FREIRE, 1546.
Cesáreo Fernandez Duro, in his Arca de Noé; libro sexto de las disquisiciones náuticas, Madrid, 1881, gives a map of the St. Lawrence Gulf and River of the sixteenth century. It was found in a volume relating to the Jesuits in the Library of the Royal Academy of History at Madrid, and was produced in fac-simile in connection with Duro’s paper on the discovery of Newfoundland and the early whale and cod fisheries,—particularly by the Basques. The date of the chart is too indefinitely fixed to be of much use in reference to the progress of discovery. Harrisse[333] is inclined to put its date after the close of the century, even so late as 1603.
Intelligence of Cartier’s tracks had hardly spread as yet into Italy, judging from the map of Gastaldi in the Italian Ptolemy of 1548. Mr. Brevoort[334] says of the sketch,—which is annexed,—that it is a “draught entirely different from any previously published. The materials for it were probably derived from Ramusio, who had collected original maps to illustrate his Collection of Voyages, but who published very few of them. In this particular map we find indications of Portuguese and French tracings, with but little from Spanish ones.”
Gastaldi is thought to have made the general map which appears in Ramusio’s third volume (1556), five or six years earlier, or in 1550. All that it shows for the geography of the St. Lawrence Gulf and River is a depression in the coast nearly filled by a large island. In 1550, and again in 1553, the Abbé Desceliers, who has already been shown to be the author of the Henri II. map, made portolanos which are of the same size, and bear similar inscriptions: (1) “Faicte a Arques par Pierres Desceliers, P. Bre: lan 1550; and (2) Faicte a Arques par Pierre Desceliers, Prebstre, 1553.”
BRITISH MUSEUM, NO. 9,814.
No. 1 was in the possession of Professor Negri at Padua, when it was described in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, September, 1852, p. 235. It is now in the British Museum.[335] Harrisse[336] describes it, and says its names are essentially Portuguese. On Labrador we read: Terre de Jhan vaaz and G. de manuel pinho. The St. Lawrence is not named, but the Bay of Chaleur bears its present name.
NIC. VALLARD DE DIEPPE.