[The Editor cannot derive from the reasons expressed by Stevens (Hist. and Geog. Notes, p. 15) that the coast where the legend is put, represents the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence; for it is not easy to account for the absence of the characteristics of a gulf, if “mar,” unaccompanied by “oceanus,” signifies, as Stevens holds, an enclosed sea; and if so, why is the genuine gulf between Cuba and the Asian coast called “mar oceanus”?—Ed.]
Cosa’s map not having been engraved, or to any extent copied, exercised but little influence on the cartography of the period, and although the information relating to the English discoveries depicted upon it could have come from no other source than the Cabots themselves, their names were not inscribed upon the map; neither was the legend already quoted copied upon any one of the maps, relating to the new-found lands, which soon followed. The enterprising Cortereals, who are supposed to have seen Cabot’s or Cosa’s map, soon spread their sails for the West, and the maps of their discoveries, in the regions visited by them, contained a record of their own name, or inscriptions which have perpetuated the memory of their exploits. (See vol. iv. of the present work.) Not so with the Cabots unless we should adopt the improbable statement of Peter Martyr, in 1515, that Sebastian Cabot gave the name Baccalaos to those lands because of the multitude of big fishes which he saw there, and to which the natives gave that name. This subject is considered in a later note.
Another important map will be briefly referred to here, as it may possibly have some connection with the Cabots,—that of John Ruysch, published in the Ptolemy of 1508, at Rome. It is the first engraved map with the discoveries of the New World delineated upon it. [There are accounts of this map (which measures twenty-one and a quarter by sixteen inches) in Harrisse’s Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima, p. 108; in the Catalogue of the John Carter-Brown Library, i. p. 39; in Henry Stevens’s Bibliotheca Geographica, No. 3058; and reproductions are given in Humboldt’s Examen Critique, v., in his essay on the earliest maps appended to Ghillany’s Martin Behaim; in Stevens’s Historical and Geographical Notes, pl. 2 (cf. Historical Magazine, August, 1869, p. 107); in Santarem’s Atlas composè de mappemondes depuis le ve jusqu’au xviie, siècles; in Lelewel’s Moyen Age; in Judge Daly’s Early History of Cartography, p. 32 (much reduced); and a section is given in Kohl’s Discovery of Maine, p. 156. A copy of the original is in the Sumner Collection in Harvard College Library, and has been used for the fac-simile herewith given.—Ed.] A northeastern coast similar to that on the Cosa map is drawn, but there is no record on it that the English had visited it, and “Cabo de Portogesi” takes the place of “Cavo de Ynglaterra,” on the point of what is now called Cape Race. Concerning John Ruysch, the maker of the map, who was a German geographer, Kunstmann (Die Entdeckung Amerikas, p. 137) says that he accompanied some exploring expeditions undertaken from England to the north. Marcus Beneventanus, an Italian monk, who edited this edition of Ptolemy, and included in it “A new Description of the World, and the new Navigation of the Ocean from Lisbon to India,” says: “But John Ruysch of Germany, in my judgment a most exact geographer, and a most painstaking one in delineating the globe, to whose aid in this little work I am indebted, has told me that he sailed from the South of England, and penetrated as far as the fifty-third degree of north latitude, and on that parallel he sailed west toward the shores of the East, bearing a little northward (per anglum noctis), and observed many islands, the description of which I have given below.” Mr. Henry Stevens, from whom I have taken this extract, thinks that Ruysch may have sailed with the Cabots to the new-found islands. We know that among the crew one was a Burgundian and one a Genoese. Beneventanus professed to know of the discoveries of the English as well as of those of the Spaniards and Portuguese: “Columbi et Lusitanorum atque Britannorum quos Anglos nunc dicimus.” (Stevens’s Hist. and Geog. Notes, p. 32; Biddle, p. 179.)
In his Memoir of Sebastian Cabot, p. 179, Mr. Biddle calls attention to a remarkable inscription on this map, placed far at the north, some twenty degrees above “I. Baccalauras,” namely, “Hic compassus navium non tenet nec naves quæ ferrum tenent revertere valent” (“Here the ship’s compass loses its property, and no vessel with iron on board is able to get away”). Mr. Biddle cites this inscription as showing the terror which this phenomenon of the variation of the magnetic needle, particularly noticed by Cabot, had excited. (See Humboldt’s Examen Crit. iii. 31, et seq.; Chytrœus, Variorum in Europa Itinerum Delicicæ, published at Herborn, in Nassau, 1594, pp. 791, 792.) Columbus had noticed the declination of the magnetic needle in his first voyage.
