200 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



While there are some things to be noted in relation to this, there 

 cannot be a long argument, as all the information is from Mr. Harrisse's 

 own researches. 



In the first jîlace I would remark that Grajales may have copied the 

 legends for his own information, because he certainly did copy out Col- 

 umbus's account of his third voyage, and the first legend in the pamphlet, 

 as on the map, continues the history, for it commences, " No. 1 of the 

 Admiral." Why should he be supposed to have been the author of the 

 legends bound up in the same volume with the letter of Columbus, and 

 covered by the same title ? Why one more than the other ? 



The question is not, however, important, for it has been admitted by 

 Mr. Harrisse that the information came from Sebastian Cabot. Dr. Gra- 

 jales was then merely the instrument by which Cabot worked, and it is 

 immaterial whether Grajales wrote the legends or not. Somebody beside 

 Cabot wrote them, and it may as well have been Grajales as anybody 

 else. He lived at Puerto Santa Maria, close to Seville, where Cabot re- 

 sided. It brings the responsibility for the legends closer home to Cabot ; 

 that is really the outcome of the discovery, interesting as it is and 

 creditable to Mr. Harrisse's powers of research. It will not do, however, 

 to take Dr. Grajales too seriously. He is not more likely to have written 

 the legends out of his own head than to have written, of his own knowl- 

 edge, Columbus's account of his third voyage. 



The conclusion I arrived at in 1894 concei'ning the celebrated map 

 of 1544 was that, although it was not actually compiled by Cabot, it was 

 largely based on information supplied by him. It seems to me impossible 

 to deny that he had some hand in it, and yet the only copy now surviv- 

 ing was evidently not put forth under his immediate responsibility. In- 

 deed, in 1544, he would not have dared to publish a map unofficially, for 

 he was then holding an official position in Spain, and not long before he 

 had suspended Guthierez for doing something of that kind. There were, 

 however, of a certainty, some widely known maps existing in England 

 during his residence there, which were attributed to him without a dis- 

 claimer on his part, and upon them the information concerning the island 

 of St. John did exist. It is the English maps — especiall}^ the Clement 

 Adams's edition of this map, published in England when Cabot was alive 

 and in high office there, which told of the date and place of the landfall 

 three hundred years before this 1544 map was found, and thi-ee hundred 

 and forty years before Mr. Harrisse came upon the track of Dr. Grajales's 

 private cosmographical studies. 



