The map (1587) in Hakluyt’s Paris edition of Peter Martyr conformed more nearly to the Mercator type;[1338] and Hakluyt, as well as Lok, records Drake’s discovery, both of them putting it, however, in 1580.
With the year 1588 is associated a controversy over what purports to be a memoir setting forth the passage of the ship of a Spanish navigator, Lorenzo Ferrer de Maldonado, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, through a strait a quarter of a league wide. The passage took him as high as 75°; but he reached the Pacific under the sixtieth parallel. The opening was identified by him with the long-sought Straits of Anian. The belief in this story had at one time some strong advocates, but later geographical discoveries have of course pushed it into the limbo of forgotten things; for it seems hardly possible to identify, as was done by Amoretti, the narrow passage of Maldonado, under 60°, with that which Behring discovered, sixteen leagues wide, under 65°.[1339]
SPANISH GALLEON.
A fac-simile of the sketch given in Jurien de la Gravière’s Les marins du XVe et du XVIe siècle.
In 1592 we have the alleged voyage of De Fuca, of which he spoke in 1596, in Venice, to Michael Lok, who told Purchas; and he in turn included it in his Pilgrims.[1340] He told Lok that he had been captured and plundered on the California coast by Cavendish,[1341]—a statement which some have thought confirmed by Cavendish’s own avowal of his taking a pilot on that coast,—and that at the north he had entered a strait a hundred miles wide, under 47° and 48°, which had a pinnacle rock at the entrance; and that within the strait he had found the coast trending northeast, bordering a sea upon which he had sailed for twenty days. This story, despite its exaggerations, and though discarded formerly, has gained some credence with later investigators; and the application of his name to the passage which leads to Puget Sound seems to have been the result of a vague and general concurrence, in the belief of some at least, that this passage must be identified with the strait which De Fuca claimed to have passed.[1342]
With the close of the sixteenth century, the maps became numerous, and are mostly of the Mercator type. Such are those of Cornelius de Judæis in 1589 and in 1593,[1343] the draughts of 1587 and 1589 included in the Ortelius of 1592,[1344] the map of 1593 in the Historiarum indicarum libri XVI. of Maffeius,[1345] and those of Plancius[1346] and De Bry.[1347] The type is varied a little in the 1592 globe of Molineaux, as already shown, and in the 1587 map of Myritius we have the Asiatic connection of the upper coast as before mentioned; but in the Ptolemy of 1597 the contour of Mercator is still essentially followed.[1348] In this same year (1597) the earliest distinctively American atlas was published in the Descriptionis Ptolemaicæ Augmentum of Cornelius Wytfliet, of which an account is given in another place.[1349] Fac-similes of the maps of the Gulf of California and of the New World are annexed, to indicate the full extent of geographical knowledge then current with the best cartographers. The Mercator type for the two Americas and the great Antarctic Continent common to most maps of this period are the distinguishing features of the new hemisphere. The same characteristics pertain also to the mappemondes in the original Dutch edition of Linschoten’s Itinerario, published in two editions at Amsterdam in 1596,[1350] in Münster’s Cosmographia, 1598, and in the Brescia edition (1598) of Ortelius.
