Waiting for Ile Saint Jean to appear: The Sixteenth Century

Ile Saint Jean, correctly positioned in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, becomes a fairly certain feature in world mapping only in the 1630s. The maps that were being produced before that time were far more interested in creating a picture of the whole world, not a needle in a haystack of interest only to fishermen, and these came to be called mappamundi.

 

The Origins of the Mappamundi

Mappamundi or maps of the known world, began to appear in ancient times such as this one, from the Sixth Century BCE, on a baked clay tablet from the Late Babylonian period and now in the British Museum. The known world at that time was that of the Mesopotamian city states bordered by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

It would take almost 2000 more years before the projection of the world, as we know it today, would appear.

During that time the world was represented in many forms and the study of these maps is very complicated. With the appearance of Christianity, the old Mesopotamian mappamundi would be changed very significantly. The map would be oriented to the East with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden actually depicted at the very top. To one side would generally be a representation of where the Garden of Eden was to be found at that time, placed, as it had been formed by God, on land high enough to escape Noah’s flood, but not so high as to prevent the enclave from being lush and paradisiacal.

Below all this was the Holy City of Jerusalem and, in a very complicated design, all the other nations of the known world. This would continue to evolve as more nations and even continents were discovered. Map-making was never static, but this general pattern survived into the Middle Ages.

The Evesham world map, a fascinating English map from 1390 with revisions added about 20 years later, survives in the College of Arms in London. It is like all the maps that came before, with Adam and Eve and Jerusalem at the top except for a very major change at the bottom. In that way it was old-fashioned because this format had already been discarded in countries like Spain and Italy that provided charts for mariners interested in sea exploration. In the past maps were universalist in nature, showing all the known countries and continents. Here however, because England was fighting the Hundred Year’s War with France, and wanted to make a point of its supremacy, the map is Anglocentric and England replaces the rest of the world in the bottom portion.

It may have been the beginning of political propaganda in maps but it was also an important break from the ancient models that would soon lead to more representations of political entities. The static vision of the older maps would soon be challenged in favour of the introduction of specific territorial, political and commercial elements.

1390 c, emended c 1410, 1452 – Evesham World Map, painted on parchment, College of Arms, London.

The mappamundi that began to be produced in the late Middle Ages, when ship architecture produced vessels capable of making more extensive voyages than had ever been done before, would bring about even more spectacular changes in the shape of the known world and the importance applied to specific parts of it.

The new mappamundi were based on small sea charts called portolans (meaning relating to ports and harbours) and were one of a kind, inked and painted on parchment in specialised workshops in Spain and Italy. The practice of making these small, often localised charts, had begun as an aid to Mediterranean shipping in the Thirteenth Century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portolan_chart

The first great mapmaker on record who actually signed his maps was the Genose Pietro Vesconte who was active in the 1310-30 period. In the Museo Correr in Venice is a seven-sheet atlas of his that dates from 1318, and on the top left corner of his chart of the central Mediterranean is this sketch of a mapmaker believed to be a self portrait of Vesconte himself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Vesconte

In the right part of the drawing is what appears to be a portolan in its early stage of being drawn, with a complicated network of sunburst lines on which a map will be superimposed. These are usually referred to as rhumblines, but more and more, map scholars tend to refer to them as windrose lines, from the “rose” on the face of early compasses where all the wind directions in any part of the ocean, so vital to navigation, were indicated. Rhumblines, it is claimed, apply to a different kind of projection, or manner of showing a sphere as a flat surface, that was developed in the Fifteenth Century. The projection that we are familiar with today was devised later by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569.

You can see a wide assemblage of these windroses on this quite amazing Vesconte map in the collection of the British Library. I have tipped the photograph of the folio on its end so you can more easily see the landmasses in their familiar configuration.

 

1310-30 – Pietro Vesconte, Portolan chart of western Europe, British Library, ms_27376_ff180v-181v.

Here is a detail showing such a windrose Vesconte placed off the coast of Lisbon, with another showing at the Straits of Gibraltar.

Black, red and green ink were used for the primary, secondary and tertiary winds.

