STOBNICZA'S MAP.
1512. Stobnicza map.
We find in 1512, where we might least expect it, one of the most remarkable of the early maps, which was made for an introduction to Ptolemy, published at this date at Cracow, in Poland, by Stobnicza. This cartographer was the earliest to introduce into the plane delineation of the globe the now palpable division of its surface into an eastern and western hemisphere. His map, for some reason, is rarely found in the book to which it belongs. Nordenskiöld says he has examined many copies of the book in the libraries of Scandinavia, Russia, and Poland, without finding a copy with it; but it is found in other copies in the great libraries at Vienna and Munich. He thinks the map may have been excluded from most of the editions because of its rudeness, or "on account of its being contrary to the old doctrines of the Church." Its importance in the growth of the ideas respecting the new discoveries in the western hemisphere is, however, very great, since for the first time it gives a north and south continent connected by an isthmus, and represents as never before in an engraved map the western hemisphere as an entirety. This is remarkable, as it was published a year before Balboa made his discovery of the Pacific Ocean. It is not difficult to see the truth of Nordenskiöld's statement that the map divides the waters of the globe into two almost equal oceans, "communicating only in the extreme south and in the extreme north," but the south communication which is unmistakable is by the Cape of Good Hope. The extremity of South America is not reached because of the marginal scale, and because of the same scale it is not apparent that there is any connection between the Pacific and Indian oceans, and for similar reasons connection is not always clear at the north. There must have been information at hand to the maker of this map of which modern scholars can find no other trace, or else there was a wild speculative spirit which directed the pencil in some singular though crude correspondence to actual fact. This is apparent in its straight conjectural lines on the west coast of South America, which prefigure the discoveries following upon the enterprise of Balboa and the voyage of Magellan.
The Lenox globe.
Da Vinci globe.
If Stobnicza, apparently, had not dared to carry the southern extremity of South America to a point, there had been no such hesitancy in the makers of two globes of about the same date,—the little copper sphere picked up by Richard M. Hunt, the architect, in an old shop in Paris, and now in the Lenox Library in New York, and the rude sketch, giving quartered hemispheres separated on the line of the equator, which is preserved in the cabinet of Queen Victoria, at Windsor, among the papers of Leonardo da Vinci. This little draft has a singular interest both from its association with so great a name as Da Vinci's, and because it bears at what is, perhaps, the earliest date to be connected with such cartographical use the name America lettered on the South American continent. Major has contended for its being the work of Da Vinci himself, but Nordenskiöld demurs. This Swedish geographer is rather inclined to think it the work of a not very well informed copier working on some Portuguese prototype.
1507-13. Admiral's map.