Gulf of Mexico.
1524. Cortes's Gulf of Mexico.
Yucatan as an island.
We have seen how Pineda's expedition to the northern parts of the Gulf of Mexico in 1519 had improved the knowledge of that shore, and we have a map embodying these explorations, which was sent to Spain in 1520 by Garay, then governor of Jamaica. It was now pretty clear that the blank spaces of earlier maps, leaving it uncertain if there was a passage westerly somewhere in the northwest corner of the gulf, should be filled compactly. Still, a belief that such a passage existed somewhere in the western contour of the gulf was not readily abandoned. Cortes, when he sent to Spain his sketch of the gulf, which was published there in 1524, was dwelling on the hope that some such channel existed near Yucatan, and his insular delineation of that peninsula, with a shadowy strait at its base, was eagerly grasped by the cartographers. Such a severance finds a place in the map of Maiollo of 1527, which is preserved in the Ambrosian library at Milan. Grijalva, some years earlier, had been sent, as we have seen, to sail round Yucatan; and though there are various theories about the origin of that name, it seems likely enough that the tendency to give it an insular form arose from a misconception of the Indian appellation. At all events, the island of Yucatan lingered long in the early maps.
GULF OF MEXICO, 1520.
1523. Cortes.
In 1523 Cortes had sent expeditions up the Pacific, and one up the Atlantic side of North America, to find the wished-for passage; but in vain.
Spanish and Portuguese rivalries.