It has been supposed that it was a map of this type which Bartholomew Columbus, when he visited Rome in 1505, gave to a canon of St. John Lateran, together with one of the printed accounts of his brother’s voyage; and this canon gave the map to Alessandro Strozzi, “suo amico e compilatore della raccolta,” as is stated in a marginal note in a copy of the Mundus novus in the Magliabecchian library.[432]
Columbus is said to have had a vision before his fourth voyage, during which he saw and depicted on a map a strait between the regions north and south of the Antillian Sea. De Lorgues, with a convenient alternative for his saintly hero, says that the mistake was only in making the strait of water, when it should have been of land!
SCHÖNER, 1515.
According to Wieser (Magalhâes-Strasse, p. 19) this globe, which exists in copies at Weimar (of which Wieser gives the above sketch from Jomard’s fac-simile of the one at Frankfort, but with some particulars added from that at Weimar) and at Frankfort (which is figured in Jomard), was made to accompany Schöner’s Luculentissima quædam terræ totius descriptio, printed in 1515. Cf. Harrisse, Notes on Columbus, p. 179, and Bibl. Amer. Vet., nos. 80, 81; Murphy, no. 2,233. Copies of Schöner’s Luculentissima, etc., are in the Harvard College, Carter-Brown, and Lenox libraries.
In 1523 Schöner printed another tract, De nuper sub Castiliæ, ac Portugaliæ regibus serenissimis repertis insulis ac regionibus, descriptive of his globe, which is extremely rare. Wieser reports copies in the great libraries of Vienna and London only. Varnhagen reprinted it from the Vienna copy, at St. Petersburg in 1872 (forty copies only), under the designation, Réimpression fidèle d’une lettre de Jean Schöner, à propos de son globe, écrite en 1523. The Latin is given in Wieser’s Magalhâes-Strasse, p. 118. Johann Schoner or Schöner (for the spelling varies) was born in 1477, and died in 1547. The testimony of this globe to an early knowledge of the straits afterward made known by Magellan is examined on a later page. The notions which long prevailed respecting a large Antarctic continent are traced in Wieser’s Magalhâes-Strasse, p. 59, and in Santarem, Histoire de la cartographie, ii. 277.
Cf. on the copy at Frankfort,—Vol. III. p. 215, of the present History; Kohl’s General-Karten von Amerika, p. 33, and his Discovery of Maine, p. 159; Encyclopædia Britannica, x. 681; Von Richthofen’s China, p. 641; Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, xviii. 45. On the copy at Weimar, see Humboldt, Examen critique, and his Introduction to Ghillany’s Ritter Behaim.
