Harrisse (Cabots, p. 191), referring to the dotted line of a route to India, which Agnese lays down on this map, crossing the Verrazano isthmus, thinks it is rather a reminiscence of Verrazano than of Cartier. Harrisse gives the legend, “el viazo de franza.”
There are two maps which connect this western sea, extending southerly from the north, with the idea that a belt of land surrounded the earth, there being a connection between Europe and Greenland, and between Greenland and Labrador, making America and Eastern Asia identical. This theory was represented in a map of 1544,—preserved in the British Museum and figured[152] by Kohl in his Discovery of Maine (pl. xv.), who assigns it to Ruscelli, the Italian geographer. Another support of the same theory is found in the “Carta Marina” of the 1548 edition of Ptolemy (map no. 60).
Jacobo Gastaldo, or Gastaldi, was the cartographer of this edition, and Lelewel[153] calls him “le coryphée des géographes de la peninsula italique.” Ruscelli, if he did not make this map for Gastaldo, included it in his own edition of Ptolemy in 1561, the maps of which have been pointed out by Thomassy as bearing “la plus grande analogie avec celles de la galerie géographique de Pie IV.,” while the same authority[154] refers to a planisphere of Ruscelli (1561) as “inédit, conservé au Musée de la Propagande.”[155]
This union of North America and Asia was a favorite theory of the Italians long after other nations had given it up.[156] Furlani in 1560 held to it in a map, and Ruscelli, in another map of the 1561 edition of Ptolemy, leaves the question unsettled by a “littus incognitum.”
MÜNSTER, 1540.
Meanwhile Münster in the 1540 Ptolemy had given his idea of the western sea by making it a southern extension of the northwest passage. This is shown in a sketch of Münster’s 1540 map given above.
FROM THE ULPIUS GLOBE, 1542.