CHAP. I V . ]
CHRISTOPHER
43
COLUMBUS.
appropriated a part of his scanty means to the succor of his aged father at Genoa,* and to the education of his younger brothers.† The construction of a correct map or chart, in those days, required a degree of knowledge and experience sufficient to entitle the possessor to distinction.
Geography was but just emerg-
ing from the darkness which had enveloped it for ages.
Ptolemy
was still a standard authority. The maps of the fifteenth century display a mixture of truth and error, in which facts handed down from antiquity, and others revealed by recent discoveries, are confused with popular fables, and extravagant conjectures.
At
such a period, when the passion for maritime discovery was seeking every aid to facilitate its enterprises, the knowledge and skill of an able cosmographer, like Columbus, would be properly appreciated, and the superior correctness of his maps and charts would give him notoriety among men of science.
‡
W e accord-
* Oviedo, Cronica de las Indias, lib ii. cap. 2. †Muñoz Hist, del, N . Mundo, lib. ii. ‡ The importance which began to be attached to cosmographical knowledge is evident from the distinction which Mauro, an Italian friar, obtained from having projected an universal map, esteemed the most accurate of the time.
A fac-simile of this map, upon the same scale as the original, is now
deposited in the British Museum, and it has been published, with a geographical commentary, by the learned Zurla.
The Venetians struck a medal in
honor of him, on which they denominated him Cosmographus incomparabilis (Colline del Bussol. Naut. p. 2. c. 5 ) .
Y e t Ramusio, who had seen this map
in the monastery of San Michele de Murano, considers it merely an improved copy of a map brought from Cathay by Marco Polo (Ramusio, t. ii. p. 17. Ed. Venet. 1606).
W e are told that Americus Vespucius paid one hundred and
thirty ducats (equivalent to five hundred and fifty-five dollars in our time) for a map of sea and land, made at Mallorca, in 1439, by Gabriel de Valseca (Barros, D. 1 i. c. 15.
Derroto por Tofino, Introd. p. 25).