1538. Mercator.
1540. Hartmann gores.
But we have anticipated a little. Coincident with the efforts of Cartier to discover this northern passage we mark other navigators working at the same problem. The Spaniard Alonso de Chaves made a chart of this eastern coast in 1536; but we only know of its existence from the description of it written by Oviedo in 1537. In the earliest map which we have from the hand of Gerard Mercator, and of which the only copy known was discovered some years ago by the late James Carson Brevoort, of New York, we find the northern passage well defined in 1538, and a broad channel separating the western coast of America from a parallel coast of Asia,—a kind of delineation which is followed in some globe-gores of about 1540, which Nordenskiöld thinks may have been the work of George Hartmann, of Nuremberg. This map is evidently based on Portuguese information, and that Swedish scholar finds no ground for associating it with the lost globe of Schöner, as Stevens has done. A facsimile of part of it has already been given.
1540-45. Münster.
Sebastian Münster, in his maps in the Ptolemy of 1540-45, makes a clear seaway to the Moluccas somewhere in the latitude of the Strait of Belle Isle. Münster was in many ways antiquated in his notions. He often resorted to the old device of the Middle Ages by supplying the place of geographical details with figures of savages and monsters.
We come now to two significant maps in the early history of American cartography.
Columbus had been dead five and thirty years when a natural result grew out of those circumstances which conspired to name the largest part of the new discoveries after a secondary pathfinder. We have seen that there seemed at first no injustice in the name of America being applied to a region in the main external to the range of Columbus's own explorations, and how it took nearly a half century before public opinion, as expressed in the protest of Schöner in 1533, recognized the injustice of using another's name.
