The well-preserved sea (hart of 1424 was one of the first items revealed. Alter eight years, it is still not all unpacked, and it will be years more before it ceases to disclose valuable surprises. It was impossible for the purchaser to know what was in the prize without dipping into it, piece by piece. Robinson, Ltd., a distinguished London firm dealing in rare books and manuscripts, in reputedly the largest single purchase ever made by a dealer. Odd lots were sold oil at different periods, and in 1946 the still-considerable remainder was bought by William H. When Sir Thomas died in 1872, his great, bulging collection of some 60,000 parchment manuscripts and maps, many of them still uncatalogued, represented a fabulous storehouse of unsuspected historical treasures. It came from the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps who, during the first three-quarters of the Nineteenth Century, amassed the biggest library of old vellum manuscripts the world has ever known.
The history of this document is almost as intriguing as what appears on it. Recently, there came to light in England an aged nautical chart of 1424, showing what an outstanding Portuguese cartographical expert, Armando Cortesão, asserts is a representation of the New World made almost seventy years before Columbus’ first voyage, and possibly proving therefore that someone, perhaps unknown Portuguese navigators, had reached America by that time. There agreement ends, and the burden has been left with the Portuguese to unfold more about their mysterious navigators and what they did. Through the years, however, by persistent reasoning, deductions and diligent research, their basic theory has managed to make subtle progress toward acceptance-enough so that, today, most historians, including some of the stoutest champions of Columbus, have come to admit that Portuguese navigators before 1492 did suspect or even know of lands lying west of the Azores, and that Portuguese navigators were sailing out through the misty reaches of the great Ocean Sea looking for those lands, and might-just might-have found something. From time to time, they thought they had their man (Pedro de Velasco in 1452, João Vaz Corte-Real in 1472), but each time they abandoned the claim under sharp questioning by Columbus’ defenders. Who he was or when he made the first dramatic landfall they cannot say. Not without a little national pride, the pre-Columbians believe that the true discoverer of the New World was a Portuguese navigator. Leading schools and universities in those countries taught, and still teach, that Columbus was a come-lately who capitalized on the unpublicized achievement of an earlier discoverer, and educated Portuguese and Brazilians accept it as fact. came and left, leaving neither imprint nor impress to alter world history, did anyone reach America before Columbus, and, if so, when, and what is the proof?Īlmost twenty years ago, Professor Samuel Eliot Morison pointed out to his fellow North Americans that Portuguese and Brazilian historians had been asserting for half a century that what American schoolboys believe is not so. But did he? Save for the Norsemen who in 1,000 A.D. This map, whose history and meaning are discussed in the following article, is here reproduced in color for the first time in the United States.Įvery American schoolboy knows that Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492. University of Minnesota LibrariesĮditor's Note: The last issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE reported the publication in Europe of an ancient map giving evidence that the Western Hemisphere was discovered by Portuguese explorers before Columbus. An aged nautical chart of 1424 shows what an outstanding Portuguese cartographical expert, Armando Cortesão, asserts is a representation of the New World made almost seventy years before Columbus’ first voyage.
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