verified. It may, however, in order to disencumber the question, be
admitted to be the map mentioned by Annibal Caro in 1537, in a
letter to which occasion will hereafter be had to refer, and that
its author was the brother of the navigator, though of both these
facts satisfactory proof is wanting. [Footnote: This map was either
unknown to Ramusio and Gastaldi or discredited by them. Ramusio in
his preface, after mentioning to Fracastor that he placed the
relation of Verrazzano and Jacques Cartier in that volume, adds,
that inasmuch as Fracastor has exhorted him to make, in imitation of
Ptolemy, four or five maps of as much as was known up to that time
of the part of the world recently discovered, he could not disobey
his commands, and had therefore arranged to have them made by the
Piedmontese cosmographer Giacomo de Gastaldi. They are accordingly
to be found in the same volume with the letter of Verrazzano. One of
them is a map of New France extending somewhat south of Norumbega,
but no features of the Verrazzano map are to be traced upon it: and
no other map of the country is given. Fol. 424-5.]

No entirely legible copy of this map has yet been made public. Two
photographs, both much reduced from the original, have been made for
the American Geographical Society, from the larger of which, so much
as relates to the present purpose, has been carefully reproduced
here on the same scale. It is to be regretted that the names along
the coast, and the legends relating to the Verrazzano exploration,
are not photographed distinctly, though the legends and a few names
have been supplied by means of a pen. But although a knowledge of
all the names is necessary for a thorough understanding of this map,
these photographs, nevertheless, affording a true transcript of it
in other respects, enable us to determine that it is of no authority
as to the alleged discovery itself. [Footnote: This map was first