This follows a sketch given by Dr. Kohl in his Discovery of Maine, pl. xv., which is also copied in Bancroft’s Central America, vol. i. p. 148. Cf. Lelewel, p. 170; Peschel, Geschichte der Erdkunde (1865), p. 371.
The other of the two maps already referred to belongs to a manuscript, De Principiis Astronomiæ, preserved in the British Museum among the Sloane manuscripts.[1263] It closely resembles the Finæus map. The authorities place it about 1530, or a little later. In 1533, in his Opusculum Geographicum, Schöner maintained that the city of Mexico was the Quinsay of Marco Polo; and about the same time Francis I., in commissioning Cartier for his explorations, calls the St. Lawrence valley a part of Asia.
What is known as the Nancy Globe preserved the same idea, as will be seen by the sketch of it annexed, which follows an engraving published in the Compte Rendu of the Congrès des Américanistes.[1264]
THE NANCY GLOBE.
The same view is maintained in a manuscript map of Ruscelli, the Italian geographer, preserved in the British Museum. Perhaps the earliest instance of a connection of America and Europe, such as Ruscelli here imagines, is the map of “Schondia,” which Ziegler the Bavarian published in his composite work at Strasburg in 1532,[1265] in which it will be observed he makes “Bacallaos” a part of Greenland, preserving the old notion prevailing before Columbus, as shown in the maps of the latter part of the fifteenth century, that Greenland was in fact a prolongation of northwestern Europe, as Ziegler indicates at the top of his map, the western half of which only is here reproduced.
ZIEGLER’S SCHONDIA, 1532.