126 LECTURES. 



stance, to all those rude sketches of interior parts of America, which, 

 on different occasions, have been drawn by the Indians on skins or the 

 bark of trees, and which sometimes were the first guides, by the help of 

 which Europeans were enabled to find their way. Such Indian maps 

 have often been considered as conveying very valuable information, and, 

 consequently, have been sent home to England or France by governors 

 of provinces, have been copied by European geographers into their 

 works, and have then been deposited as valuable documents in the 

 archives of state, or have been found worthy, as historical curiosities, 

 of being preserved in the British Museum and in similar splendid 

 collections. Nay, there are still some parts of America, as the interior 

 of Brazil and Labrador, and the vast territories of Hudson's Bay, 

 which are delineated on our maps on no better authority than that of 

 an Indian sketch or report. It is evident, then, that we cannot 

 neglect the study of these aboriginal productions, but must give them 

 also a place in our collection. 



If we now turn our attention to that large class of maps which have 

 not been made on the spot by travellers themselves for the sake of per- 

 petuating their discoveries, but which have been compiled at home, 

 either for general instruction or to serve the purposes of commerce 

 and navigation, we must begin by subdividing them into ancient 

 and modern maps, and, with respect to their authors, into those which 

 have been constructed in the cabinets of scientific individuals, or in 

 hydrographical and topographical bureaus, and those which have been 

 made in map manufacturing establishments, by the traders and copyists 

 who live on the knowledge of others. Some of the old maps, which 

 have been compiled by careful students of geography, have nearly as 

 much historical value and importance as original maps from actual 

 survey, nay, sometimes more. 



Ribero, the celebrated cosmographer of the Emperor Charles V., 

 compiled in the year 1528 a map of America, for which he used the 

 actual surveys and draughts of different discoverers, which at that 

 time were still extant in the marine depots at Seville. Ribero laid 

 down on his map the coasts of North America after the drawings sent 

 home by Columbus, Ponce de Leon, Cortes, Garay, and other Spanish 

 navigators and conquerors. He traced the coasts of Peru, so far as 

 they were known in the year 1528, by the progress of Pizarro. For 

 the coasts of Venezuela, Guiana, Brazil, and Patagonia, he had before 

 him the charts of Pinzon, Cabral, Solis, Magelhaens, and many 

 other Portuguese and Spanish explorers. Of the original maps and 

 actual surveys of all these celebrated men nothing or very little is 

 now left to us ; but by a careful anatomy of the map of Ribero, and 

 by resolving it into its elements, we could to a certain degree supply 

 our want of sources from which it was compiled, and restore to each 

 explorer what originally belonged to him. 



The same may be said of many ancient compiled maps wliich we 

 find scattered through the editions of Ptolemy, or in the works of 

 Ramusio, Munster, Mercator, Ortelius, and many other diligent col- 

 lectors, who were never themselves in the field, but whose compila- 

 tions give us more or less faithful copies of actual surveys, and serve 

 us in their stead. 



