ZALTIÉRE, 1560.
Entanglement of the American and Asiatic coasts.
1728. Bering.
This map of Myritius, which appeared in his Opusculum Geographicum, published at Ingolstadt in 1590, is the work of, perhaps, the last of the geographers who did not leave more or less doubt about the connection of North America with Asia. So it took about a full century for the entanglement of the coasts of Asia and America, which Columbus had imagined, to be practically eradicated from the maps. Not that there were not doubters, even very early, but the faith in a new continent grew slowly and had many set-backs; nor did the Asiatic connection fade entirely out, as among the possibilities of geography, for considerably more than a century yet to come. The uncertainties of the higher latitudes kept knowledge in suspense, and even the English settlers on the northerly coasts of the United States were not quite sure.
PORCACCHI, 1572.
Thomas Morton, the chronicler of a colony on the Massachusetts shores, felt it necessary, so late as 1636, to make a reservation that possibly the mainland of America bordered on the land of the Tartars. Indeed, no one could say positively, though much was conjectured, that there was not a terrestrial connection in the extreme northwest, under arctic latitudes, till Bering in 1728, two hundred and thirty-six years after Columbus offered his prayer at San Salvador, passed from the Pacific into the polar waters. This became the solution of the fabled straits of Anian, an inheritance from the very earliest days of northern exploration, which, after the middle of the sixteenth century, was revived in the maps of Martines, Zaltière, Mercator, Porcacchi, Furlani, and Wytfliet, prefiguring the channel which Bering passed. Much in the same way as the southern apex of South America was a vision in men's minds long before Magellan found his way to the Pacific.
1536. Chaves.