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Updated: May 25, 2025
He is said, in a particular manner to have been confirmed in his belief that India might be reached by sailing to the west, by the communications which he had with Paul, a physician of Florence, a man well known at this period for his acquaintance with geometry and cosmography, and who had paid particular attention to the discoveries of the Portuguese.
I can still see the little chapel which you fitted up one day in your desk, the pretty wax tapers we made for it, which we lighted one day during the cosmography class. Oh, sweet recollections, how dear you are to me! Charming details of a calm and holy life, with what happiness do I recall you! Time in separating you from me seems only to have brought you nearer in recollection.
The maps of the world by Mercator of Leyden, published on a large scale, together with many astronomical and geographical charts, delineations of exploration, and other scientific works, at the magnificent printing establishment of William Blaeuw, in Amsterdam, the friend and pupil of Tycho Brahe, and the first in that line of typographers who made the name famous, constituted an epoch in cosmography.
The different travellers who have descended the Amazon, and written books about it, have all been men of slight capacity, and lacking powers of scientific observation; and one cannot help feeling regret, that Humboldt did not choose the Amazon, instead of the Orinoco, as the medium of his valuable researches into the cosmography of South America. Such a grand subject was worthy of such a man.
And, because Ptolemy, in the preface to his cosmography, asserts that no person can be a good cosmographer without a thorough knowledge of drawing; he therefore learnt to draw, so as to be able to delineate not only the exact outlines of countries, but to express their cosmographical features, whether having plain surfaces or interspersed with hills and vallies.
How would Descartes have rejoiced, he says, if he could have seen some poor treatise on physics or cosmography of our day, and what would we not give to catch a glimpse of such an elementary schoolbook of a hundred years hence. But that is not at any rate the experience of all the world, nor does it appear likely ever to be within the reach of all the world.
These I shall briefly mention, without staying to give him any answer, that I may not interrupt the series of the history; and because from its tenor, and by what has been written by others on that subject, the falsehood of his writing will distinctly appear. The first falsehood is, that the admiral went to Lisbon to learn cosmography from a brother of his own who was settled in that place.
In reply to one of the interrogatories, Arias Perez Pinzon, son of Martin Alonzo, declared, that, being once in Rome with his father on commercial affairs, before the time of the discovery, they had frequent conversations with a person learned in cosmography who was in the service of Pope Innocent VIII, and that being in the library of the pope, this person showed them many manuscripts, from one of which his father gathered intimation of these new lands; for there was a passage by an historian as old as the time of Solomon, which said, "Navigate the Mediterranean Sea to the end of Spain and thence towards the setting sun, in a direction between north and south, until ninety-five degrees of longitude, and you will find the land of Cipango, fertile and abundant, and equal in greatness to Africa and Europe."
With the confidence and added belief in himself that the recognition and encouragement of those kind women brought him, Columbus's mind and imagination expanded; and I think it was probably now that he began to wonder if all his knowledge and seamanship, his quite useful smattering of cartography and cosmography, his real love of adventure, and all his dreams and speculations concerning the unknown and uncharted seas, could not be turned to some practical account.
But now came stormy times for the Portuguese kingdom, and the troubles of the regency occupied the prince's attention to the exclusion of cosmography. In 1441, however, there was a voyage which led to very important consequences.
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