Alabama and the Borderlands: From Prehistory To Statehood

4 John H. Parry - Early European Penetration of Eastern North America

4 Early European Penetration of Eastern North America John H. Parry One of the most striking features of the early exploration of the Americas is the persistent influence of the notion of Asia-in-the-West: the idea that Asia could be reached by sailing west-even that Columbus' New World was Asia. It is true that the more bizarre of Columbus' suggestions-that Cuba was a peninsula of China, that Hispaniola might be Japan, that Honduras might be Marco Polo's Indo-China and Paria the earthly paradise-were quickly discredited or discounted. Nevertheless, for twenty or thirty years after Columbus' initial discovery, many intelligent and wellinformed people continued to assume, or at least hope, that the newly discovered lands lay within striking distance of Asia, that they were connected with Asia in some way, and that they were to be valued not so much for their own sake as for the convenience they might afford as staging points on the route to richer and more civilized parts of Asia. These assumptions and hopes affected both government policy and the course of events. The early Spanish-govemrnent-sponsored expeditions to the New World were all directed to areas south, not north, of Columbus' original island discoveries, because south was believed to be the way to Asia, whether by an eastern or a western route. Privately sponsored expeditions-more numerous though less ambitious-were less directly affected. Those who organized and conducted them were looking for precious metals, pearls, pro- John H. Parry ductive land, and docile inhabitants. Probably they did not much care whether the lands where they found these things were connected with Asia; but they too tended to head south rather than north. Gold, in the European mind, was associated with hot countries ; so south was the direction for riches, and indeed it was on the Caribbean coasts of Colombia and the Isthmus that gold artifacts were first found, available for trade, in significant quantity. All these considerations help to explain why the Caribbean and Atlantic coasts of South America were rapidly explored, while North America remained unknown, a vast blank on the map. Cartographers (some cartographers at leastl were aware of the existence of the Florida peninsula from about 1503, a decade or so before the first recorded reconnaissance by Juan Ponce de Leon; but for all that anyone knew to the contrary, it might be only another large island. Martin Waldseemiiller, it is true, in 1507 gave North America as a whole an attenuated continental shape, separate from Asia and with a western coastline; but this seems to have been an inspired guess, based on conjecture (so far as we knowl rather than on the evidence of exploration. One cannot be quite sure of this, of course. The record of early exploration is like the tip of an iceberg. There may have been early voyages, perhaps many voyages, of which no record has survived. Some may have gone even beyond Florida. All we can say with certainty is that Waldseemiiller in 1507 did not represent orthodox or even generally accepted opinion. Of the surviving maps and charts drawn in the first two decades of the sixteenth century, some-the Schaner globe of ISIS, Peter Apian's Typus Orbis of Ipo--follow the general lines of the 1507 woodcut. Others show Florida attached to a fair-size stretch of territory, but avoid commitment by using an edge of the maps to cut it off on the north and west. Waldseemiiller himself treated the Florida territory in this way in the-IS 13 Strasburg Ptolemy, and in his Carta Marina of IS 16 he added a legend indicating that the territory was part of Asia: "Terra de Cuba Asie Partis." Whether this represented a change of mind or a slip of the pen is impossible to say. Many maps, on the other hand, fully as authoritative as those of Waldseemiiller, contradict the 1507 woodcut flatly. Examples are those of Contarini-Rosselli in 1506, Contarini in 1508, Ruysch in 1508, Vesconte Maggiolo in 1511. In all these maps the mainland of Asia stretches from west to east across the northern portion of the globe in a great peninsular extension, usually labeled "Tangut," 84 EUROPEAN PENETRATION OF EASTERN NORTH AMERICA terminating in the lands discovered by John Cabot and the brothers Corte-Real. Far to the south is the big amorphous lump of "Terra Crucis," South America...