The Results in Europe of Cartier's explorations, 1542-1603.

The results of Carrier's explorations came slowly to the knowledge of contemporary cartographers.In the year of Carrier's return from his second voj^age (153G), Alonso de Chaves, the official cosmographer of Spain, made a plot of the North American coast.Although the Spaniards were keeping close watch on the northern explorations of their rivals, it is apparent that Chaves had not heard of Carrier's movements.This map of Chaves is not preserved ; but there is a map by Gutierrez (1550), known to us, which is held to be based on Chaves.This Gutierrez map gives no trace of the French voyages; nor does Oviedo, the Spanish historian, who wrote the next year (1537) with Chaves's map before him, give us any ground for discrediting the map of Gutierrez as indicating the features of that by Chaves.The next year (1538), the rising young Flemish map-maker, Gerard Mercator, made his earliest map, which shows that no tidings of the Cartier voy- ages had yet reached the Low Countries.He did not even recognize the great Square Gulf, which had appeared in the Ptolemy of 1511, as premonitory of the Gulf which Cartier had circumnavigated, though three years later Mercator affords a faint suspicion of it in his gores of 1541.We do not find any better information in the best of the contemporary cosmographers.Minister in Germany (1540) widened a little the passage which severed Newfoundland from the main, and so did the Italian Vopellio ; but Ulpius, making the globe at Rome, in 1542, which is now owned by the New York Historical Society, seems not to have been even thus imperfectly informed.The French globe-maker, who not far from the same time made the sphere preserved at Nancy, knew only enough to make a group of islands beyond the Newfoundland banks.We turn to something more intimately connected with Car- tier's own work.It might go without saying that Cartier would plot his own tracks ; but we have no written evidence that he did, other than a letter of his grand-nephew fifty years later, who says that he himself had inherited one such map.We must look to three or four maps, made within five years of Cartier's last voyage, and which have come down to us, to find how the last charts of Cartier affected cartographical knowledge in certain circles in France, and placed the geography of the St. Lawrence on a basis which was not improved for sixty years.Those who have compared the early maps find the oldest cartographical record which we have of Cartier's first voyage (1534) in a document by Jean Rotz, dated eight years later, and preserved in the British Museum.Harrisse thinks that

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