No. 2, which is less richly adorned than the other, was intended for Henri II., as would appear from its bearing that monarch’s arms. Some inquiry into the life of its maker is given in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, September, 1876, p. 295, by Malte-Brun. It is owned by the Abbé Sigismond de Bubics, of Vienna. Desceliers was born at Dieppe, and his services to hydrography have been much studied of late.[337]
FROM GASTALDI’S MAP.
A sketch of map no. 56 in the Italian edition of Ptolemy, 1548, entitled, “Della terra nova Bacalaos.” The following key explains it: 1. Orbellande. 2. Tierra del Labrador. 3. Tierra del Bacalaos. 4. Tierra de Nurumberg. 5. C: hermoso. 6. Buena Vista. 7. C: despoir. 8. C: de ras. 9. Breston. 10. C. Breton. 11. Tierra de los broton. 12. Le Paradis. 13. Flora. 14. Angoulesme. 15. Larcadia. 16. C: de. s. maia.
Paul Forlani, of Verona, had scarcely advanced beyond this plot of Gastaldi, when so late as 1565 he published at Venice his Universale descrittione (Thomassy, Les Papes géographes, p. 118).
Harrisse[338] thinks that the praise bestowed upon Desceliers as the creator of French hydrography is undeserved, as the excellence of the maps of his time presupposes a long line of tentative, and even good, work in cartography; and he holds that Portuguese influence is apparent from the early part of the sixteenth century.
Wuttke, in his “Geschichte der Erdkunde,”[339] describes and figures several manuscript American maps from the Collection in the Palazzo Riccardi at Florence, dated 1550 or thereabout; but they add nothing to our knowledge respecting the region we are considering. One makes a large gulf in the northeast of North America, and puts “Terra di la S. Berton” on its east side, and “Ispagna Nova” on the west. This gulf has a different shape in two other of the maps, and disappears in some. In one there is a gulf prolonged to the west in the far north.
At about this date we may place a curious French map, communicated by Jomard to Kohl, and included by the latter in his Washington Collection. A sketch of it is annexed.[340] It is manuscript, and bears neither name nor date. The extreme northeastern part resembles Rotz’s map of 1542, and the explorations of Cartier and Roberval seem to be embodied. The breaking-up of Newfoundland would connect it with Gastaldi’s maps, or the information upon which Gastaldi worked, while the names on its outer coast are of Portuguese origin, with now a Spanish and now a French guise. Farther south the coast seems borrowed from the Spanish maps. The large river emptying into the St. Lawrence from the south is something unusual on maps of a date previous to Champlain. If it is the Sorel, Champlain’s discovery of the lake known by his name was nearly anticipated. If it is the Chaudière, it would seem to indicate at an early day the possibilities of the passage by the portage made famous by Arnold in 1775, and of which some inkling seems to have been had in the union of the St. Lawrence and the Gulf of Maine not infrequently shown in the early maps. The most marked feature of the map, however, is the insularity of the continent, with a connection of the Western Ocean somewhere apparently in the latitude of South Carolina, similar to that shown in John White’s map, as depicted in the preceding chapter. It may, of course, have grown out of a belief in the Sea of Verrazano; or it may have simply been a geographical gloss put upon Indian reports of great waters west of the limit of Cartier’s expedition.
THE JOMARD MAP, 155—(?).