Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 4 (of 8) / French Explorations and Settlements in North America and Those of the Portuguese, Dutch, and Swedes 1500-1700

by Unknown

Besides this collection in the State Department (which cost the Government nearly $6,000), the Reports of the United States Coast-Survey[131] describe three other collections, accompanied by descriptive texts, which he made for that office, and which he proposed to call collectively “The Hydrographic Annals of the United States.” They repeat many of the maps belonging to the State Department Collection. These supplemental collections are,—

1. On the eastern coast of the United States, giving copies of 41 maps; the titles of 155 surveys of the coast between 1612 and 1851; a list of 291 works on the early explorations of the coast; and an historical memoir on such voyages, from the Northmen down.

2. On the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico falling within the United States, giving copies of 48 maps from 1500 to 1846; the titles of 58 surveys (exclusive of those of the United States), between 1733 and 1851; a list of 221 books and manuscripts on the explorations since 1524; and an historical memoir of the explorations between 1492 and 1722.[132]

3. On the west coast of the United States, giving a bibliography of 230 titles.

There is another historical memoir by Dr. Kohl, with other copies of the maps of the west coast, in the Library of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, Mass.; and this also has been in the temporary custody of the Editor.[133] At the time of his death Dr. Kohl was occupied with the preparation of a history of the Search for a Northwest Passage, from Cortes to Franklin, of which only a fragment appeared in the Augsburg periodical, Ausland. It was a theme which would naturally have embraced the whole extent of his knowledge of early American discovery and cartography.[134]

The best printed enumeration of maps of the eastern coast of North America is given by Harrisse for the earlier period in his Cabots, and for a later period in his Notes sur la Nouvelle France.

PORTUGUESE CHART, 1503 (after Kohl).

The map of La Cosa (1500) still remains the earliest of these delineations, and a heliotype of it is given in another volume.[135] Harrisse has lately claimed the discovery in Italy of a Portuguese chart of 1502, showing the coast from the Gulf of Mexico to about the region of the Hudson River, which bears coast names in twenty-two places; but the full publication of the facts has not yet been made;[136] and there is no present means of ascertaining what relation it bears to a large manuscript map of the world, of Portuguese origin, preserved in the Archives at Munich, of which a part is herewith sketched from Dr. Kohl’s copy, and to which he gives the conjectural date of 1503.