Greenland connects Europe and America.
While this idea of the north was developing, there came in another that made the peninsular Greenland of the ante-Columbian maps grow into a link of land connecting Europe with the Americo-Asiatic main, so that one might in truth perambulate the globe dryshod. We find this conception in the maps of the Bavarian Ziegler (1532), and in the Italians Ruscelli (1544) and Gastaldi (1548),—the last two represented in the Ptolemies of those years published in Italy. But these Italian cosmographers were by no means constant in their belief, as Ruscelli showed in his Ptolemy of 1561, and Gastaldi in his Ramusio map of 1550.
CARTA MARINA, 1548.
Asia and America joined in the higher latitudes.
MYRITIUS, 1590.
As the Pacific explorations were stretched northward from Mexico, and the peninsula of California was brought into prominence, there remained for some time a suspicion that the western ocean made a great northerly bend, so as to sever North America from Asia except along the higher latitudes. We find this northerly extension of the Pacific in a map of copper preserved in the Carter-Brown library, which seems to have been the work of a Florentine goldsmith somewhere about 1535; in the Carta Marina of Gastaldi in 1548; and it even exists in maps of a later date, like that of Paolo de Furlani (1560) and that of Myritius (1587).