MERCATOR'S GLOBE OF 1538.
[1st part]
[MERCATOR'S GLOBE OF 1538. (complete view)]

1541. Mercator.

Whether that protest was prompted by a tendency, already shown, to give the name to the whole western hemisphere is not clear; but certainly within eight years such a general application was publicly made, when Mercator, in drafting in 1541 some gores for a globe, divided the name AME—RICA so that it covered both North and South America, and qualified its application by a legend which says that the continent is "called to-day by many, New India." Thus a name that in the beginning was given to a part in distinction merely and without any reference to the entire field of the new explorations, was now become, by implication, an injustice to the great first discoverer of all. The mischief, aided by accident and by a not unaccountable evolution, was not to be undone, and, in the singular mutations of fate, a people inhabiting a region of which neither Columbus nor Vespucius had any conception are now distinctively known in the world's history as Americans.

MERCATOR'S GLOBE OF 1538.
[2nd part]
[MERCATOR'S GLOBE OF 1538. (complete view)]

These 1541 gores of Mercator were first made known to scholars a few years ago, when the Belgian government issued a facsimile edition of the only copy then known, which the Royal Library at Brussels had just acquired; but since there have been two other copies brought to light,—one at St. Nicholas in Belgium, and the other in the Imperial library at Vienna.

Henry II. map.

1544. Cabot map.

There are some indications on Spanish globes of about 1540, and in the Desceliers or Henry II. map of 1546, that the Spanish government had sent explorers to the region of Canada not long after Cartier's earliest explorations, and it is significant that the earliest published map to show these Cartier discoveries is the other of the two maps already referred to, namely, the Cabot mappemonde of 1544, which has been supposed a Spanish cartographical waif. Early publications of southern and middle Europe showed little recognition of the same knowledge.