy with a map was discovered, now owned by an American collector, in which the proposition of the text is enforced with the name America on the representation of South America. A section of this map is here given as the Tross Gores. In the present condition of our knowledge of the matter, it was thus at a date somewhere about 1516-17 that the name appeared first in any printed map, unless, indeed, we allow a somewhat earlier date to two globes in the Hauslab collection at Vienna. On the date of these last objects there is, however, much difference of opinion, and one of them has been depicted and discussed in the Mittheilungen of the Geographische Gesellschaft (1886, p. 364) of Vienna. Here, as in the descriptive texts, it must be clearly kept in mind, however, that no one at this date thought of applying the name to more than the land which Vespucius had found stretching south beyond the equator on the east side of South America, and which Balboa had shown to have a similar trend on the west. The islands and region to the north, which Columbus and Cabot had been the pioneers in discovering, still remained a mystery in their relations to Asia, and there was yet a long time to elapse before the truth should be manifest to all, that a similar expanse of ocean lay westerly at the north, as was shown by Balboa to extend in the same direction at the south.
THE HAUSLAB GLOBE.