Zürich archives, letters of the exiled Puritans in, [247].
Zürich Letters, [248].
FOOTNOTES:
[1] An error in Eden’s translation of a passage in Peter Martyr, written in 1515, makes him a member of the Council of the Indies.
[2] It will be understood that we now regard it as satisfactorily settled that the voyage of discovery took place in 1497, followed by a second voyage in 1498.
I have spoken of the map of the discoveries of the Cabots being made known to rival courts. In a letter dated Dec. 18, 1497, written from London by the Abbé Raimondo, envoy of the Duke of Milan to the Court of Henry VII., recently brought to light, and printed on page 54, the writer, speaking of the return of John Cabot from his voyage of discovery, says: “This Master John has the description of the world in a chart, and also in a solid globe, which he has made, and he shows where he had landed.” Don Pedro de Ayala, the Spanish Minister, also writes to Ferdinand and Isabella, in the following year, July 25, 1498, after the second expedition had sailed: “I have seen the map which the discoverer has made.”
In the year 1500, the Spanish navigator, Juan de la Cosa, who had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to the West in the years 1493-96, compiled a map of the world on which he delineated all he knew of the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries in the New World. He also depicted, undoubtedly from English sources, the northern portion of the east coast of the continent, as is shown by a broad legend or inscription running along the coast: “Mar descubierta por Ingleses.” There was also placed at the eastern cape of the coast: “Cavo de Ynglaterra.” It is the earliest map known on which the western discoveries are depicted. A few copies of the map are supposed to have been made soon after its compilation, one of which hung up in the office of the Spanish Minister of Marine. The map afterwards fell into neglect and was forgotten. In the year 1832 it was found and identified by Humboldt, in the library of his friend the Baron Walckenaer, in Paris. [It is on ox-hide, measuring five feet nine inches by three feet two inches, drawn in colors, and was afterwards bought in 1850 for 4,020 francs (see Walckenaer Catalogue, no. 2,904) by the Queen of Spain, and is now in the Royal Library at Madrid. See Humboldt’s appendix to Ghillany’s Geschichte des Seefahrers Ritter Martin Behaim, and the appendix to Kunstmann’s Entdeckung Amerikas; also Kohl’s Discovery of Maine, 151, 179. This Cosa map is given in part full-size and in part half-size, in Humboldt’s Examen Critique, vol. v., 1839, but not accurately; and again in connection with Humboldt’s essay in Ghillany’s Behaim, Nürnberg, 1853. This essay was also issued at Amsterdam in the Seeskabinet, with the fac-simile of the map. The only full-size fac-simile in colors is in three sheets in Jomard’s Monuments de la Géographie, pl. 16; and there are reductions of the American portion in Stevens’s Hist. and Geog. Notes, 1869, pl. 1 (following Jomard’s delineation); in De la Sagra’s Cuba; in Lelewel’s Géog. du Moyen Age, 1852, no. 41. A biographical study of Juan de la Cosa, by Enrique de Leguina, was published at Madrid in 1877. Cosa died while accompanying Ojedo in December, 1509. Peter Martyr, in 1514, gave him a high rank as a cartographer. The American (Asian) part of his map is given in phototype herewith, reduced from Jomard’s fac-simile.—Ed.]
Some have supposed that Cosa drew his whole eastern coast of North America as a separate and independent continent, entirely distinct from Asia, on the authority of the maps of the Cabots on which their discoveries were delineated. Of course, in the absence of the maps or globes of the Cabots, it is impossible for us to tell precisely what was delineated upon them, or how much of Cosa’s coast-line was copied from them; but from whatever source this line was drawn, it must be evident that it was supposed by Cosa to be the eastern coast of Asia. Cosa, so far as is observed from the fac-simile of his map,—which is a map of the world,—drew no east coast of Asia at all, unless this be it. (See Stevens’s Notes as above, pp. 14, 17; Cf. Kohl, pp. 145, 152, 153.)
I have already said that the discoveries of the English on Cosa’s map were noted on the northern portion of the east coast of the continent, and if confined, as they appear to be, to that region, we have no right to assert that the remaining portion of the east coast-line was supplied from the Cabots, but rather that it was taken from well-known existing representations of the east coast of Asia. The map and globe of the Cabots, already referred to, had laid down upon them the results of their experience on their first voyage, the voyage of discovery, in 1497. Of the results of the voyage of 1498, with which Sebastian Cabot is now more particularly associated, we know but little. Accounts narrated by others, but originally proceeding many years after the event from Sebastian Cabot himself, of a voyage to the new-found lands, have been supposed by modern writers to refer more particularly to this voyage; and these accounts, as we shall see further on, speak of a run down the coast to a considerable extent. That the Cabots, or Sebastian Cabot, should have prepared maps of the second voyage at the time of its occurrence, as well as of the voyage of discovery, is in every respect probable. But all these early maps are lost. Perhaps they are yet slumbering in some dusty archive.