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Dear Nito:
My book first published in 2007 contains my answer to your questions
which does not need crazy pro-Chinese theories like those of Gavin
Menzies. Here is a summary once again which I will post on Maphist for
others.
Beginning in May 1501 the Portuguese began sending expeditions down
the coastline that Cabral reported he discovered in mid-1500 to determine
or find the answer to three questions:
A. how long was this coastline and in what direction? Even Queen
Isabella sent an expedition in 1501 for this purpose and Vespucci was excluded
at
the last minute from this voyage which is one reason he went over to
Portugal in late 1500.
B. was there an opening -- a cape or a strait?
C. if there was a cape or strait, did it look like they would fall on the
Spanish or Portuguese side of the treaty demarcation line established by
the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494? It was essential that Lisbon learn the
answer to this question before the Spanish did.
All the evidence which I have collected since 2002 and cited in my
book The Magellan Myth now in a second edition, makes clear that the
Portuguese knew or learned that a strait existed before Martin Beheim's death
in
1506 (which is what Magellan always implied or stated to the Spanish in
1518-1519) and that the Portuguese were able sometime no later than 1506 to
explore the west coastline (at least once and up to at least Arica and perhaps
a little beyond that) and get the news back to Lisbon sometime no later
than 1506.
In early 1507, Ringmann revised the little poem he had placed at the
front of his own edition of Mundus Novus (Vespucci's first account) that
he published in August 1505. In 1507, Ringmann inserted this revised poem
between Cosmographie Introductio and the new Latin edition of Vespucci's
Letters with a new statement that this new land is "surrounded by a vast
ocean". This is a highly revealing revision and it is consistent with
Ringmann's remark in Cosmographiae Introductio that this new land is
surrounded
on all side by water or so it appeared to be. And Ringmann he makes quite
clear that the source of this information came from Portugal. He makes a
clear reference to the fleets of King Manuel of Portugal. Gauthier Ludd
suggested the same in a work of his own in early 1507 about Portugal being the
source for the descriptions and of course Waldseemueller's depiction of
South America.
I have been saying since my first essay in Exploring Mercator's World
(November-December 2002 issue) that the Portuguese achieved a double
circumnavigation: first around Africa in 1498 and then South America by 1506.
The problem for Lisbon was that in the New World the southern water
passage was inside the Spanish zone as they probably suspected was the case
fairly early. Therefore, once the Portuguese satisfied their curiosity
they had to kept their mouths shut, keep quiet -- although the Portuguese
knowledge of a west coastline and the ice cream cone shape of South America
eventually leaked out into certain channels and word got eventually to
Saint-Die and also to the maker of the Lenox Globe and also to Francesco
Rosselli
whose world map of 1508 clearly shows a western coastline and an ice cream
cone shaped southern continent -- all this no later than 1507-1508.
This is my Majestic Lenox-Rosselli-Waldseemueller Cartographic Troika
which further contributes to the final destruction/deconstruction of old
Orthodoxy or false narrative about the primacy of Balboa (1513) and Magellan
(1519-1520) as far as European knowledge of the Pacific.
This false narrative took hold when published maps began naming the
strait in honor of Magellan in the mid-to-late 1530s. This false narrative
flooded the market place via the proliferation of maps with this
nomenclature for the name of the Strait but before 1535 (and even after) the
strait
was not always named for Magellan. In fact, the first name which Juan
Vespucci gave in 1525 was The Strait of San Antoni which was a huge insult to
Magellan since San Antoni was the name of the men who betrayed him and
returned to Spain with all the supplies, leaving him stranded at San Julian.
All this is in my book. Table B in my book catalogues the names (or
failure to give a name in some cases) for the Strait found in nearly 50
maps. globes and globe gores made between 1524 and 1590.
Peter
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