Fig. 6—Section of the Nicolay map of 1560 showing, on the American Side of the Atlantic, Brazil, Man, and Insula Verde, the first two transferred from the European side. (After Nordenskiöld’s photographic facsimile.)
It is true that this map shows also another Brazil of the divided kind (in this instance with a channel crossing it from east to west) located in mid-Atlantic about where Prunes and others show their bisected Brazil. But this seems only an instance of conservation and deference for authority, such as has often been manifested in cartography. Of such deference for authority perhaps there is no more striking instance than Bianco’s map of 1448, which places the rediscovered Azores where they should be but also preserves them, on the faith of older maps, where they should not be—making a double series. The lesser bisected mid-Atlantic Brazil of the Catalan map may well be set aside as a survival without significance.
But the duplication by Bianco in 1448 raises a question of distance, which must be considered, for his Azores retained from the maps antedating the Portuguese rediscoveries are far nearer the coast of Europe than the truth at all warrants; and, so far as we can judge, the same cautious underestimating was applied to all oceanic islands as reported. Corvo, for example, is actually nearly half-way across the Atlantic, yet on all the maps for a long time is brought eastward to a position much nearer Portugal. We must suppose that the region about the Gulf of St. Lawrence, if visited, would be similarly treated, and we cannot tell how far the minimization of distance might be carried by some map-makers.
Fig. 7—Section of the Catalan map of about 1480 showing Brazil Island and Green Island (Illa Verde). (After Nordenskiöld’s photographic facsimile.)
The Sylvanus Map of 1511
The fact is, this matter does not rest in supposition only, for the thing has undoubtedly happened. The map of Sylvanus,[113] 1511, brings the Gulf of St. Lawrence and surroundings as an insular body almost as near Ireland as are many of the presentations of Brazil Island on older maps. He shows in front a single large island; a square gulf behind it; a bent shore line forming the border on the north, west, and south; and two gaps well representing the Straits of Belle Isle and Cabot. The names given are Terra Laboratorum and Regalis Domus. Nobody doubts that it illustrates the St. Lawrence Gulf region, though there has been much speculation as to what unknown explorer has had his discoveries commemorated here, thirteen years before the first voyage of Cartier. Why should not a like episode of discovery and imperfect record have happened at a still earlier date?
It is not to be supposed that Brazil Island was generally conceived of by intelligent persons as no farther at sea than it appears on the map of Dalorto, 1325, and divers later ones. Peasantry and fisher folk might, indeed, confuse it with the mythical Isle of the Undying—accessible only to a few chosen ones but vanishing from ordinary mortal gaze—and thus account for Brazil’s elusiveness, though so near at hand; but the sturdy explorers of Bristol[114] who kept sailing westward in search of the island, before and after Columbus, sometimes at least being away on this quest for many months together, must often have passed over the very site given by Dalorto and far beyond. They were looking for solid earth and rock and must have been convinced that the real Brazil was to be found in remoter seas. Also, during a great part of the period in which Brazil appeared on the maps off the Blaskets and Limerick and unduly close to Ireland, Italian traders were habitually following the Irish western coast and trafficking in that port and others and must often have been blown out, or sailed out by choice, far enough for a landing on the island if it had actually been where Dalorto and others pictured it. The total lack of any such happening must have been convincing to all except devotees of the occult and those given over blindly to seashore tradition. No doubt the far westward showing of the fifteenth-century Catalan and the much later Nicolay and Zaltieri maps accorded with the general expectation of thoughtful and well-informed navigators.