PORTUGUESE DISCOVERIES 



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Portuguese flag is seven hundred miglia, which thus corre- 

 sponds to the six hundred or seven hundred miglia that 

 Pasqualigo says the Portuguese sailed along the coast. If 

 we divide the map into degrees according to the distance 

 between the tropic and the Arctic Circle, the extent of the 

 country will be about eleven degrees of latitude. On Reinel's 

 map the length of Newfoundland from north to south is between 

 ten and eleven degrees of 

 latitude. The distance from 

 Cape Race to Belle Isle Strait 

 corresponds in reality to 

 about 5%°, that is, fairly near 

 the half. 



Both Greenland and New- 

 foundland lie too far north 

 on the Cantino map. The 

 southern point of Greenland 

 lies in about 62° 20' N. lat., 

 instead of 59° 46', while 

 Cape Race, the south-eastern 

 point of Newfoundland, lies 

 in about 50° N. lat., in- 

 stead of 46° 40'. It is un- 

 necessary to assume that 

 Greenland is derived from 

 southern point lies in 62° 





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Reconstruction of an equidistant chart 

 on which the coasts are laid down 

 from magnetic courses without re- 

 gard to the variation. 



the too northerly latitude of 

 the Clavus map, where its 

 40' N. lat., since a natural 

 explanation of the position both of this point and of Cape 

 Race is provided by the way in which the Cantino map 

 is drawn. It is, in fact, an equidistant compass-chart, 

 which takes no account of the surface of the earth being 

 spherical and not a plane, and on which the courses sailed 

 have been laid down according to the points of the compass, 

 presumably in ignorance of the variation of the needle. If 

 we try to draw a map of the same coasts in the same fashion, 

 using the correct distances, and taking the courses as starting 

 from Lisbon, and the variation to be distributed approxi- 



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