[21] Cf. the learned dissertations on this map, by Dr. Kohl and M. D’Avezac, in Doc. Hist. of Maine, i. 358-77, 506, 507; and Mr. Major’s review of the whole question in the Archæologia, xliii. 17-42, in 1870.
[Reference may also be made to D’Avezac’s paper in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 4th ser., iv. 266; Asher’s appendix to his Henry Hudson, p. 260; and papers by Mr. Deane himself in Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., April, 1867, Historical Magazine, November, 1866, p. 353; and his note in Hakluyt’s Westerne Planting, p. 225. Cf. also Kohl’s Descriptive Catalogue of those Maps relating to America, mentioned in Hakluyt’s Third Volume, p. 11.—Ed.]
[22] The geographical designation here employed has been thought by some to be very indefinite, inasmuch as the Spaniards, who discovered Florida, subsequently gave that name to the whole country northward and westward of the territory now bearing that name; but it must be remembered that that designation was not accepted by geographers of other nations. After the voyages of Verrazano and Cartier the name “La Nouvelle France” was applied by French geographers to the territory as far down as 40° N., and the name was sometimes applied to the whole of North America. The maps of the Italian geographer, Gastaldi, who made maps for Ramusio’s third volume, and of Ruscelli, his pupil, confined Florida to more southern limits; and so did Sebastian Cabot himself, if the map of 1544 was made by him. Indeed, in the conversation of these Italian savans at the house of Fracastor, that geographical status was assumed; that is to say, the country of Cabot’s landfall, and the land by which he sailed north and south, was not understood to be Florida, for the statement is that “he sailed down the coast by that land toward the equinoctial, and came to that part of this firm land which is now called Florida.” Of course the point which he reached is very indefinite. Peter Martyr had said, thirty-five years before, that Cabot told him that he went south almost to the latitude of the strait of Gibraltar, which is in 36° N. Nobody knows whether these two accounts relate to the same voyage. That to which the conversation refers is assumed by the narrator to be the voyage of discovery. Indeed, for two hundred years and more there was no suspicion that a voyage by the Cabots followed immediately the voyage of discovery; though some incidents are related which may have taken place in a subsequent voyage, and others which never took place at all. Modern critics, who accept the above story as to the latitude reached at the south, generally agree that it was only on the second voyage that this was accomplished.
[23] The conversation at Caphi, at the house of Fracastor, who was a friend of Ramusio, took place a short time only before its publication. Ramusio says, in his report, “a few months ago.” We do not know precisely when he wrote his report, but there is a reference in it to a book of Jacob Tevius, published in 1548. As I have said above, we do not know the year of the interview with Cabot at Seville. The narrator says that it was “some years ago,” and I should infer that it was some years after Cabot’s return in August, 1530, from the La Plata expedition, to which Cabot in the interview refers. He also mentions that he is growing old, and retiring from active duties. In 1540 he would probably have been approaching seventy years of age, and this date may safely be assumed as not far from the time when the conversation took place. M. D’Avezac, in Revue Crit., v. 265, gives 1544 or 1545 as the probable date.
To the publication of this report relating to Cabot, Hakluyt, in 1589, prefixed the name of Galeacius Butrigarius, the Pope’s legate in Spain, as the distinguished person who reported the conversation with Cabot; and ever since that time, down to the publication of Biddle’s Memoir of Sebastian Cabot, in 1831, the statement passed without question. Biddle, who regarded the matter as of little moment, said there was no authority for that name in Ramusio, who says himself that he withholds it from motives of delicacy; but Biddle did not say, perhaps he did not observe, that Hakluyt got the name from Eden (Decades, f. 252, verso), who made the original blunder. Martyr, in the beginning of his second Decade, written in 1515, speaks of knowing Butrigarius of Bologna, when the latter was of the Pope’s embassy in Spain; and I find that he died in 1518, in the forty-third year of his age (see Zedler’s Universal Lexikon, v. 4, Halle, 1733). M. D’Avezac had noted, as early as 1869, that Butrigarius had died thirty years before the conversation took place at the house of Fracastor, and also that the editor of Ramusio, Tomaso Giunti, had added the word Mantuan to this anonymous person’s name; and now, through the researches instituted by Charles Bullo and by the mediation of the superintendent of the archives of the state at Venice, it is ascertained that this unknown person was Gian Giacomo Bardolo, of Mantua. See Intorno a Giovanni Caboto, etc., by Cornelio Desimoni, Genova, 1881, pp. 26, 27; also, in Atti, vol. xv., of the Società ligure di storia patria.
[24] Fracastor died Aug. 8, 1553, over seventy years of age. He was a maker of globes. Humphrey Gilbert says that he was a traveller in the northern parts of America. (Kohl, p. 229; Hakluyt, 1589, p. 602).
[25] Ramusio, ii. 4; Hakluyt, 1589, p. 513.
[26] Hakluyt, 1589, p. 602.
[27] Eden’s Decades, fol. 318, corrected by the original. [The first edition of Gomara is a rare book, and a copy has been lately priced by Quaritch at £36. It proved to be one of the most popular of all the books of that century on the New World; and, as we count, including varieties of titles, there were more than a score of editions in fifty years, so that his statements became widely known. There were seven such issues in Spanish, either in Spain or in Flanders, in two years, when the demand for it seems to have failed in its original tongue, and was transferred to Italy, where at Rome and Venice there were six editions in twenty years (1556 to 1576). Sabin says eighteen in that interval, but I fail to find them. There was a seventh near the end of the century (1599). In 1568 or 1569 there seem to have been three issues of the first French translation, and six others followed, from 1577 to 1597. These statements are based chiefly on the lists of editions given in Sabin, vii. 306 (said to have been drawn up by Mr. Brevoort); in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 169; and Leclerc’s Bibliotheca Americana, No. 143.—Ed.]
[28] [See a later Editorial note on “The earliest English publications on America.”—Ed.]