Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 67

[Ill.u.s.tration: MAP, 1534.]

[Sidenote: North America, east coast.]

[Sidenote: Verrazano.]

We come next to some further developments on the eastern coast of North America. A certain French corsair, known from his Florentine birth as Juan Florin, had become a terror by preying on the Spanish commerce in the Indies. In January, 1524, he was on his way, under the name of Verrazano, in the expedition which has given him fame, and has supplied not a little ground for contention, and even for total distrust of the voyage as a fact. He struck the coast of North Carolina, turned south, but, finding no harbor, retraced his course, and, making several landings farther north, finally entered, as it would seem from his description, the harbor of New York. The only point that he names is a triangular island which he saw as he went still farther to the east, and which has been supposed to be Block Island, or possibly Martha's Vineyard. At all events, the name Luisa which he gave to it after the mother of Francis I. clung to an island in this neighborhood in the maps for some time longer. So he went on, and, if his landings have been rightly identified, he touched at Newport, then at some place evidently near Portsmouth in New Hamps.h.i.+re, and then, skirting the islands of the Maine coast, he reached the country which he recognized as that where the Bretons had been. He now ended what he considered the exploration of seven hundred leagues of an unknown land, and bore away for France, reaching Dieppe in July, whence, on the 9th, he wrote the letter to the King which is the source of our information. Attempts have been made, especially by the late Henry C. Murphy, to prove this letter a forgery, but in the opinion of most scholars without success.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE VERRAZANO MAP.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: AGNESE, 1536.]

[Sidenote: The Verrazano map.]

Fortunately for the student, Hieronimo da Verrazano made, in 1529, a map, still preserved in the college of the Propaganda at Rome, in which the discoveries of his brother, Giovanni, are laid down. In this the name of Nova Gallia supplants that of Francesca, which had been used in the map of Maiollo (1527), supposed, also, to have some relation to the Verrazano voyage.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MuNSTER, 1540.]

The most distinguis.h.i.+ng feature of the Verrazano map is a great inland expanse of water, which was taken to be a part of some western ocean, and which remained for a long while in some form or other in the maps.

It was made to approach so near the Atlantic that at one point there was nothing but a slender isthmus connecting the discoveries of the north with the country of Ponce de Leon and Ayllon at the south.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MuNSTER, 1540.]

[Sidenote: The sea of Verrazano.]

It is in the _Sumario_ (1526) of Oviedo that we get the first idea of this sea of Verrazano, as Brevoort contends, and we see it in the Maiollo map of the next year, called "Mare Indic.u.m," as if it were an indentation of the great western ocean of Balboa. It was a favorite fancy of Baptista Agnese, in the series of portolanos a.s.sociated with his name during the middle of the century, and in which he usually indicated supposable ocean routes to Asia. As time went on, the idea was so far modified that this indentation took the shape of a loop of the Arctic seas, or of that stretch of water which at the north connected the Atlantic and Pacific, as shown in the Munster map in the Ptolemy of 1540,--a map apparently based on the portolanos of Agnese,--though the older form of the sea seems to be adopted in the globe of Ulpius (1542).

This idea of a Carolinian isthmus prevailed for some years, and may have grown out of a misconception of the Carolina sounds, though it is sometimes carried far enough north, as in the Lok map of 1582, to seem as if Buzzard's Bay were in some way thought to stretch westerly into its depths. The last trace of this mysterious inner ocean, so far as I have discovered, is in a map made by one of Ralegh's colonists in 1585, and preserved among the drawings of John White in the De Bry collection of the British Museum, and brought to light by Dr. Edward Eggleston.

This drawing makes for the only time that I have observed it, an actual channel at "Port Royal," leading to this oceanic expanse, which was later interpreted as an inland lake. Thus it was that this geographical blunder lived more or less constantly in a succession of maps for about sixty years, until sometimes it vanished in a large lake in Carolina, or in the north it dwindled until it began to take a new lease of life in an incipient Hudson's Bay, as in the great Lake of Tadenac, figured in the Molineaux map of 1600, and in the Lago Dagolesme in the Botero map of 1603.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MICHAEL LOK, 1582.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN WHITE'S MAP.

[Communicated by Dr. Edward Eggleston.]]

[Sidenote: Norumbega.]

It was apparently during the voyage of Verrazano that an Indian name which was understood as "Aranbega" was picked up along the northern coasts as designating the region, and which a little later was reported by others as "Norumbega," and so pa.s.sed into the mysterious and fabled nomenclature of the coast with a good deal of the unstableness that attended the fabulous islands of the Atlantic in the fancy of the geographers of the Middle Ages. As a definition of territory it gradually grew to have a more and more restricted application, coming down mainly after a while to the limits of the later New England, and at last finding, as Dr. Dee (1580), Molineaux (1600), and Champlain (1604) understood it, a home on the Pen.o.bscot. Still the region it represented contracted and expanded in people's notions, and on maps the name seemed to have a license to wander.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROBERT THORNE, 1527.]

[Sidenote: The English on the coast.]

[Sidenote: William Hawkins.]

