﻿20 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



voyages of Columbus is considered by him to show Antillia as of the 

 real Antilles. The slightly later (1500) map of Juan de La Cosa may 

 preserve another echo of the tradition recorded by Behaim in his 

 entry " this is the island that the Portuguese found " applied to an un- 

 named outline of the orthodox rectangular form of the eastern South 

 American coast, for he could hardly yet have heard of the landfall of 

 Cabral. Finally, we know that Las Casas, the friend of Columbus, 

 promptly applied to Cuba and its companions the term The Antilles, 

 which they bear to this day and that other contemporaries believed he 

 had reached the Antillia which Toscanelli recommended to him in 

 advance as a convenient stopping-place on the way to Asia. All 

 things considered, it appears that Nordenskjold had some solid 

 ground of justification for classifying all the maps of Periplus which 

 contain Antillia, under the heading " Maps relating to the New 

 World " (see note 1, p. 176). 



Antillia and its consorts cannot be the Azores, which in each 

 instance are shown half way out to them or not much less, the 

 remotest pair of the latter, Flores and Corvo being similarly situated 

 in reality with regard to some points of the American shore. Fur- 

 thermore these Portuguese islands are in each instance represented of 

 about the proper size, being indeed evidently well understood except 

 as to the western inclination of the extended Azorean series. This is 

 not strange in view of the amount of coming and going among them 

 at that time, Beccaria's earliest date being about sixty years after * the 

 establishment of the Norman trading post Petit Dieppe on the African 

 coast far below, followed by frequent voyages thereto while the 

 Basque and Breton fisheries were carried on in a lively way in those 

 seas. The Italians also had been up among them, leaving names for all 

 the islands, and now the Portuguese were taking exploration and 

 colonization earnestly in hand. But far beyond these Azores there 

 was obviously, in their settled belief, something very much greater, 

 aptly defined as in front of Portugal, and the Azores, since it extended 

 from the parallel of Lisbon or higher, to about that of Gibraltar or a 

 little below. The Antillia of Beccaria and his successors may well be 

 rather too far north. Discoverers, knowing nothing of the dip of the 

 isothermal lines southward on the western side, would be likely to 

 judge by climate and productions, thus erring in the latitude; and it 

 is easy to see how an opposite mass of land reported to resemble 

 Portugal in bulk, and conditions, might be conventionalized by the 

 map-makers into greater resemblance. A royal grant of i486 even 



1 Nordenskjold : Periplus, p. 115. Cf. M. D'Avezac : Discoveries of the 

 Middle Ages. 



