Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery

by Justin Winsor

Made a Part of Asia.

It is only when we get down to the later years of Columbus's life that we find, on a Portuguese chart of 1503, a glimmer of the truth, and this only transiently, though the conception of the mariners, upon which this map was based, probably associated Greenland with the Asiatic main, as Ruysch certainly did, by a bold effort to reconcile the Norse traditions with the new views of his time, when he produced the first engraved map of the discoveries of Columbus and Cabot in the Roman Ptolemy of 1508.

Again made a part of Europe.

It is thus beyond dispute that if Columbus entertained any views as to the geographical relations of Greenland, which had been practically lost to Europe since communication with it ceased, earlier in the fifteenth century, they were simply those of a peninsula of northern Europe, which could have no connection with any country lying beyond the Atlantic; for it was not till after his death that any general conception of it associated with the Asiatic main arose. It is quite certain, however, that as the conception began to prevail, after the discovery of the South Sea by Balboa, in 1513, that an interjacent new world had really been found, there was a tendency, as shown in the map of Thorne (1527), representing current views in Spain, and in those of Finæus (1531), Ziegler (1532), Mercator (1538), and Bordone (1528-1547), to relegate the position of Greenland to a peninsular connection with Europe.

There is a curious instance of the evolution of the correct idea in the Ptolemy of 1525, and repeated in the same plate as used in the editions of 1535 and 1545. The map was originally engraved to show "Gronlandia" as a European peninsula, but apparently, at a later stage, the word Gronlandia was cut in the corner beside the sketch of an elephant, and farther west, as if to indicate its transoceanic and Asiatic situation, though there was no attempt to draw in a coast line.

Later diverse views.

Later in the century there was a strife of opinion between the geographers of the north, as represented in the Olaus Magnus map of 1567, who disconnected the country from Europe, and those of the south, who still united Greenland with Scandinavia, as was done in the Zeno map of 1558. By this time, however, the southern geographers had begun to doubt, and after 1540 we find Labrador and Greenland put in close proximity in many of their maps; and in this the editors of the Ptolemy of 1561 agreed, when they altered their reëngraved map—as the plate shows—in a way to disconnect Greenland from Scandinavia.

It is not necessary to trace the cartographical history of Greenland to a later day. It is manifest that it was long after Columbus's death when the question was raised of its having any other connection than with Europe, and Columbus could have learned in Iceland nothing to suggest to him that the land of Eric the Red had any connection with the western shores of Asia, of which he was dreaming.

Discovery of Vinland.

If any of the learned men in Iceland had referred Columbus once more to the Heimskringla, it would have been to the brief entry which it shows in the records as the leading Norse historian made it, of the story of the discovery of Vinland. There he would have read, "Leif also found Vinland the Good," and he could have read nothing more. There was nothing in this to excite the most vivid imagination as to place or direction.