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Memorandum presented by Magellan to King Ferdinand
in September, 1519.1

But to return to Frey Bartolome. Having referred to
the globe, he goes on to say that Magellan in the course
of conversation stated that he would first go and seek the
Cabo de S. Maria, near the mouth of the Rio de Solis ;
that then he would examine the coast to the southward,
and, failing to discover a strait communicating with the
South Sea (discovered only recently by Vasco Nunez de
Balboa), he would follow the usual course of the
Portuguese in their voyages to the East, round the
Cape of Good Hope.2 Not a word is said about
Behaim and his chart. A few pages further, however
, Las Casas states, on the authority of Pigafetta,
that Magellan felt sure of discovering a strait, "having
seen it upon a chart in the treasury of the King of
Portugal made by Martin de Bohemia, a great pilot and
cosmographer."

Oviedo3 (Historia, liv. XX., c. 1) knows about
the reported existence of Behaim's chart, admits that
it may have suggested the existence of a strait, but
maintains that its discovery was due rather to the
capacity of Magellan than to the science of the
" Bohemian."

Francisco Lopez de Gomara in his ' Historia general
de las Indias' (Zaragoza, 1552, c. 91) knows all about
Behaim and his " carta de marear," but adds that " as far as
he heard that chart showed no strait whatever, unless the
Rio de la Plata or some other great river on that coast
was taken for such."

Antonio de Herrera,4 who had access to the archives
of Philip III., may have consulted there the original
journal of Pigafetta, which had been presented to
Charles V., and other documents, now lost to us, but
what he tells us in his ' Historia general' (Dec. II., liv. II.,
cc. 19-21) about Behaim, whom he describes as a native
of the island of Fayal and a cosmographer of great
authority (de gran opinion), and the " hidden" strait,
seems to have been borrowed from Las Casas, who was
himself dependent upon Pigafetta.

1 Navarrete, ' Coleccion,' IV., doc. No. 19. The object of this
Memorandum was to prove that the Moluccas, according to the treaty of
Tordesillas, lay within the Spanish sphere. Starting from S. Antao, the
outermost of the Cape Verde Islands, Magellan computes the 370 leagues
of the treaty to be equivalent to 22° of longitude. As a league was
equal to 7,500 varas, or 6,269 metres, a meridian distance of 370 leagues
in lat. 17° actually amounts to 21 "8 degrees, a very near approach to the
truth. The Moluccas were supposed by him to lie only 176° to the west
of this " linea de reparticao," and to be thus within the Spanish sphere,
their true distance being 187°, which placed them within that of the
Portuguese.

2 'Historia de Us Indias,' liv. III., c. 100, vol. IV., Madrid, 1876,
p. 376.

3 Goncalo Fernandez Oviedo y Valdes was born at Madrid in 1478,
spent 1513-47 in Haiti, and was appointed Royal Historiographer on his
return to Europe. He is the author of ' La Historia general y natural
de las Indias Occidentales,' Seville, 1535-55, a new edition of which was
published at Madrid, 1851-55. He died 1557.

4 See p. 14, note.

It is significant that Joao de Barros, the famous
Portuguese historian, in the account of the voyage of his
countryman Magellan (' Da Asia,' Dec. III., liv. 5, p. 8),
whom the " devil bad instigated " to desert his own King
" for him of Castile,' makes no reference whatever to the
chart supposed to have existed in the King's treasury. It
is evident that he knew nothing about such a chart, or he
would surely have referred to it, if only to minimize
Magellan's merit in discovering the sought-for strait
leading to the South Sea. Gaspar Correa,5 in his
' Lendas de India,' is equally silent.

Indeed, the existence of Behaim's chart seems to be
vouched for by Pigafetta alone, and considering the
friendly personal relations which existed between him and
Magellan, his testimony is undoubtedly of considerable
weight. It has been unhesitatingly accepted by many
subsequent writers, and among others by William Postel,6
a learned Frenchman, who speaks of the strait of
Martin Bohemus, which separates the new world or
Atlantis from the unknown southern continent or
Chaesdia, but is named after Magellan because that
navigator passed through it on his route to the Moluccas.
He evidently looked upon Behaim as the hypothetical if
not actual discoverer of this strait. Urbain Chauveton
(Calvetonus), in the notes which he added to a Latin
translation of Girolamo Benzoni's 1 Historia del Mondo
novo' (Venice, 1565, lib. III., c. 14), which was published
at Geneva in 1578, confines himself to the statements
made by Pigafetta, and as this work, up to 1650, appeared
in at least ten editions, including translations into French,
German, Dutch and English, the statement about
Behaim's map gained wide currency, and was accepted by
quite a host of compilers.

A sketch of the progress of discovery and exploration
along the east coast of South America may help us
towards a correct opinion as to the likelihood of Behaim
having ever designed a chart resembling that with which
he is credited by Pigafetta.

Christopher Columbus was the first to sight the mainland
of South America, immediately to the south of the
island of Trinidad. This happened on August 1, 1498.
In the year after, in 1499, on May 18, Alonzo de
Hojeda (with whom were Juan de la Cosa, the famous
pilot, and Amerigo Vespucci) fell in with the coast
further to the east, off Surinam, and followed in the wake
of Columbus. In the following year, 1500, on the 20th
of January, Vicente Yanez Pinzon, sighted the coast in
lat. 8° 20' S. at a low point of land, which he called Cabo

5 Gaspar Correa went out to India about 1512 and died there after
1561. His great work remained in MS. until 1858-61, when it was
published by the Academy of Sciences at Lisbon.

8 In his ' Cosmographiae disciplinae Compendium,' Basel, 1561,
c. 2; ' De Univcrsitate liber,' Paris, 1563. Guillelmus Postellus
was born in 1510 at Barenton, in Normandy, and died in 1581.
He was a distinguished Oriental scholar, able to read Arab geographers
, was expelled from the Society of Jesus, and persecuted by the
Inquisition.

F 2