Cape Cod and Miscellanies Volume 4 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 Excerpt: ...in sight of the coast. There is a chart in Hackluyt's "Divers Voyages," made according to Verrazzani's plot, which last is praised for its accuracy by Hackluyt, but I cannot distinguish Cape Cod on it, unless it is the "C. Arenas," which is in the right latitude, though ten degrees west of " Claudia," which is thought to be Block Island. The "Biographie Universelle" informs us that "an ancient manuscript chart drawn in 1529 by Diego Ribeiro, a Spanish cosmographer, has preserved the memory of the voyage of Gomez a Portuguese sent out by Charles the Fifth. One reads in it under (au dessous) the place occupied by the States of New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, Terre d'Etienne Gomez, qu'il decouvrit en 1525 (Land of Etienne Gomez, which he discovered in 1525)." This chart, with a memoir, was published at Weimar in the last century. Jean Alphonse, Roberval's pilot in Canada in 1542, one of the most skillful navigators of his time, and who has given remarkably minute and accurate direction for sailing up the St. Lawrence, showing that he knows what he is talking about, says in his " Routier" (it is in Hackluyt), " I have been at a bay as far as the forty-second degree, between Norimbegue the Penobscot? and Florida, but I have not explored the bottom of it, and I do not know whether it passes from one land to the other," i. e., to Asia. (" J'ai ete a une Baye jusques par les 42e degres entre la Norimbegue et la Floride; mais je n'en ai pas cherche le fond, et ne scais pas si elle passe d'une terre a l'autre.") This may refer to Massachusetts Bay, if not possibly to the western inclination of the coast a little farther south. When he says, " I have no doubt that the Norimbe...