15. Sarçales (brambles).

16. R. de la Buelta (river of return).

A. “Tiera de Estevā Gomez, la qual descrubrio por mandado de su magt el año de 1525: ay en ella muchos arboles y fructas de los de españa y muchos rodovallos y Salmones y sollos: no han alla do oro.”

The map, which is described more fully in another volume, has been the theme of much controversy, it being usually held to be the result of Gomez’s explorations; but this is denied by Stevens. References upon it by the Editor will be found in the Ticknor Catalogue, published by the Boston Public Library. It is of interest in the present connection as being one of the current charts of the coast, though made eighty years earlier, which Hudson could and did take with him. How he interpreted it is not known. In our day there is much diverse opinion upon its points. Mr. Murphy, for instance, in his Voyage of Verrazzano, puts the Hudson River at 5, and Cape Cod at 10. Sprengel, who published a memoir on this map in 1795, thought Hudson’s river was the one between 10 and 11. Asher, in his Henry Hudson, p. xciii, takes the same view. Kohl, in his Discovery of Maine, p. 304, and in his Die beiden ältesten General-Karten von America, p. 43, makes the river between 10 and 11 the Penobscot, and the hook near 2 Cape Cod, though he acknowledges some objections to this interpretation of the latter landmark, because the names between 2 and 8 are those that in later maps are given to the New Netherland coast. It seems to the Editor, however, as it does to Kohl, that Ribero had fallen into a confusion of misplacing names, common to early map-makers, and that we cannot keep the names right and accept the strange geographical correspondences which, for instance, Dr. De Costa imposes on the map in his Verrazano the Explorer, when he makes the hook near 2 to be Sandy Hook, at New York Bay, and the bay between 10 and 11 the Penobscot, which he thinks “clearly defined,” while “Ribero gives no hint of the region now embraced by Long Island, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.” It is difficult to accept Dr. De Costa’s “wildly exaggerated” Sandy Hook, or his notion of “Dr. Kohl’s confusion” in regarding the great gulf of these early maps, shown between 2 and 10, as the Gulf of Maine. With all the difficulties attending Kohl’s interpretation, it presents fewer anomalies than any other. There is so much uncertainty at the best in the interpretation of these early maps, that any understanding is subject to change from the developments now making in the study of this early cartography.—Ed.]

I will not assert that the Cabots actually saw and explored the whole coast from Florida to Newfoundland, but they must have brought away the impression that the land seen by them was a continent, and that no passage to the East Indies could be found in these latitudes, but should be looked for farther north. A map in the collection of the General Staff of the Army at Munich;[794] supposed to have been made by Salvatore de Pilestrina about 1517, shows that the cartographers of that period had accepted this Cabot theory as a fact. The voyage of Esteban Gomez in 1524, sent out “to find a way to Cathay” between Florida and the Baccalaos,[795] resulted only in discovering “mucha tierra, continuada con la que se llama de los Baccalaos, discurriendo al Occidente y puesta en XL. grados y XLI.”[796]

The next voyage along the coast of North America, made in 1526 by Lucas Vasquez de Aillon and Matienzo, must be considered of importance for the cartography of the first half of the sixteenth century; for their discoveries, although of no direct benefit to them or to Spain, proved to Spanish map-makers and their imitators that North America was not, like the West Indies, an archipelago of islands, but a continent. Even though Ramusio, in the preface to vol. iii. of his work, published in 1556, declares it is not yet known whether New France is connected with Florida or is an island, the maps made shortly after Aillon’s voyage[797] show that the cartographers had decided the matter in their minds.

This knowledge was not confined to the map-makers and officials, who might have been forbidden to divulge such information. A contemporary writer says, in 1575:—

“La forme donc de la Floride est en peninsule et come triangulaire, ayant la mer qui la baigne de tous costez sauf vers le Septentrion.... Au Septentrion luy sont Hochelaga [Canada] et autres terres.... Or ce pays Floridien commence à la grande rivière, que les mondernes ont appelé de St. Jean [Cape Fear River?], qui le separe du pays de Norumbeg en la nouvelle France.”[798]

And I refer further to the divers Descriptiones Ptolemaicæ[799] published during the sixteenth century,—books accessible to the public of that day, and most likely known to and read by every navigator of the Atlantic.

To bring this information still nearer home to Henry Hudson, I mention the map made by Thomas Hood, an Englishman, in 1592,[800] and the work of Peter Plancius, published in 1594.[801] Hudson, an English navigator, could hardly have been ignorant of his countryman’s production, which shows under 40° north latitude the mouth of a river called Rio de San Antonio, the name given to Hudson’s River by the earlier Spanish discoverers. Before starting on his voyage in the “Half Moon,” Hudson had been in consultation with Dr. Peter Plancius, who adds to his chapter on “Norumberga et Virginia” a map, incorrect, it is true, as to latitudes and other details, but nevertheless showing an unbroken coast-line.