If you are interested in finding out more about this complicated subject you can begin by checking out these internet links.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhumbline_network

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhumb_line

 

The Appearance of the Atlantic Ocean and the Americas

A splendid later example of the evolution of Vesconte’s work now showing the extent of the Atlantic Ocean and parts of America can be seen in this circa 1504 nautical chart by the Portuguese cartographer Pedro Reinel that is now in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich.

 

1504 c – Pedro Reinel, Nautical Chart of Atlantic Ocean, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

1504 c Nautical chart by Portugeuse cartographer Pedro Reinel – Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munchen

In this early and very clear example in Munich, the whole hide of the sheep that provided the parchment is reflected in its shape.

This map was based on data accumulated from vast numbers of small portolans made on shipboard by navigators as they travelled the known and unknown world. They would draw a length of coastline that was aligned to compass bearings on the windroses and, at right angles to the coast, put in the names of geographic features they considered important. The big map makers would collect and collate this information and produce an outline of a larger land mass that could be a continent. This information was always being updated because of the never-ending exploration of the world so that no big parchment portolans were ever alike.

If you open the pdf file of this map you would expect to see that Europe was relatively well-known and your eye might move about comfortably over land that you can recognise. But that was not the case in this map. When you look at the Mediterranean you realise that it ends with the west coast of Italy with Greece and the Balkans and the coast of Asia Minor is left out.

When you look for the east coast of North America or New France, as it would be called a few years later by Jacques Cartier, you are not quite sure what you are seeing in this fragmented record. However, being optimistic you might be able to discern what might be Newfoundland and Labrador fused together, and maybe the Saint Lawrence River with the Gaspe coast falling away to unarticulated Maritime regions below.

The major windrose for the prevailing winds in the ocean were often things of beauty, filled with heraldic and other decorations. Here is a detail from the 1504 Reinel windrose.

 

Exploration begins.

In 1524, King Francis 1 of France contracted the Florentine navigator and explorer Giovanni Verrazano to explore the upper part of North America, which had not received a great deal of attention in the years since Columbus. He became the first European to explore the coast of North America between Florida and New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. A 1527 manuscript map by Visconte Maggiolo of Verrazano’s voyage in the Ambrosiana Museum in Milan, attributed to Verrazano or those closest to him, shows a summary of his voyages from Florida to Labrador. I have tilted the image so that Labrador is at the top and Florida at the bottom. For centuries to come this practice or indifference of reversing the poles in major maps would continue.

Two years later in 1529, Giovanni’s brother, Girolamo, would produce his own mappamundi on parchment, indicating his brother’s earlier discoveries. The map is in the Vatican collection and I cannot find a better image of it than this one appearing in a modern printed atlas of old maps.

In 1873 scholars tried to make sense of the two Verrazano maps and did this transcription which still finds a place in map history books. It tries to make sense of what was actually seen and recorded from Florida up to Labrador. Terra Nova and Nova Galia are indicated, but of course there is no mention of Ile Saint Jean because it would be a long time before royal interests shifted in that direction. Everything was focussed on the developing colonies in Quebec and at Port Royale in the Bay of Fundy. Newfoundland was always a place of the greatest interest because of its fish resources but activity there was mostly that of the Basques and the English.

In one of my earlier blogs I discuss this early period of exploration in this post:

DISCOVERY AND FIRST CONTACT BY EUROPEANS

Nearing the middle of the Sixteenth Century, map-making had made extraordinary progress in not only identifying the Atlantic Ocean and the continents that lay across it, but exploration to the south began intense speculation about the existence of perhaps another continent that in time would be called Australia when it was discovered by the Dutch in 1606 and by others who carefully mapped the coastline. The English connection is recent, dating to Captain Cook’s claim of the east coast, which he mapped, and called New South Wales. It was not the imaginary Terra Australis of ancient accounts, whose concept had been invented to balance out the other continents above.

In the Sixteenth Century French cartographers were especially active and productive and the school at Dieppe was very notable. This 1543 mappamundi by Guillaume Brouscon, now in the Huntington Collection in San Marino, California, is considered one of the greatest masterpieces of the time for the sheer extent of the information it contains or the land masses it implies must be present.

In the three voyages that would result in the data required for this map a good account of Eastern Canada is given to the point where we can identify the general layout of the country in a manner never seen before.

