Meanwhile, new efforts were made by the Spaniards to push their advantage westward. Gomez, the recreant pilot of Magellan, was sent to explore the eastern coast of the present United States, to find, if possible, a passage by the north, as has been told elsewhere.1 3 The French also, in the voyage of Verrazano, endeavored, if we accept the accounts, to gain their share in the new progress, as illustrated in the Verrazano map. To the south the Spaniards sent Loyasa in 1525, who succeeded in finding the Straits which Magellan had passed through; while one of his vessels, driven south as far as fiftyfive degrees in February, 1526, discovered Cape Horn; and the insular character of Tierra del Fuego was thus early divined, though the fact was kept secret from the world.4 In 1526 Sebastian Cabot was sent in command of four vessels to follow Loyasa on the route to the Spice Islands. When he had reached the La Plata he undertook the exploration of it, and never went farther on his way to India. Five years were spent here in encampments and boat expeditions. The main river and its tributaries were explored to points over a thousand miles from the sea. He was so impressed with the resources of the country that he sent reports to Spain, and asked for reinforcements to effect the settlement of the region; but delays in their coming discouraged him, and he set sail for Spain. with drafts and reports which the map-makers made good use of in plentifully bifurcating the La Plata on their maps.5 The belief in a great Antarctic continent, through ignorance, or misunderstanding of the Spanish discovery of Cape Horn, was soon firmly established, the Straits of Magellan forming its northern limits. We find it thus in the map of the Monk Franciscus; in the map which Thorne, the Englishman, sent from Seville in 1527; and in the fac-simile of a map given in the Cartas de Indias. iv. 310; Jones's edition of Hakluyt's Divers Voyages, p. 47; also such general accounts as those of Peter Martyr, Oviedo, and Gomara; also Varnhagen's Historia geral do Brazil, second edition, p. 68, with map. 1 Vol. IV. p. 24. 2 Given in Vol. IV. p. 26. E. Gosselin in his Documents ... de la marine Normande (Rouen, 1876), enumerates (p. 142) some of the voyages made from Norman ports to Brazil and parts adjacent after 1523. 3 Galvano, Hakluyt Society's edition, p. 165. 4 Drake in October, 1578, did the same, calling its most southern cape "Terra nunc bene cognita." A sketch of Hondius' map, illustrating Drake's voyage, is given in Kohl's Magellan's-Strasse. Schouten, however, in 1616 was the first actually to double Cape Horn from the east. "The merit of the discovery of the southernmost extremity of the new continent in fifty-five degrees south latitude," says Humboldt (Cosmos, Eng. tr., ii. 642, iv. 339), "is due to Francis de Hoces, who commanded one of Loyasa's ships in 1525. It is very characteristically described in Urdaneta's Journal by the words acabamiento de tierra, the ceasing of the land. De Hoces probably saw a portion of Tierra del Fuego west of Staten Island; for Cape Horn is situated, according to Fitzroy, in 55° 58′ 41". See Navarrete, v. 28, 404." 5 Cabot got little credit from any but the cartographers. The Council of the Indies would have sent him into exile for his shortcomings, except for the clemency of the Emperor. The legend on the Cabot map of 1544 regarding this La Plata expedition is given by Harrisse in his Cabots, p. 356, where that author refers to the original sources for this voyage, printed in the Rawdon Brown Calendar, vol. iii. no. 115; to the Relazioni di Ambasciatori (Veneti), 2d ser., ii. 9; Navarrete, v. 456, 457; various manuscripts in the Archives of the Indies; a letter of Luis Ramirez, July 10, 1528, published by Varnhagen in the Revista do Inst. Hist. (Trimensal), Rio de Janeiro, 1852, p. 14, also in the Nouvelles annales des voyages (1843), iii. 39; a letter of Simão Alfonso in Varnhagen's Brazil, etc.; and such early accounts as Galvano's (Hakluyt Society's edition, p. 169), etc. Cf. Vol. III. pp. 4, 48; Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix's Histoire du Paraguay, 1516-1547 (Paris, 1756), and modern summaries like Charles A. Washburn's History of Paraguay, i. 7,- the work of a United States Minister to Asuncion, published at Boston in 1871, — and Sir Woodbine Parish's Buenos Ayres and the provinces of the Rio de la Plata; from their discovery and conquest by the Spaniards to the establishment of their political independence. Second edition, enlarged, with a new map and illustrations (London, 1852). 