17. Agnese, Battista. Fac-simile delle Carte nautiche dell’ anno 1554, illustrate da Teobaldo Fischer. Venezia. 1881.
The editor, Fischer, is Professor of Geography at Kiel. The original is in the Bibliotheca Marciana, at Venice. The sheets which throw light upon the historical geography of America are these:—
XVII. 4. North America northward to the Penobscot and the Gulf of California; and the west coast of South America to 15° south; then blank, till the region of Magellan’s Straits is reached.
XVII. 5. North America, east coast from Labrador south; Central America; South America, all of east coast, and west coast, as in XVII. 4.
XVII. 33. The World,—the American continent much as in XVII. 4 and 5.
We note the following other maps of Agnese:—
a. Portolano in the British Museum, bearing date 1536. Index to MSS. in British Museum, 19,927. If this is the one Kohl (Discovery of Maine, p. 293) refers to as no. 5,463, MS. Department British Museum, it is signed and dated by the author.
b. Portolano, dated 1536, in the royal library at Dresden, of ten plates,—one being the World, the western half of which, showing America, is given reduced by Kohl, p. 292. It resembles XVII. 33, above, but is not so well advanced, and retains a trace of Verrazano’s Sea, which makes New England an isthmus. It wants the California peninsula, a knowledge of whose discovery had hardly yet reached Venice.
c. Portolano, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; thought by Kohl, who gives a sketch (pl. xv. c), to be the work of Agnese, since it closely resembles, in its delineations of the American continent, that Venetian’s notions. This, perhaps, is earlier than the previous map; for it puts a strait leading to the Western sea, where Cartier had just before supposed he had found such in the St. Lawrence.
d. Map in the archives of the Duke of Coburg-Gotha, marked “Baptista Agnes fecit, Venetiis, 1543, die 18 Febr.” Kohl (pl. xvii. 3) gives from it a draft of the eastern coast of the United States.