LA COSA, 1500.
Three or four maps at least have come down to us which are supposed to represent in some way one or several of these drafts by Columbus. The first of these is the celebrated map of the pilot Juan de la Cosa,[407] dated in 1500, of which some account, with a heliotype fac-simile of the American part of the map, is given in another place.[408] After the death (April 27, 1852) of Walckenaer (who had bought it at a moderate cost of an ignorant dealer in second-hand articles), it was sold at public auction in Paris in the spring of 1853, when Jomard failed to secure it for the Imperial Library in Paris, and it went to Spain, where, in the naval museum at Madrid, it now is.
Of the next earliest of the American maps the story has recently been told with great fulness by Harrisse in his Les Cortereal, accompanied by a large colored fac-simile of the map itself, executed by Pilinski. The map was not unknown before,[409] and Harrisse had earlier described it in his Cabots.[410]
We know that Gaspar Cortereal[411] had already before 1500 made some explorations, during which he had discovered a mainland and some islands, but at what precise date it is impossible to determine;[412] nor can we decide upon the course he had taken, but it seems likely it was a westerly one. We know also that in this same year (1500) he made his historic voyage to the Newfoundland region,[413] coasting the neighboring shores, probably, in September and October. Then followed a second expedition from January to October of the next year (1501),—the one of which we have the account in the Paesi novamente retrovati, as furnished by Pasqualigo.[414] There was at this time in Lisbon one Alberto Cantino, a correspondent—with precisely what quality we know not—of Hercule d’Este, Duke of Ferrara; and to this noble personage Cantino, on the 19th of October, addressed a letter embodying what he had seen and learned of the newly returned companions of Gaspar Cortereal.[415]
The Report of Cantino instigated the Duke to ask his correspondent to procure for him a map of these explorations. Cantino procured one to be made; and inscribing it, “Carta da navigar per le Isole novamte tr.... in le parte de l’India: dono Alberto Cantino Al S. Duca Hercole,” he took it to Italy, and delivered it by another hand to the Duke at Ferrara. Here in the family archives it was preserved till 1592, when the reigning Duke retired to Modena, his library following him. In 1868, in accordance with an agreement between the Italian Government and the Archduke Francis of Austria, the cartographical monuments of the ducal collection were transferred to the Biblioteca Estense, where this precious map now is. The map was accompanied when it left Cantino’s hands by a note addressed to the Duke and dated at Rome, Nov. 19, 1502,[416] which fortunately for us fixes very nearly the period of the construction of the map. A much reduced sketch is annexed.
THE CANTINO MAP.
This is sketched from Harrisse’s fac-simile, which is of the size of the original map. The dotted line is the Line of Demarcation,—“Este he omarco dantre castella y Portuguall,”—which has been calculated by Harrisse to be at 62° 30´ west of Paris.
For the northern coast of South America La Cosa and Cantino’s draughtsmen seem to have had different authorities. La Cosa attaches forty-five names to that coast: Cantino only twenty-nine; and only three of them are common to the two.[417] Harrisse argues from the failure of the La Cosa map to give certain intelligence of the Atlantic coast of the United States (here represented in the north and south trend of shore, north of Cuba), that there was existing in October, 1500, at least in Spanish circles, no knowledge of it,[418] but that explorations must have taken place before the summer of 1502 which afforded the knowledge embodied in this Cantino map. This coast was not visited, so far as is positively known, by any Spanish expedition previous to 1502. Besides the eight Spanish voyages of this period (not counting the problematical one of Vespucius) of which we have documentary proof, there were doubtless others of which we have intimations; but we know nothing of their discoveries, except so far as those before 1500 may be embodied in La Cosa’s chart.[419] The researches of Harrisse have failed to discover in Portugal any positive trace of voyages made from that kingdom in 1501, or thereabout, records of which have been left in the Cantino map. Humboldt had intimated that in Lisbon at that time there was a knowledge of the connection of the Antilles with the northern discoveries of Cortereal by an intervening coast; but Harrisse doubts if Humboldt’s authority—which seems to have been a letter of Pasqualigo sent to Venice, dated Oct. 18, 1501, found in the Diarii of Marino Sanuto, a manuscript preserved in Vienna—means anything more than a conjectural belief in such connection. Harrisse’s conclusion is that between the close of 1500 and the summer of 1502, some navigators, of whose names and nation we are ignorant, but who were probably Spanish, explored the coast of the present United States from Pensacola to the Hudson. This Atlantic coast of Cantino terminates at about 59° north latitude, running nearly north and south from the Cape of Florida to that elevation. Away to the east in mid-ocean, and placed so far easterly as doubtless to appear on the Portuguese side of the Line of Demarcation, and covering from about fifty to fifty-nine degrees of latitude, is a large island which stands for the discoveries of Cortereal, “Terra del Rey du Portuguall;” and northeast of this is the point of Greenland apparently, with Iceland very nearly in its proper place.[420] This Cantino map, now positively fixed in 1502, establishes the earliest instance of a kind of delineation of North America which prevailed for some time. Students of this early cartography have long supposed this geographical idea to date from about this time, and have traced back the origin of what is known as “The Admiral’s Map”[421] to data accumulated in the earliest years of the sixteenth century. Indeed Lelewel,[422] thirty years ago, made up what he called a Portuguese chart of 1501-1504, by combining in one draft the maps of the 1513 Ptolemy, with a hint or two from the Sylvanus map of 1511, acting on the belief that the Portuguese were the real first pursuers, or at least recorders, of explorations of the Floridian peninsula and of the coast northerly.[423]