 

1543 – Guillaume Brouscon, Mappamundi, painted parchment, Huntington Collection, San Marino, California.

When you examine the area that is now Canada you can easily identify Newfoundland, Anticosti Island and the Saint Lawrence River leading to Hochelaga. The Gulf of Saint Lawrence is not articulated in any interesting fashion. Here is a pdf of the detail for your further study.

1543 Guillaume Brouscon – World chart – Huntington Col

 

Before we progress further in our exploration of the evolution of mapmaking it is important that we digress for a while and examine the basics of printing technology which takes over in the middle of the Fifteenth Century and changes the world in every way imaginable.

 

The Invention of Printing

Early Parchment Manuscripts

All the maps or portolans we have been examining thus far were manuscript documents done on paper or, more probably for its strength, parchment generally obtained from the skin of a sheep. The skin would be skilfully processed and polished until the surface was perfect for writing or drawing. This is the technique that emerged from the Early Middle Ages when the conventions of using fragile, and now rare, papyrus were replaced by this extremely durable material.

 

Printing on Paper with a Woodblock

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing

It had been known for centuries that if you carved an image in relief on a wooden block and covered those ridges with ink, you could transfer the picture to a piece of paper if you could apply sufficient pressure. The first pictures to come out of the middle ages were devotional, one of the most popular being of Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travellers. Below is a fine well-known example made in Germany about 1423. There was an enormous amount of travelling in the Middle Ages aside from the requirements of commerce. In those days there was an intense cult of relics which were bits and pieces of saints, or even artefacts, to cause the greatest astonishment and zeal, such as pieces of the True Cross or a nail from the Crucifixion. The most famous pilgrimage destination was the church of Saint James (Iago) of Compostela in Northern Spain. The wildly devout could then cross the Alps and go on to Rome where the relics of the True Cross were on display along with thousands of other pieces of important saints. And if that was not enough, you could spend the rest of your life visiting the Holy Land. Few returned. So that is why a patron saint of travellers was needed and Christopher (which translates from Greek as the bearer of Christ) was the best candidate for the job. His story is told in the Legenda Aurea or Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine.

Many thousands of these small prints were printed and sold to pilgrims for a very small sum. For a little more they could be tinted with watercolour and examples of these survive in various museums.

It takes no leap of the imagination at all to extend this technique to mapmaking. It is cheap, widely distributable, and the prints are all identical, with no copyist errors.

 

Printing on Paper with Movable Type

The greatest advancement – indeed revolution – in book production was when in 1439 Johannes Gutenberg adapted movable type to print books.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Gutenberg

Until this time all books had been copied by hand and some were beautifully decorated with borders and paintings. But books copied by hand were rare and expensive and, almost in every case, had errors introduced into the text by an inattentive copyist. And if a copyist was working from a bad copy, the scale of errors would be magnified.

In the new printing process lead alloy type was arranged in a tray which was then placed in the printing press. The surface of the type was inked, just like woodblock prints, prepared paper lowered onto the type and the whole placed under enormous pressure with a screw press. A perfect page was peeled away. You can see the stages in the process used to produce books in this woodcut from 1568. It is estimated that once the process was mastered about 3,600 pages could be produced in a single day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press

It is in this way that the Modern Age came into being. In 1452 Gutenberg printed his glorious Bible in a vernacular tongue and sealed the fate of the Catholic Church’s monopoly on all knowledge at the same time. The Protestant Reformation that followed opened the floodgates of the uncensored exploration of the natural world circulated in printed books.

 

Commercially produced woodcut maps begin to replace manuscripts.

During the High Renaissance, that period of artistic innovation and variety, mapmakers quickly seized upon the woodblock technique of making and circulating maps that did not vary from the original drawing. The concept of the printed atlas was expanded and whole collections of maps, with essential commentary, could be bound as books and sold relatively cheaply in large numbers.

 

One of the earliest woodcut maps of our Gulf of Saint Lawrence region is this small map intended for a book produced in Venice in 1556 by Giacomo Ramusio of La Nuova Francia – New France. Even the woodcutter, Matteo Pagano, has been identified. This was a time, remember, when artists like Albrecht Dürer in Germany turned this archaic process into very high art.

