The latter portion of the book, embracing the Quattuor Americi Vesputii navigationes, seems to have been issued also separately, and is still occasionally found.[566]
What seems to have been a composite edition, corresponding to D’Avezac’s fourth, made up, as Harrisse thinks (Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 47), of the introductory part of D’Avezac’s first and the voyages of his third edition, is also found, though very rarely. There is a copy in the Lenox Library of this description, and another, described by Harrisse, in the Mazarine Library in Paris.[567]
It was in this precious little quarto of 1507, whose complicated issues we have endeavored to trace, that, in the introductory portion, Waldseemüller, anonymously to the world, but doubtless with the privity of his fellow-collegians, proposed in two passages, already quoted, but here presented in fac-simile, to stand sponsor for the new-named western world; and with what result we shall see.
TITLE OF THE SEPTEMBER EDITION, 1507.
This is the third edition of D’Avezac’s enumeration.
It was a strange sensation to name a new continent, or even a hitherto unknown part of an old one. There was again the same uncertainty of continental lines as when Europe had been named[568] by the ancients, for there was now only the vaguest notion of what there was to be named. Columbus had already died in the belief that he had only touched the eastern limits of Asia. There is no good reason to believe that Vespucius himself was of a different mind.[569] So insignificant a gain to Europe had men come to believe these new islands, compared with the regions of wealth and spices with which Vasco da Gama and Cabral had opened trade by the African route, that the advocate and deluded finder of the western route had died obscurely, with scarcely a record being made of his departure. A few islands and their savage inhabitants had scarcely answered the expectation of those who had pictured from Marco Polo the golden glories of Cathay.
FROM THE COSMOGRAPHIÆ INTRODUCTIO.