RIBERO, 1529.
The key is as follows:—
1. Esta tierra descubrierô los Ingleses, Tiera del Labrador.
2. Tiera de los Bacallaos, la qual descubrieron los corte reales.
3. Tiera de Esteva Gomez la qual descubrio por mandado de su. mag. el año de 1525, etc.
There are several early copies of this map. Harrisse describes the Weimar copy as having on “Tiera del Labrador” the words, “Esta tierra descubrieron los Ingleses no ay en ella cosa de pronecho.” Thomassy says the Propagande copy indicates the discovery of Labrador by the English of Bristol. See Vol. III. pp. 16, 24, and a note in chap. ix. of the present volume. The Ribero contour of the eastern coast long prevailed as a type. We find it in the Venice map of 1534, of which there is a fac-simile in Stevens’s Notes, and in the popular Bellero map of 1554 (in use for many years), and, with little modification, in so late a chart as Hood’s in 1592. It was held to for the coast between Florida and Nova Scotia long after better knowledge prevailed of the more northern regions. It was evidently the model of the map published by the Spanish Government in 1877 in the Cartas de Indias.
Reference has already been made to the map of Maggiollo, or Maiollo (1527), which Desimoni has brought forward, and of which a fac-simile of his sketch is reproduced on page 39. The sea will be here observed with the designation, “Mare Indicum.” Dr. De Costa showed a large photograph of it at a meeting of the New York Historical Society, May, 1883, pointing out that the name “Francesca” gave Verrazano the credit of first bestowing that name in some form upon what was afterward known as New France.[147]
In 1870 there was published in the Jahrbuch des Vereins für Erdkunde in Dresden (tabula vii.) a fac-simile of a map of America from a manuscript atlas preserved in Turin which gives conjecturally this western sea, closely after the type shown below in a map of Baptista Agnese (1536); its date is put somewhere between 1530 and 1540.
An Italian mappamundi of the middle of the sixteenth century is described by Peschel in the Jahresbericht des Vereins für Erdkunde in Leipzig, 1871, where the map is given in colored fac-simile. Peschel places it between 1534 and 1550; and it also bears a close resemblance to the Agnese map, as does also a manuscript map of about 1536, preserved in the Bodleian, of which Kohl, in his manuscript collection, has a copy. This Agnese map is a part of a portolano in the Royal Library at Dresden; and similar ones by him are said to be in the Royal Library at Munich, in the British Museum, and in the Bodleian, dated a few months apart. Kohl, in his Discovery of Maine (pl. xiv.), sketches it from the Dresden copy, and his sketch is followed in the accompanying cut. An account of Agnese’s cartographical labors is given in another volume.[148]