All these places in the new-found lands,—Terre Neuve, Baccalaos, Labrador, etc.,—named by European visitors to these shores, were supposed to be sections and projections of the Old World, and to belong to the map of Asia; and this continued to be the opinion of navigators and cartographers, advancing and receding in their views, for a number of years afterward.
[Johannes Myritius in his Opusculum Geographicum, published at Ingoldstadt in 1590, is accounted one of the last to hold to this view. Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 314. After the discovery by Balboa in 1513 of the South Sea, the new cartographical knowledge took two—in the main—distinct phases, both of which recognized South America as an independent continental region, sometimes joined and sometimes disjoined from the northern continent; while in one, North America remained a prolongation of Asia, as in the map of Orontius Finæus, and in the other it presented a barrier to western sailing except by a northern circuit. An oceanic passage, which seemed to make an island of Baccalaos, or the Cabot region, nearly in its right latitude and longitude, laid New England, and much more, beneath the sea. The earliest specimen of this notion we find in the Polish Ptolemy of 1512, in what is known as the Stobnicza map, one of the evidences that on the Continent the belief did not prevail that the Cabots had coursed south along a continental shore. It was a year before Balboa discovered the Pacific that this map was published at Cracow; and we are forced to believe that divination, or more credible report, had told John de Stobnicza what was beyond the land which the Spaniards were searching. The map is striking, and, singular to say, it has not been long known. The only copy known of the little book of less than fifty leaves, which contains it, was printed at Cracow without date as Introductio in Ptholomei Cosmographiam, and is in the Imperial Library at Vienna; and though there are other copies known with dates (1512), they all lack the maps, there being two sheets, one of the Old World, the other of the New, including in this latter designation the eastern shore of Asia, which is omitted in the fac-simile given herewith. A full-size fac-simile of the New World was made by Muller of Amsterdam (five copies only at twenty-five florins), and one is also given in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 53. We note but a very few other copies, all however, except one, without the map. One is in the great library at Munich. A second (forty-three leaves and dated 1512) was sold by Otto Harrassowitz, a dealer of Leipsic, in 1873, to Muller of Amsterdam (we suppose it to be the copy described in the latter’s Books on America, iii. 163, which was sold for 240 florins), from whom it passed into the Carter-Brown Library in Providence. Harrisse, Bib. Amer. Vet., no. 69, says there are two copies at Vienna, one in the Imperial Library (which has the map, a woodcut), and the other in the City Library, both without date. One or both of these copies are said to have forty-two leaves,—Kunstmann, Die Entdeckung Amerikas, p. 130. A fifth was advertised in 1876 by Harrassowitz, Catalogue no. 29, as containing forty-six leaves, dated 1512, but without the map, and priced at 500 marks. In the same dealer’s Catalogue no. 61, book-number 56, a copy of forty-six leaves is dated 1511, and priced 400 marks, which is perhaps the same copy with a corrected description. See also Panzer, Annales Typographici, vi. 454. From this it would appear, as from slight changes said to be in the text, that there were three separate issues and perhaps editions about 1511-12. Mr. Henry C. Murphy’s copy of 1513 has no map. A second edition was printed in Cracow in 1519, but without the map,—Carter-Brown Catalogue, no. 60; Harrisse, Bib. Amer. Vet. no. 95. The Finæus map, above referred to, was a heart-shaped projection of the earth, which appeared in Grynæus’s Novus Orbis, in the edition of Paris, 1532. A fac-simile of it has been published by Muller, of Amsterdam, and in Stevens’s Notes, pl. 4. America occupies the extreme edge of the plate, and is greatly distorted by the method of projecting. Mr. Brevoort reduced the lines to Mercator’s projection for Stevens’s Historical and Geographical Notes, 1869, pl. 3; and a fac-simile of this reduction, which shows also the true Asian coast-line in its right longitude, and curiously resembling the American (Asian) coast of the map, is given herewith. See also Stevens’s Bibliotheca Geographica, p. 124; Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 104; Harrisse, Bibliographia Americana vet. pp. 294, 297. There are copies of the map also found in the 1540 editions of Pomponius Mela, and in the Geografia of Lafreri and others, published at Rome, 1554-72.—Ed.]
