[414] Harrisse, Les Cortereal, p. 50, translates this.
[415] Printed for the first time in Harrisse, Les Cortereal, app. xvii. From Pasqualigo and Cantino down to the time of Gomara we find no mention of these events; and Gomara, writing fifty years later, seems to confound the events of 1500 with those of 1501. Gomara also seems to have had some Portuguese charts, which we do not now know, when he says that Cortereal gave his name to some islands in the entrance of the gulf “Cuadrado” (St. Lawrence?), lying under 50° north latitude. Further than this, Gomara, as well as Ramusio, seems to have depended mainly on the Pasqualigo letter; and Herrera followed Gomara (Harrisse, Les Cortereal, p. 59). Harrisse can now collate, as he does (p. 65), the two narratives of Pasqualigo and Cantino for the first time, and finds Cortereal’s explorations to have covered the Atlantic coast from Delaware Bay to Baffin’s Bay, if not farther to the north.
[416] Harrisse, Les Cortereal, p. 71.
[417] Ibid., p. 96.
[418] Some have considered that this Atlantic coast in Cantino may in reality have been Yucatan. But this peninsula was not visited earlier than 1506, if we suppose Solis and Pinzon reached it, and not earlier than 1517 if Cordova’s expedition was, as is usually supposed, the first exploration. The names on this coast, twenty-two in number, are all legible but six. They resemble those on the Ptolemy maps of 1508 and 1513, and on Schöner’s globe of 1520, which points to an earlier map not now known.
[419] These earliest Spanish voyages are,—
1. Columbus, Aug. 3, 1492—March 15, 1493.
2. Columbus, Sept. 25, 1493—June 11, 1496.
3. Columbus, May 30, 1498—Nov. 25, 1500.
4. Alonzo de Ojeda, May 20, 1499—June, 1500, to the Orinoco.