ON THE
PACIFIC COAST OF NORTH AMERICA.
BY THE EDITOR.
THE cartographical history of the Pacific coast of North America is one of shadowy and unstable surmise long continued.[1254] The views of Columbus and his companions, as best shown in the La Cosa and Ruysch maps,[1255] precluded, for a considerable time after the coming of Europeans, the possibility of the very existence of such a coast; since their Asiatic theory of the new-found lands maintained with more or less modification a fitful existence for a full century after Columbus. In many of the earliest maps the question was avoided by cutting off the westerly extension of the new continent by the edge of the sheet;[1256] but the confession of that belief was still made sometimes in other ways, as when, in the Portuguese portolano, which is placed between 1516 and 1520, Mahometan flags are placed on the coasts of Venezuela and Nicaragua.[1257]
In 1526 a rare book of the monk Franciscus, De orbis situ ac descriptione Francisci epistola,[1258] contained a map which represented South America as a huge island disjoined from the Asiatic coast by a strait in the neighborhood of Tehuantepec, with the legend, “Hoc orbis hemisphærium cedit regi Hispaniæ.”[1259] A few years later we find two other maps showing this Asiatic connection,—one of which, the Orontius Finæus globe, is well known, and is the earliest engraved map showing a return to the ideas of Columbus. It appeared in the Paris edition of the Novus Orbis of Simon Grynæus, in 1532,[1260] and was made the previous year. It is formed on a cordiform projection, and is entitled “Nova et integra universi orbis descriptio.” It is more easily understood by a reference to Mr. Brevoort’s reduction of it to Mercator’s projection, as shown in another volume.[1261] The same map, with a change in the inserted type dedication, appeared in the Pomponius Mela of 1540,[1262] and it is said also to be found much later in the Geografia of Lafreri published at Rome, 1554-1572.
SLOANE MANUSCRIPTS, 1530.
This follows a drawing in Kohl’s Washington Collection.
RUSCELLI, 1544.