"FLORIDA" ON CANTINO MAP 125 



oral testimony concerning the discoveries, have failed 

 to take into consideration what was probably the 

 most usual means of communicating the news of the 

 period among the seaport towns of Spain and Portu- 

 gal. All the names dealt with so far are descriptive 

 terms (derived from events that occurred during the 

 progress of the voyage along the coast of Cuba or 

 from the prominent features of the coast) such as 

 would naturally be communicated orally by a sailor 

 who had taken part in the voyage. Such a person, 

 though himself incapable of making a map of the new 

 discoveries, might be presumed to have described 

 from memory what he had seen. It may well be 

 imagined that, from these accounts, some Portuguese 

 draftsman made rude local charts of the real Cuba. 

 Supposing this chart-maker to have been a man in 

 clined to spell according to sound and capable of 

 omitting a letter occasionally, we may readily visu- 

 alize the material the Cantino chart-maker used in 

 depicting the northwestern mainland. 



These names, picked from descriptions of some 

 two hundred miles of coast (a description covering 

 forty pages in Las Casas' ''Historia de las Indias"), 

 would not necessarily mean much were it not that 

 the descriptive terms also correspond in order with 

 the names on the Cantino map. Of the eleven names 

 thought to be derived from the first voyage of Co- 

 lumbus, nine are in the same order in the accounts of 

 Las Casas and others as they are found on the 

 Cantino map. Three, ''Canfure," ''Costa alta," and 



