1515. Reisch's map.
It is worthy of remark that, in the same year with the discovery of the South Sea by Balboa, an edition of Ptolemy made popular a map which had indeed been cut in its first state as early as 1507, but which still preserved the contiguity of the Antilles to the region of the Ganges and its three mouths. This was the well-known "Admiral's map," usually associated with the name of Waldseemüller, and if this same cartographer, as Franz Wieser conjectures, is responsible for the map in Reisch's Margarita philosophica (1515), a sort of cyclopædia, he had in the interim awaked to the significance of the discovery of Balboa, for the Ganges has disappeared, and Cipango is made to lie in an ocean beyond the continental Zoana Mela (America), which has an undefined western limit, as it had already been depicted in the Stobnicza map of 1512.
THE ALLEGED DA VINCI SKETCH.
[Combination.]
First modern atlas.
It was in this Strassburg Ptolemy of 1513 that Ringmann, who had been concerned in inventing the name of America, revised the Latin of Angelus, using a Greek manuscript of Ptolemy for the purpose. Nordenskiöld speaks of this edition as the first modern atlas of the world, extended so as to give in two of its maps—that known as the "Admiral's map," and another of Africa—the results following upon the discoveries of Columbus and Da Gama. This "Admiral's map," which has been so often associated with Columbus, is hardly a fair representation of the knowledge that Columbus had attained, and seems rather to be the embodiment of the discoveries of many, as the description of it, indeed, would leave us to infer; while the other American chart of the volume is clearly of Portuguese rather than of Spanish origin, as may be inferred by the lavish display of the coast connected with the descriptions by Vespucius. On the other hand, nothing but the islands of Española and Cuba stand in it for the explorations of Columbus. Both of these maps are given elsewhere in this Appendix.
REISCH, 1515.
