A theory of connecting the Atlantic and the St. Lawrence on the line of what is apparently the Hudson River, which had been advanced by Ruscelli in the general map of the world in the 1561 edition of Ptolemy, was developed in 1578 by Martines in his map of the world in the British Museum, from a copy of which in the Kohl Collection the accompanied sketch is taken.[358]
What is known as Dr. Dee’s map was presented by him to Queen Elizabeth in 1580, and was made for him, if not by him. It is preserved in the British Museum, and the sketch here given follows Dr. Kohl’s copy in his Washington Collection. Dee used mainly Spanish authorities, as many of his names signify; and though he was a little too early to recognize Drake’s New Albion, he was able to depict Frobisher’s Straits.[359]
This is sketched from the copy in the Harvard College Library. The book has a somewhat similar delineation in an elliptical mappemonde, of which a fac-simile is given in Stevens’s _Historical and Geographical Notes_. The bibliography of Porcacchi is examined in another volume.]
The peculiarities of three engraved English maps of about this time are not easy to trace. The first map is that in Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s _Discourse_;[360] the second is the rude drawing which accompanied Beste’s _True Discourse_ relating to Frobisher;[361] the third, that of Michael Lok,[362] in Hakluyt’s _Divers Voyages_. Hakluyt, in the map which he added to the edition of Peter Martyr published in Paris in 1587, conformed much more nearly to the latest knowledge.[363]
We find what is perhaps the latest instance of New France being made to constitute the eastern part of Asia, in the map (1587) given in Myritius’s _Opusculum geographicum rarum_, published at Ingoldstadt in 1590.[364] A group of small islands stands in a depression of the coast, and they are marked “Insulæ Corterealis.” It carries back the geographical views more than half a century.
In the Molineaux globe of 1592,[365] preserved in London, we find a small rudimentary lake, which seems to be the beginning of the cartographical history of the great inland seas,—a germ expanded in his map of 1600[366] into his large “Lacke of Tadenac.” Meanwhile Peter Plancius embodied current knowledge in his well-known map of the world. So far as the St. Lawrence Valley goes, it was not much different from the type which Ortelius had established in 1570. Blundeville, in his _Exercises_ (1622, p. 523), describing Plancius’ map, speaks of it as “lately put forth in the yeere of our Lord 1592;” but in the Dutch edition of Linschoten in 1596 it is inscribed: _Orbis terrarum ... auctore Petro Plancio_, 1594.