Scarcity of Spanish printed maps.
We know, on the testimony of Robert Thorne in 1527, if from no other source, that it was a settled policy of the Spanish government to allow no one but proper cartographical designers to make its maps, "for that peradventure it would not sound well to them that a stranger should know or discover their secrets." This doubtless accounts for the fact that, in the two hundred maps mentioned by Ortelius in 1570 as used by him in compiling his atlas, not one was published in Spain; and every bibliographer knows that not a single edition of Ptolemy, the best known channel of communicating geographical knowledge in this age of discovery, bears a Spanish imprint. The two general maps of America during the sixteenth century, which Dr. Kohl could trace to Spanish presses, were that of Medina in 1545 and that of Gomara in 1554, and these were not of a scale to be of any service in navigating.
Cabot's connection with the map of 1544.
There seem to be insuperable objections to considering that Sebastian Cabot had direct influence in the production of the map now under consideration. It is full of a lack of knowledge which it is not possible to ascribe to him. That it is based upon some drafts of Cabot is most probably true; but they are clearly drafts, confused and in some ways perverted, and eked out by whatever could be picked up from other sources.
That the Cabot map was issued in more than one edition is inferred partly from the fact that the legends which Chytræus quotes from it differ somewhat from those now in the copy preserved in Paris; and indeed Harrisse finds reason to suppose that there may have been four different editions. That in some form or other it was better known in England than elsewhere is deduced from certain relations sustained with that country on the part of those who have mentioned the map,—Livio Sanuto, Ortelius, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Richard Willes, Hakluyt, and Purchas.
Whoever its author and whatever its minor defects, this so-called Cabot map of 1544 may reasonably be accepted as the earliest really honest, unimaginative exhibition of the American continent which had been made. There was in it no attempt to fancy a northwest passage; no confidence in the marine or terrestrial actuality of the region now known to be covered by the north Pacific; no certainty about the entire western coast line of South America, though this might have been decided upon if the maker of the map had been posted to date for that region. The maker of it further showed nothing of that presumption, which soon became prevalent, of making Tierra del Fuego merely but one of the various promontories of an immense Antarctic continent, which later stood in the planispheres of Ortelius and Wytfliet.
MEDINA, 1544.
Geographical study transferred to Italy.
This map of Cabot was the last of the principal cartographical monuments made north of the Alps in this early half of the sixteenth century. The centre of geographical study was now transferred to Italy, where it had begun with the opening of the interest in oceanic discovery. For the next score years and more we must look mainly to Venice for the newer development.