Page:Legendaryislands00babcuoft.djvu/169

 BECCARIO MAP OF 1435 151 THE BECCARIO MAP OF 1426 The second map on Nordenskiold's New World list is "Be- charius 1426," a Latinization of the surname of Battista Beccario and at least not so weird a transformation as Humboldt's "Be- clario or Bedrazio." Apparently the year of this map has not been doubted, but there is a lack of first-hand evidence that the original contains Antillia. No reproduction of this map had been published prior to the writer's paper on St. Brendan's Islands in the July, 1919, Geographical Review, nor, so far as is known, has its extreme western part been copied in any way. The section there reproduced, and herewith reprinted only slightly curtailed (Fig. 3), is one of several sent me in response to arrangements, made before the war, for a photograph of the map, but by some mistake the very portion that would have been con- clusive was omitted, and all attempts to remedy the error have failed. But, if there were any inscription concerning recently dis- covered islands located as in his later map, some part of it at least would probably be seen on what I have; and for this and other reasons I do not believe that Antillia is delineated or named on the Beccario map of 1426. THE BECCARIO MAP OF 1435 The addition to fifteenth-century geography of a great group of large western islands roughly corresponding to a part of the West Indies and Florida rests mainly on the testimony of the following maps now to be discussed: Beccario 1435, Bianco 1436, Pareto 1455, Roselli 1468, Benincasa 1482, and the anonymous Weimar map probably by Freducci and dating somewhere after 1481. Of these the most complete as well as the earliest is Beccario's 20 (Fig. 20). He gives the islands the collective title of "Insulle a novo rep'te" (newly reported islands), which 20 Gustavo Uzielli: Mappamondi, carte nautiche e portolani del medioevo e dei secoli delle grandi scoperte marittime construiti da italiani o trovati nelle biblioteche d' Italia, Part II (pp. 280-390) of "Studi Bibliografici e Biografici sulla Storia della Geografia in Italia," published on the occasion of the Second International Geograph- ical Congress, Paris, 1875, by the Societa Geografka Italiana, Rome, 1875; refer- ence on PI. 8 (the second edition, Rome, 1882, does not contain the plates).