6 See fac-simile in Vol. III. p. 17. TITO PROVINCIA PERU PROVINCIA CABOT, 1544.1 The distinctively Spanish maps of 1527 and 1529-respectively assigned, the one formerly to Ferdinand Columbus, though with scant evidence, and the other to the 2 1 Sketch of a section of the so-called Sebastian Cabot mappemonde in the National Library at Paris, following a photographic reproduction in Harvard College Library. VOL. VIII. — 25 2 Cf. sketch, Vol. II. p. 43. In addition to the reproductions of this map elsewhere named, one can be found in Ernst Mayer's Die Entwicklung der Seekarten bis zur Gegenwart (Wien, 1877). royal hydrographer, Ribero - confine the shores of this supposable continent to what Magellan actually saw. Much the same may be said of the Homem mappemonde of about in 1530, preserved in the British Museum; of the atlas at Turin;1 of another mappemonde of about this time which Peschel has described and drawn in colored fac-simile; 2 of the Agnese map of 1536, the type of so many others, including the Bodleian manuscript of about the same date. 8 In the Finæus map of 1531, and in Schöner's of 1533, the great southern continent takes very definite shape about the Pole. It was some time after 1535, when the details of the coast of Chili first came to be S. Augustin 00 partially understood in Europe, that this completion of the western coast of South America was drawn in the map with anything like precision; though Münster and Apianus,5 in 1540, and the Nancy globe, had given it a seemingly definite line. It was drawn with a dotted line in the Homem of 1540 (?); in the portolano (1539) which Charles V. gave to Philip II., the possible work of Agnese; the Mercator gores of 1541; and with equal uncertainty in the great mappemonde of Sebastian Cabot in 1544. Both the determinate and dotted-line delineations of the west coast are shown in the maps of an atlas in the Riccardi Palace at Florence.10 The coast is drawn continuous, though without names, in a French mappemonde (1540?), which was acquired by the British Museum in 1790, and which in Kohl's opinion was derived from French sources. The Ulpius globe 11 leaves the coast unbroken, but calls it "terra incognita." The lande Brazil شکسته MARTINES, 1578. Marciana at Venice. Cf. Studi biog. e bibliog., etc, ii. 139. 9 See Vol. II. p. 177. 10 Shown in the Jahrbuch des Vereins für Erd kunde in Dresden, 1870, Tab. vii. and ix. 11 Fac-simile in Vol. IV. p. 42. in the British Museum,2 repeated the new feature in the eastern parts which was shown in the French mappemonde of 1540 (?) in making a large part of Brazil an island, — a feature which was long preserved with some cartographers, and appears more pronounced still in the manuscript atlas of Johannes Martines, 1578, now in the British Museum, and is still differently conceived in the manuscript map of Johannes à Doetechum, made about 1585. Four years after Cabot's desertion of the La Plata, Pedro de Mendoza led an expedition thither to possess the country, which in part he called Buenos Ayres, from the salubrity of the climate. The enmity of the natives and famine finally drove him away; but he left his lieutenant, Ayolas, who explored the stream and founded the city of Asuncion in 1537. To make good the hold which Ayolas had established, and in the belief that he was dead, somewhat in advance of the fact, though the natives in due time murdered him and his followers, Alvar Cabeça de Vaca was despatched from Spain, in 1540, with a following of four hundred men. He divided his force, part attempting to reach Asuncion from the coast overland, and part by following the river. After much hardship and adventure, both parties finally arrived at the settlement within a month of each other. Not much gain to geography came of the subsequent proceedings. 1 This follows the map given in Wieser's Magalhães-Strasse. Wieser thinks (p. 66) that the 1531 map of Finæus is the earliest map to apply the designation "Terra australis" to the LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY He fought disease and want, and at last succumbed to a mutiny, which put in command Irala, one of Mendoza's men who had remained, and Cabeça de Vaca found himself a prisoner to his own followers. After a detention of nearly a year he was sent to Spain. Irala proved to be a hero of discovery; he forced an expedition through to Peru, and established a route across the continent. He showed himself also to be an able governor, and made of his people, whose amalgamation with the natives he encouraged, a nation of marked characteristics. He died in 1557; but there was no one to take his place, and Paraguay never again had a governor in all respects his equal.3 1 This follows the map given in Wieser's documentos relativos a la historia antigua y mod Magalhaes-Strasse. erna de las provincias del Rio de la Plata. Ilustrados con notas y disertaciones por Pedro de Angelis (Buenos-Aires, 1836-1837). 2 The fifth section of Cartas de Indias contains papers relating to the region of the La Plata (1555-1556) during the administration of Martinez de Irala. Cf. also Coleccion de obras y 3 We have a plain narrative of these exploits of Mendoza and Cabeça de Vaca in an account |