SPANISH MAP, 1527.
[After sketch in E. Mayer's Die Entwicklung der Seekarten (Wien, 1877).]

The Weimar chart of 1527, which Kohl, Stevens, and others have assigned to Ferdinand Columbus, has been ascribed by Harrisse to Nuño Garcia de Toreno, but by Coote, in editing Stevens on Schöner, it is assigned to Ribero, as a precursor of his undoubted production of 1529.

Idea of a new continent spreading.

We have seen how, succeeding to the belief of Columbus that the new regions were Asia, there had grown up, a few years after his death, in spite of his audacious notarial act at Cuba, a strong presumption among geographical students that a new continent had been found. We have seen this conception taking form with more or less uncertainty as to its western confines immediately upon, and even anticipating, the discovery of the actual South Sea by Balboa, and can follow it down in the maps or globes of Stobnicza and Da Vinci, in that known as the Lenox globe, in those called the Tross and Nordenskiöld gores, the Schöner and Hauslab globes, the Ptolemy map of 1513, and in those of Reisch, Apianus, Laurentius Frisius, Maiollo, Bordone, Homem, and Münster,—not to name some others. In twenty years it had come to be a prevalent belief, and men's minds were turned to a consideration of the possibility of this revealed continent having been, after all, known to the ancients, as Glareanus, quoting Virgil, was the earliest to assert in 1527.

THE NANCY GLOBE.
[1st part]
[THE NANCY GLOBE. (complete view)]

Reaction in the monk Franciscus.

About 1525 there came a partial reaction, as if the discovery of Balboa had been pushed too far in its supposed results. We find this taking form in 1526, in an identification of North America with eastern Asia in a map ascribed to the monk Franciscus, while South America is laid down as a continental island, separated from India by a strait only. The strait is soon succeeded by an isthmus, and in this way we get a solution of the problem which had some currency for half a century or more.