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 92 MAYDA of America. The identification with some outlying island of the Azores, as Corvo, for example, is an old hypothesis; and the grotesquery of that rocky islet seems to have deeply impressed the minds of early navigators, lending some countenance to the idea. But the Laurenziano map of 135 1 35 and the Book of the Spanish Friar 36 show that all the islands of the Azores group were known before the middle of the fourteenth century, and Corvo in particular had been given the name which it still holds. Man, afterward Mayda, appears on many maps of the fifteenth century, which show also the Azores in full. Perhaps this is not conclusive, for there are strange blunders and duplica- tions on old maps; but it is at least highly significant. If Man, or Mayda, were really Corvo or another island of the Azores group, surely someone would have found it out in the course of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, just as it came to be per- ceived after a time that the Azores had been located too near to Europe and just as Bianco's duplication of the Azores in 1448 had finally to be rejected. Mayda, if real, must have been something more remote and difficult to determine than Corvo. Perhaps Nicolay and Zaltieri were right in thinking that Mayda was America, or at least was on the side of the Atlantic toward America. The latitude generally chosen by the maps would then call for Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland, often supposed to be insular in early days; or perhaps for Cape Breton Island, the next salient land feature. But that is an uncertain reliance, for the observations of pre-Columbian navigators would surely be rather haphazard, and they might naturally judge by similarity of climate. This would justify them in supposing that a region really more southerly lay in the latitude of northern France for example Cape Cod, which juts out 85 Theobald Fischer, Portfolio 5 (Facsimile del Portolano Laurenziano-Gaddiano dell' anno 1351). PL 4- 34 Book of the Knowledge of All the Kingdoms, Lands, and Lordships That Are in the World, and the Arms and Devices of Each Land and Lordship, or of the Kings and Lords Who Possess Them, written by a Spanish Franciscan in the middle of the I4th century, published for the first time with notes by Marcos Jimenez de la Es- pada in 1877, translated and edited by Sir Clements Markham, Hakluyt Soc. Publs., and Ser., Vol. 29, London, 1912, p. 29.