IN THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 63 



Many of the early voyages of Portuguese or Spaniards were 

 either unrecorded or else the records were destroyed and lost. 

 Proof of this is shown by the fact that constantly the Portuguese 

 and Spanish libraries and private archives yield documents revealing 

 totally unknown circumstances. As an instance of this may be cited 

 the case of one whole district of the island of Madeira which is 

 called Machico, and that this was the name of a Portuguese sailor 

 of 1379 is shown by a unique document found only in 1894.^ Of 

 one early voyage, however, the strange invasion or conquest of the 

 Canary Islands by the Sieur Jean de Bethencourt, a Norman French 

 nobleman, in 1402-1405, we have an elaborate account, one copy of 

 which in the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris is illuminated like a 

 missal with old drawings. But although the written records are 

 scanty, there is no doubt that during the fifteenth century many 

 commercial ventures and voyages of exploration into the Atlantic 

 were made, not only by Portuguese and Spaniards, but also by 

 Englishmen. Cape Bojador was rounded by Gil Eanes in 1435, 

 Cape Verde in 1445 and between then and 1448 it is said that more 

 than thirty ships sailed round it. Long voyages into the Atlantic 

 are recorded in 1452, 1457, 1460, 1462, 1473, 1475, 1476, 1480-81, 

 1484, i486. Some of these went at least 150 leagues to the west; 

 one of them discovered or rediscovered the Sargasso Sea ; all of 

 them were in search of lands or islands in which the belief seems 

 to have been very general. There are some rough written records 

 of some of these voyages and they tell very fairly the evolution of 

 discovery down the western coast of Africa. 



The best records of discoveries in the western Atlantic in the 

 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, are maps. For as I 

 have said earlier in this article, the evidence of maps is exceedingly 

 hard to controvert. When land or sea is charted with some ac- 

 curacy, even if there is no message in words about the matter, the 

 chance is that a discovery had been made. And on these early 

 maps of the Atlantic, the factor of especial importance in regard to 

 America are the islands and their names. 



Some names of islands persist with striking tenacity on these 



2 Batalha-Reis, The Geographical Journal, February, 1897. 



