Mapping North America

Part II: The Map of Juan de la Cosa

Age of Discovery explorers willingly submitted themselves to the most extreme danger and often paid the price for doing so. Completely cutting themselves off from any form of communication with their homelands, crossing a great ocean in small, primitive ships, having no established relations with indigenous inhabitants – not to mention having no clear idea of where they were headed for, famous names like Ferdinand Magellan, Giovanni da Verrazzano and Henry Hudson were added to the list of those who perished en-route. Two key players in the creation of the oldest known European cartographic representation of North America are members of that list; namely John Cabot and Juan de la Cosa.

Juan de la Cosa traveled back and forth across the Atlantic in a manner reminiscent of the way people commute to work nowadays. On Christopher Columbus’ first voyage, in 1492, he owned and was master of Santa María, the flagship of the fleet. On Columbus’ second voyage, in 1493, he was master and cartographer of the Marigalante, and on the third voyage, in 1498, he was on the ship La Niña. He was to travel on four more expeditions to the New World. During the final exploration, in 1509, de la Cosa and his companions fought with the natives and he was shot and killed by a barrage of poisoned arrows. It is safe to assert that the Indians who used poisoned arrows were not cannibals.

Juan de la Cosa made several maps, of which the only survivor is a map of the world signed in his name with the date 1500, making it the oldest known European cartographic representation of the New World. One point of special interest is that Cuba is drawn as an island, despite Columbus’ belief that it was part of the Asian mainland. Also noteworthy is that North America is shown as a solid landmass extending far into the North Atlantic, while most earlier maps showed it consisting of separate islands.

This map is the oldest of which we are aware that shows the discoveries made in the New World. With its compass roses and direction lines, it is an example of the portolan charts which came into use among Italian sailors in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Intended only for seamen, they showed the coast line and a few landmarks along the coast, but displayed little information about the interior. The map appears to have been put together from at least two sections; the western portion having been joined to a portion representing the Old World, despite the fact that the pieces were drawn to different scales. For whatever reason, Cuba and Haiti were incorrectly placed north of the Tropic of Cancer.

The only line of longitude is the one that crosses the tip of Brazil. That’s thought to represent the line of demarcation established by the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, which divided the newly discovered lands outside Europe between Spain and Portugal. According to this arrangement, territory to the east of the meridian would belong to Portugal and the lands to the west to Spain. We see that de la Cosa placed most of the New World under Spanish jurisdiction, which makes sense after taking into consideration the fact that he was acting as an agent of the Spanish crown.

By 1500 no Spanish ships had visited Central and North America. The map correctly represents them as a continuous landmass, but the coastlines are in general hypothetical and without annotation, with the exception of the section lined with English flags.

The Voyages of John Cabot

There are many things about John Cabot that we cannot state for certain, including exactly what his name was, where and when he was born, where he landed on the North American continent and why he never returned from his final voyage. In Italy he is known today as Giovanni Caboto, although there are documents on which he is named “Zuan Chabotto” or “Zuan Cabotto”, but there were acquaintances who called him “Zuam” or “Zoane”. While in Spain he was known as Juan Caboto and in England he was called John Cabot.

John Cabot’s son, Sebastian, seems to have believed that his father originally came from Genoa, although the towns of Gaeta and Chioggia have also been suggested, but in any case we’re certain that he lived in Venice from an early age. The best guess as to when he was born is sometime around 1450, although it was probably some time earlier than that. In any event, Venice in the late 1400s was a great place to become involved in maritime trade, which he very much seems to have done. After Columbus actually managed to reach dry land by sailing westward and return to Europe to tell about it, experienced mariners witnessed a jump in demand for their skills. With Spain and Portugal planning to divide the New World between them (see the vertical line representing the boundary set by the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 in the map above), it’s no wonder that King Henry VII of England and King Francis I of France were anxious to launch their own expeditions.

Details of the voyages of John Cabot are themselves enveloped in a haze of uncertainties created by time and distance. We know that in 1496 he set out from the city of Bristol, England, but was forced to turn back, that he again set sail in 1497 and explored the Atlantic coast in the vicinity of Labrador, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Maine, and that he made a final voyage in 1498. In the final voyage Cabot’s fleet was presumably lost at sea, although there seem to be the usual set of theories and so forth regarding this mystery.

This brings us back to the map of Juan de la Cosa, specifically the series of five English standards drawn along the North American coastline. Given that the map was signed by de la Cosa and dated 1500, those five English flags can represent nothing other than the 1497 exploration of John Cabot. Determining the exact locations referenced by those flagstaffs is a matter of inference and conjecture, but the map is of great interest nonetheless, as it is believed that this portion of the coast was drawn based on John Cabot’s map, now lost, which was sent to King Ferdinand by Pedro de Ayala, the Spanish Ambassador to London.