[3] The first Decade, which was begun in 1493, and completed in 1510, was printed at Seville in 1511.
[4] Baccalaos is an old ante-columbian name for codfish, in extensive use in the South of Europe. Humboldt says (Ghillany, p. 4), “Stockfischland, von Bacallao, dem Spanischen Namen des stockfisches.” Mr. Brevoort says it is the Iberian name for codfish; see his Verrazano the Navigator, pp. 61, 137, where the etymology of the word is given. The name is found on many of the early charts. On that of Reynel, the Portuguese pilot, assigned by geographers to the year 1504 or 1505, it appears on the east coast as “Y dos Bocalhas” (Island of Codfish). On the chart of Ruysch, 1508, it is seen as applied to a small island, or cape, as “J. Baccalaurus.” On another Portuguese map published by Kunstmann, assigned to the year 1514, or a little later, the name “Bacalnaos” is applied to Newfoundland and Labrador, including also Nova Scotia. After various fortunes the name became subject to the limitations which overtook “Norumbega,” and has settled down on a small island on the east coast of Newfoundland. There appears to be no evidence, except Martyr’s statement, that Cabot gave the name to the region he discovered; and it may well be asked on what book or map he had caused it to be inscribed? There is no such name on Cosa’s map, the only early record of the Cabots’ discoveries in the New World. The name was probably applied by the Portuguese. Dr. John G. Kohl, the distinguished geographer, says that the Portuguese originated the name of Tierra de Bacalhas (“the stock-fish country”) and gave currency to it, though the word, like the cod-fishery itself, appears to be of Germanic origin. See his learned note in full in Doc. Hist. of Maine, i. 188, 189, and compare Parkman’s Pioneers of France, pp. 170, 171. Parkman says: “If, in the original Basque, baccalaos is the word for codfish, and if Cabot found it in use among the inhabitants of Newfoundland, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Basques had been there before him.” The affirmative of this proposition—that the Cabots had been preceded by the fishermen—has been held by a few writers, but it is generally believed that the evidence for it is insufficient. Dr. Kohl says: “That the name should have been introduced by the Cabots is for many reasons most improbable; and that they should have heard and received the name from the Indians, is certainly not true; though both these facts are asserted by Peter Martyr, De Orbe Novo, dec. iii. ch. 6.” (Kohl, pp. 188, 189; and compare his statement on p. 481.) Dr. Kohl had already said that the name, with some transposition of the letters, had long been used, before the discoveries of the Cabots and Cortereals, in many Flemish and German books and documents. It should be added that the statement of Peter Martyr, that the savages on the coast visited by Sebastian Cabot called a certain kind of fish found there in abundance baccalaos, is repeated in the legend on Cabot’s map, published in 1544, as rendered by Hakluyt in his folio of 1589, p. 511. Indeed, much in the general description of the coast and the inhabitants, both of the sea and the land, is similar in both accounts, and indicates one origin.
[In a dispute with England so early as 1672, the Spaniards claimed a right to fish at Newfoundland by reason of the prior discovery by the Biscayan fishermen. Papers relating to the rupture with Spain, London, 1672. The latest claim for the Basques’ antedating Cabot in this region is in C. L. Woodbury’s Relation of the Fisheries to the Discovery of North America, Boston, 1880.—Ed.]
[5] This, the earliest notice of Cabot which I have seen in print, and, written by one so distinguished as Peter Martyr, who had such rare opportunities for information, is given almost entire. It is from the quaint English version of Richard Eden, made some three hundred and thirty years ago, and published in his Decades, fol. 118, 119. The translation has been compared with the Latin text of Martyr, in the De Orbe Novo of 1516, “Tertie decadis liber sextus,” printed the year after it was written, and a few redundances eliminated. See M. D’Avezac’s criticism on some of Eden’s English renderings, in Revue Critique, v. 265.