During this period the English also were up and down the coast, but they contributed little to our geographical knowledge. Slave-catching on the coast of Guinea, and lucrative sales of the human plunder in the Spanish West Indies and neighboring regions, seem to have taken William Hawkins and others of his countrymen to these coasts not infrequently between 1525 and 1540.

[Sidenote: John Rut.]

There is some reason to believe that John Rut, an Englishman, may have explored the northeast coasts of the present United States in 1527, a proposition, however, open to argument, as the counter reasonings of Dr.

Kohl and Dr. De Costa show. It is certain that at this time Robert Thorne, an English merchant living in Seville, was gaining what knowledge he could to promote English enterprise in the north, and there has come down to us the map which in 1527 he gave to the English amba.s.sador in Spain, Edward Leigh, to be transmitted to Henry VIII.

[Sidenote: Progress of maritime art.]

It was in 1526 when the Spanish authorities thought that the time was fitting for making a sort of register of the progress of discovery and of the attendant cartographical advances. Nordenskiold says that "from the beginning of the printing of maps the graduations of lat.i.tude and longitude were marked down in most printed maps, at least in the margin;" the most conspicuous example of omitting these being, perhaps, in the work of Sebastian Munster, at a period a little later than the one we have now reached.

[Sidenote: Lat.i.tude and longitude.]

In 1503 Reisch for the first time settled upon something like the modern methods of indicating lat.i.tude and longitude in the map which he annexed to his _Margarita philosophica_ at Freiburg, though so far as climatic lines could stand for lat.i.tudinal notions, Pierre d'Ailly had set an example of scaling the zones from the equator in his map of 1410. The Spaniards, however, did not fall into the method of Reisch, so far as published maps are concerned, till long afterwards (1534).

[Sidenote: Italian maps.]

Up to the time when the Stra.s.sburg Ptolemy was issued, in 1513, the chief activity in map-making had been in Italy. The cartographers of that country got what they could from Spain, but the main dependence was on Portuguese sources, though the rivals of Spain were not always free in imparting the knowledge of their hydrographical offices, since we find Robert Thorne, in 1527, charging the Portuguese with having falsified their records. It is worthy of remark that no official map of the Indies was published in Spain till 1790.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SEBASTIAN MuNSTER.

[From Reusner's _Icones_, 1590.]]

[Sidenote: Cartographical activity north of the Alps.]

[Sidenote: Map projections.]

After 1513, and so on to the middle of the century, it was to the north of the Alps that the cosmographical students turned for the latest light upon all oceanic movements. The question of longitude was the serious one which both navigators and map makers encountered. The cartographers were trying all sorts of experiments in representing the converging meridians on a plane surface, so as not to distort the geography, and in order to afford some manifest method for the guidance of s.h.i.+ps.

[Sidenote: Lunar observations.]

[Sidenote: Chronometers.]

These experiments resulted, as Nordenskiold counts, in something like twenty different projections being devised before 1600. For the seaman the difficulty was no less burdensome in trying to place his s.h.i.+p at sea, or to map the contours of the coasts he was following. The navigator's main dependence was the course he was steering and an estimate of his progress. He made such allowance as he could for his drift in the currents. We have seen how the imperfection of his instruments and the defects of his lunar tables misled Columbus egregiously in the attempts which he made to define the longitude of the Antilles. He placed Espanola at 70 west of Seville, and La Cosa came near him in counting it about 68, so far as one can interpret his map.

The Dutch at this time were beginning to grasp the idea of a chronometer, which was the device finally to prove the most satisfactory in these efforts.

[Sidenote: Earliest sea-atlas.]

Reinerus Gemma of Friesland, known better as Gemma Frisius, began to make the Dutch nautical views better known when he suggested, a few years later, the carrying of time in running off the longitudes, and something of his impress on the epoch was shown in the stand which a pupil, Mercator, took in geographical science. The _Spieghel der Zeevaardt_ of Lucas Wagenaer, in 1584 (Leyden), was the first sea-atlas ever printed, and showed again the Dutch advance.

There were also other requirements of sea service that were not forgotten, among which was a knowledge of prevalent winds and ocean currents, and this was so satisfactorily acquired that the return voyage from the Antilles came, within thirty years after Columbus, to be made with remarkable ease. Oviedo tells us that in 1525 two caravels were but twenty-five days in pa.s.sing from San Domingo to the river of Seville.

Two of the duties imposed by the Spanish government upon the Casa de la Contratacion, soon after the discovery of the New World, were to patronize invention to the end of discovering a process for making fresh water out of salt, and to improve s.h.i.+ps' pumps,--the last a conception not to take effective shape till Ribero, the royal cosmographer, secured a royal pension for such an invention in 1526.

[Sidenote: Congress of pilots at Seville.]

It was in the midst of these developments, both of the practical parts of seamans.h.i.+p and of the progress of oceanic discovery, that in 1526 there was held at Seville a convention of pilots and cosmographers, called by royal order, to consolidate and correlate all the cartographical data which had acc.u.mulated up to that time respecting the new discoveries.