MÜNSTER, 1545.
The Cabot map has been an enigma to scholars ever since it was discovered in Germany, in 1843, by Von Martius. It was deposited the next year in the great library at Paris. It is a large elliptical world-map, struck from an engraved plate, and it bears sundry elucidating inscriptions, some of which must needs have come from Sebastian Cabot, others seem hardly to merit his authorship, and one acknowledges him as the maker of the map. There is, accordingly, a composite character to the production, not easily to be analyzed so as to show the credible and the incredible by clear lines of demarcation. We learn from it how it proclaimed for the first time the real agency of John Cabot in the discovery of North America, confirmed when Hakluyt, in 1582, printed the patent from Henry VII. There is an unaccountable year given for that discovery, namely, 1494, but we seem to get the true date when Michael Lok, in 1582, puts down "J. Cabot. 1497," against Cape Breton in his map of that year. As this last map appeared in Hakluyt's Divers Voyages, and as Hakluyt tells us of the existence of Cabot's maps and of his seeing them, we may presume that we have in this date of 1497 an authoritative statement. We learn also from this map of 1544 that the land first seen was the point of the island now called Cape Breton. Without the aid of this map, Biddle, who wrote before its discovery, had contended for Labrador as the landfall.
MERCATOR, 1541.
[Sketched from his gores.]
FROM THE SEBASTIAN CABOT MAPPEMONDE. 1514.