[5] On the Map of Verrazano, to which attention will be directed, this triangular island is delineated. The voyager approaching the island from the west comes to a point of the triangle where he can look away in the easterly direction, and at a glance take in two sides; while on reaching the eastern limit the third side plainly appears. In sailing past Block Island, as Verrazano did, from west to east, the navigator could not fail to discover its triangular shape. Indeed it is so marked that one is struck by the fact.
[6] The story of this map is curious. The American contents were first given to the public by the writer in the “Magazine of American History,” and afterward reprinted in “Verrazano the Explorer.”
[7] In “Cabo de Arenas,” the coast names taken from a large collection of maps are arranged in parallel columns, illustrating three main divisions of the coast, showing that Cabo de Baxos was the name applied to Cape Cod, and Cabo de Arenas to Sandy Hook. Capo Cod in the early times was not a sandy cape, but a beautiful and well-wooded cape. Sandy Hook ever since it was known has borne its present character.
[8] Those who have fancied that Cape Arenas was Cape Cod, and that the bay behind it was Massachusetts Bay, have the same difficulty as regards dimensions. Students of American cartography understand perfectly well that latitudes in the old maps were often more than two degrees out of the way, the instruments of that period being so defective.
[9] To convince himself of this fact the reader may compare the reconstructed Map of Chaves with the coast surveys, when the main difference will be found to consist in the exaggeration of Sandy Hook. The “Narrative and Critical History of America,” dealing with this point, suppresses all allusion to the fact that Kohl recognizes the cape on the Map of Chaves with the names “Santiago” and “Arenas” as Sandy Hook, which follows, as the river inside of the Hook he identifies with the Hudson. Dr. Kohl, though generally very acute, failed to see that Oviedo’s description of the Map of Chaves was, substantially, the description of Ribeiro, and that in identifying, as he chanced to, the “Arenas” of Ribeiro with Cape Cod, he stultified his own reasoning. Nor did he consider this, that if the great Cape “Arenas” was intended for Cape Cod, there is no representation whatever of Sandy Hook and the Hudson in the old cartography and that all the voyages to this region geographically went for nothing. Credat Judaeus Appellus! This exaggeration of Sandy Hook is conceded, yet the inlets along the New Jersey shore may have been viewed as connected by Gomez; and indeed, so great have been the changes along the coast that no one can well deny that they were connected in 1525, and formed a long bay running down behind Sandy Hook. It will prove more historic to follow the writer, who says, “that the coast of New York and the neighboring district were known to Europeans almost a century before Hudson ascended the ‘Great River of the North,’ and that this knowledge is proved by various maps made in the course of the sixteenth century. Nearly all of them place the mouth of a river between the fortieth and forty-first degrees of latitude, or what should be this latitude, but which imperfect instruments have placed farther north.”—Nar. and Crit. His. of Amer., 4: 432.
EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE.
Seventy-odd years ago the Rev. Sydney Smith wrote in the Edinburg Review as follows: “Literature, the Americans have none—no native literature, we mean. It is all imported. They had a Franklin, indeed, and may afford to live for half a century on his fame. There is, or was, a Mr. Dwight, who wrote some poems, and his baptismal name was Timothy. There is also a small account of Virginia, by Jefferson, an epic by Joel Barlow, and some pieces of pleasantry by Mr. Irving. But why should the Americans write books, when a six weeks’ passage brings them, in their own tongue, our sense, science and genius in bales and hogsheads?”
Times have changed since Mr. Smith wrote this somewhat sarcastic summary of our native literature; for, while it is true that we still import British “sense, science, and genius in bales and hogsheads,” it is done now on principles of reciprocity, and we return quite as good and perhaps nearly as much as we receive.
Americans do not instance Mr. Dwight, whose “baptismal name was Timothy,” or Mr. Barlow, the author of the epic so sneeringly referred to, as the chiefs of American poesy; yet we need not blush for either of them; for the first was a distinguished scholar the President of Yale College, and the author of the hymn so dear to many pious hearts: