Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 May 1896 — First Map of America. [ARTICLE]

First Map of America.

It was an Italian who discovered the New World. It was a second latlian who, wresting from the first the eponymic glory which was his right, gave his own name to the newly discovered lands. What should have been Columbia becaihe America, because it was falsely believed that the main land had been reached by Amerigo Vespucci among all modern explorers. It is therefore fitting that an Italian publisher, U. Hoepli, of Milan, is to bring out fae-similes of sundry works of great interest aud rarity which bear upon the question of the naming of our country. Most important of these is a little treatise, entitled “Globus Mundi,” which was published anonymously between 1505 and 1510. Its authorship is attributed, though on insufficient authority, to Henricus Lovitus Glareanus, a geographer and map maker of the early sixteenth century. It is memorable as the first book in which the name America is formally given to the new continent. The suggestion of this, name had, indeed, been made in 1507 by Hylacomylus, in his “Cosmographiae Introductio,” published in Die in a passing allusion to “a fourth part of the world, which since Amerigo found it, we may call Amerigo orAmerica.” But it was the “Globus Mundi” that first adopted the suggestion. Another feature of great interest in the “Globus” is a map of the Eastern Hemisphere, containing in the left hand corner a small fragment of the newly discovered continent, which juts out at about the same longitude as the Cape of Good Hope. This is labelled not America, but Niuw Welt, or New World. The map is especially interesting as being, with the possible exception of the Ptolomaeus edition of 1508, the first that contains America.