Smith was born in 1579 at Willoughby, as the parish records show. (Hist. Mag., i. 313; Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., ix. 451.) He died June 21, 1631, signing his will the same day (Ibid. ix. 452), and was buried in St. Sepulchre’s, London, where the inscription above his grave is said to be now illegible. A committee of the American Antiquarian Society was appointed in 1874 to see to its restoration, but were prevented from acting by the demand of a fee for the privilege from the vestry of the church. (N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1874, p. 222.) In Sparks’s American Biography is a memoir of him by George S. Hillard; another, by W. Gilmore Simms, was printed in 1846; and a recent study of his life and writings has been made by C. D. Warner, who says that the inscription, with the three (Turks’?) heads in St. Sepulchre’s, long supposed to mark the grave of Smith, is proved to commemorate some one who died in September, aged 66, while Smith died June, 1631, aged 51. Stow’s Survey of London, 1633, gives the long epitaph which could be read on the walls of the church previous to its destruction in the great London fire in 1666. Cf. Deane in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., Jan. 1867, p. 454.
NEW WORLD FROM THE LENOX GLOBE.
Simon Passe, whose Latinized name we see on the engraving of Smith’s map, was ten years in England, and engraved many of the chief people of the time; and as he was his own draughtsman, it is probable the portrait of Smith was drawn by Passe from life, though Robert Clerke is credited with draughting the map.
E. Early Globes.—The Molineaux globe referred to in the text was constructed at the instance of that great patron of navigation, William Sanderson. (Davis’s Voyages, Introduction by Markham, pp. xii. 211.) It is said to be the earliest ever made in England. (Ibid. p. lix.) It is two feet in diameter, and was completed in 1592. (Asher’s Henry Hudson, p. 274.) The oldest globe known antedates it more than a century, and of those intervening which are known, the following, with the prototype, deserve mention:—
1. Martin Behaim’s, 1492, preserved in the library at Nuremberg. It presents an open ocean between Europe and Asia. The first meridian runs through Madeira. There is a copy in fac-simile in the Bibliothèque Nationale, at Paris. There have been engraved delineations of it by Doppelmayr at Nuremberg in 1730; by Dr. Ghillany, in connection with his Geschichte des Seefahrers Ritter Martin Behaim, 1853; by Jomard in his Monuments de la Géographie, 1854-56, pl. 15. There are sections and reductions in Cladera’s Investigaciones Historicas, Madrid, 1794; in Lelewel’s Moyen Age; in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, xviii.; in Kohl’s Discovery of Maine; in some of the editions of Irving’s Columbus; in Bryant and Gay’s United States, i. 103; and in Maury’s paper in Harper’s Monthly, xlii. (February, 1871).
2. Acquired from a friend in Laon in 1860 by M. Leroux, of the Administration de la Marine at Paris, and represents the geographical knowledge current at Lisbon, 1486-87, according to D’Avezac, who gives a projection of it in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie de Paris, 4th series, viii. (1860). It is dated 1493. The first meridian runs through Madeira.
3. A small copper globe in the Lenox Library, in New York, which is said to be the earliest globe to show the American coast, and its date is fixed at about 1510-12, but by some as early as 1506-7.
