It is in the Sumario (1526) of Oviedo that we get the first idea of this sea of Verrazano, as Brevoort contends, and we see it in the Maiollo map of the next year, called "Mare Indicum," as if it were an indentation of the great western ocean of Balboa. It was a favorite fancy of Baptista Agnese, in the series of portolanos associated with his name during the middle of the century, and in which he usually indicated supposable ocean routes to Asia. As time went on, the idea was so far modified that this indentation took the shape of a loop of the Arctic seas, or of that stretch of water which at the north connected the Atlantic and Pacific, as shown in the Münster map in the Ptolemy of 1540,—a map apparently based on the portolanos of Agnese,—though the older form of the sea seems to be adopted in the globe of Ulpius (1542). This idea of a Carolinian isthmus prevailed for some years, and may have grown out of a misconception of the Carolina sounds, though it is sometimes carried far enough north, as in the Lok map of 1582, to seem as if Buzzard's Bay were in some way thought to stretch westerly into its depths. The last trace of this mysterious inner ocean, so far as I have discovered, is in a map made by one of Ralegh's colonists in 1585, and preserved among the drawings of John White in the De Bry collection of the British Museum, and brought to light by Dr. Edward Eggleston. This drawing makes for the only time that I have observed it, an actual channel at "Port Royal," leading to this oceanic expanse, which was later interpreted as an inland lake. Thus it was that this geographical blunder lived more or less constantly in a succession of maps for about sixty years, until sometimes it vanished in a large lake in Carolina, or in the north it dwindled until it began to take a new lease of life in an incipient Hudson's Bay, as in the great Lake of Tadenac, figured in the Molineaux map of 1600, and in the Lago Dagolesme in the Botero map of 1603.
MICHAEL LOK, 1582.
JOHN WHITE'S MAP.
[Communicated by Dr. Edward Eggleston.]
Norumbega.
It was apparently during the voyage of Verrazano that an Indian name which was understood as "Aranbega" was picked up along the northern coasts as designating the region, and which a little later was reported by others as "Norumbega," and so passed into the mysterious and fabled nomenclature of the coast with a good deal of the unstableness that attended the fabulous islands of the Atlantic in the fancy of the geographers of the Middle Ages. As a definition of territory it gradually grew to have a more and more restricted application, coming down mainly after a while to the limits of the later New England, and at last finding, as Dr. Dee (1580), Molineaux (1600), and Champlain (1604) understood it, a home on the Penobscot. Still the region it represented contracted and expanded in people's notions, and on maps the name seemed to have a license to wander.