LECTURES. Ill 



either because they inserted on the map what they had omitted in the 

 book, or because they found it easier and shorter to speak to the eye 

 than to the ear. 



Maps, therefore, form a peculiar class of historical documents. 

 Sometimes they confirm what we have in the books, sometimes they 

 make our literary information more complete, and sometimes they 

 must serve us instead of books. It is particularly the old maps which 

 have this documentary character. Martin Behaim, when he composed, 

 in the year 1492, liis celebrated globe, was not content with giving 

 merely the outlines and names of the countries and islands which he 

 depicted, but he added to each of them quite lengthy descriptions, in 

 which he informs us what kind of people lived in each country, what 

 plants were raised there, and, occasionally, by whom and when it was 

 discovered. 



The same thing was done by many other map-makers, on whose de- 

 lineations we find inscrip'ions like these: "In the year 1500, Bastidas 

 sailed as far as this point." "Here Solis was killed." "On this island 

 the Portuguese found signs of gold," and the like. Travellers, too, 

 have often been in the habit of jotting down their observations and 

 conjectures on the maps they composed in travelling. 



It is not seldom the case that maps contain the only hints and data 

 which we possess concerning an expedition or a discovery the reports 

 of which have been lost. Historians have, in this respect, not yet 

 derived all the advantage from them which maps are capable of afford- 

 ing. It has been questioned, if the first Portuguese expedition along 

 the eastern coast of South America, could have gone as far south as 

 they pretended to have done, that is to say, beyond the fiftieth degree 

 of south latitude, and if the Portuguese explorers of tlie beginning of 

 the sixteenth century ought to be considered as the discoverers of the 

 Falkland islands. Different very old maps, which show a group of 

 islands in the true latitude of the Falkland islands, can be quoted as 

 documentary proof of the truth of that assertion. That the Spaniards 

 knew the Sandwich islands a long time before Cook, that they had 

 a name for them, tliat they probably visited them repeatedly, was 

 proved by a map which Admiral Anson found on board a Spanish 

 vessel, and on which those islands were laid down in their true posi- 

 tion, and is proved likewise by still older maps, on which we find a 

 group of islands, called Los Volcanos, laid down in the latitude and 

 longitude of the Sandwich islands. Some other old maps, which have 

 recently come to light, have large tracts of the Australian continent 

 very accurately depicted, and prove to us that the Portuguese and 

 Spaniards were acquainted with those countries a long time before the 

 Dutch and English. 



The printed books inform us imperfectly about those highly inter- 

 esting expeditions which Cortes ordered to be made into the Gulf of 

 California, and along the western shores of the Californian peninsula. 

 A map of these regions, which was made by a contemporary of Cortes, 

 and which, at the end of the last century, was discovered and pub- 

 lised in Mexico, completed our knowledge of these exjieditions in a 

 very satisfactory manner. It showed us exactly how far the captains 

 of Cortes ascended the Rio Colorado, what names they gave to the 



