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Updated: May 26, 2025
Ramusio in his preface, after mentioning to Fracastor that he placed the relation of Verrazzano and Jacques Cartier in that volume, adds, that inasmuch as Fracastor has exhorted him to make, in imitation of Ptolemy, four or five maps of as much as was known up to that time of the part of the world recently discovered, he could not disobey his commands, and had therefore arranged to have them made by the Piedmontese cosmographer Giacomo de Gastaldi.
At sixteen degrees east from the northern end of Cuba, a large island is placed in the Oceanus Magnus or Atlantic, called Terra Cortesia; which the cosmographer seems to have intended to represent the kingdom of Mexico, recently discovered by Cortez; though placed almost in lat. 50° N. Perhaps this may be an error for Corterealis, an early navigator, who is said to have made discoveries on the eastern coast of North America.
All the details of such a prospective arrangement were thoroughly discussed, and it was intimated that the king would be expected to take shares in the enterprise. Jeannin had also repeated conferences on the same subject with the great cosmographer Plancius.
A speciall note gathered by the excellent Venetian Cosmographer M. Iohn Baptista Ramusius out of the Atabian Geographie of Abilfada Ismael, concerning the trending of the Ocean sea from China Northward, along the coast of Tartarie and other vnknowen lands, and then running Westwards vpon the Northerne coasts of Russia, and so farther to the Northwest.
It was 1474 when this encouragement came, and from this time all the sailor's thoughts and plans turned toward the west. The life at home between his voyages, whether spent with his brother, the cosmographer, at Lisbon, or with his wife and sailor brother-in-law, on the Porto Santo island, was hardly less nautical than the voyages themselves.
And I found that Franciscus Lopez de Gomara affirmeth America to be an island, and likewise Greenland; and that Greenland is distant from Lapland forty leagues, and from Terra de Labrador fifty. Moreover Alvarez Nunmius, a Spaniard, and learned cosmographer, and Jacques Cartier, who made two voyages into those parts, and sailed five hundred miles upon the north-east coasts of America.
"True it is," writes the old cosmographer Thevet, "and I myself have heard it, not from one, but from a great number of the sailors and pilots with whom I have made many voyages, that, when they passed this way, they heard in the air, on the tops and about the masts, a great clamor of men's voices, confused and inarticulate, such as you may hear from the crowd at a fair or market-place whereupon they well knew that the Isle of Demons was not far off."
Antonio Galvano, an experienced Portuguese sailor and cosmographer, writing in 1563, like the others, knows of one voyage only, which he fixes in 1496. He interweaves, like them, in his narrative many circumstances of the second voyage, but it is important to note that from some independent source is given the landfall at 45°, the latitude very nearly of Cape Breton, on the island of Cape Breton.
Champlain desired, it is true, to gain an intimate knowledge of the country, and his labours are highly valued as a geographer and cosmographer, but his intention was to utilize all his varied information to promote the Christian religion and at the same time to increase the renown of his native land.
In the projected expedition of the viceroy, Urdaneta's experience will be very valuable "because of your knowledge of the products of that region, and as you understand its navigation, and are a good cosmographer." Therefore the king charges him to embark upon this expedition. Mexico, May 28, 1560.
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