 

1556 – Giacomo Ramusio, La Nuova Francia, woodcut by Matteo Pagano, printed in Venice.

The Ramusio map is quite fantastical for that late date and passes on all sorts of absurd information about the region. Newfoundland is identified but lost in other land masses such as the huge island of Isola dei Demoni – the Island of Demons? – just above it. I include it here because it illustrates very well the clarity and consistency of detail possible in a woodcut.

 

Maps as Engravings on copper.

In the period of the Early Renaissance in 1430s Germany, at the same time woodblocks were bring used to produce printed images, artists, using techniques in metalwork going back to Antiquity began to produce images on paper.

Woodblocks are relief printing, that is, the image is raised above the surface of the wood by cutting away the background so the picture remains as ridges which can be inked and transferred to paper.

On the other hand, engravings, on thin sheets of polished copper alloy, are intaglio, or cut in works of art. A design, carefully copied from an original on paper or canvas, is cut into the soft copper plate by means of a variety of picks called burins. The incised grooves can be very thin or quite wide or even criss-crossed as hatching in order to give more substance to an object or area. Everything had to be done backwards so it would appear in correct aspect when it was finished.

A suitable ink is rubbed into the incised grooves of the plate, the excess wiped clean, and then it is run through a press similar to that used to make woodblock prints. In time the copper plates were run through rollers to increase the pressure and thus improve the quality of transfer of the ink. The edge of the plate, separated from the image by heavy lines, embosses the paper so that what is called a platemark is seen at the edge of the picture.

Sometimes it picks up a bit of ink and is more clearly defined than the shadow provided by the embossed surface.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engraving

 

The earliest engraved map of the Gulf region I have been able to find – and this may change – is this small representation of Tierra Nveva (Nuova) by Giacomo Gastaldi printed in Venice in 1548. It is interesting for a number of reasons even though it is impossible to make sense of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Labrador is clearly shown in roughly the right location, and floating about aimlessly are little islands that may represent small harbours in Newfoundland which have not yet been connected together. Bay of Chaleur might be there as well as Cape Breton Island.

New Brunswick and the coast of New England are identified with the usual historical fantasies that will simply not go away – the vast Tierra del Bacalaos and the Tierra de Nurumberg. Down the coast towards a hypothetical New York is our beloved Larcadia with an “r”.

 

1548 Giacomo Gastaldi, Tierra Nveva(Nuova), engraving on copper, printed in Venice.

You can see all these amazing places more clearly in this detail from the larger map.

Now, there is one very enigmatic detail that, if this were the only map it appeared on would be dismissed as more nonsense, but on the right, at the top of all those imaginary islands is one that is called S Juan or Saint Jean! Is it our Island? I rather think that it is possible as the Basques were already fishing in the region. Their major home port was San Juan de Luz and why not name a little island, with similar indentations along its coastline, and where they had fishing stations, after their home port.

 

Great manuscript maps for special presentations or occasions continued to be made on painted parchment. One such was made by the Norman mapmaker Pierre Desceliers as a presentation piece to King Henry II of France in 1550 and is now in the British Library. It is made of four conjoined hides that in total measure 135 x 215 centimeters (4 feet 5 inches by 7 feet 1 inch).

 

1550 – Pierre Desceliers, Mappamundi, 135 x 215 cm,  painted on parchment, British Library.

In its elaborate decoration it is a very old-fashioned piece of work, but the information contained in the continental outlines is as up-to-date as it can be.  It is covered with heraldic crests, windroses in profusion, cities, peoples and kings and even a selection of sea monsters. The loveliest of these decorations are the beautiful drawing of the very ships that would have sailed these seas at the cresting of the European Renaissance.

The map was drawn with South at the top, a fairly common convention at the top and so to be intelligible to modern viewers is usually displayed upside down.

When you look at the Gulf of Saint Lawrence things begin to make a lot of sense. We know where we are, as it were. As always, because it was only of interest as a relatively small fishing area, the Gulf has not been adequately recorded by the portolan makers and so Cape Breton Island, the Magdalene Islands and Ile Saint Jean (is it actually there?) are floating around vaguely. Newfoundland is a total mess.

To date, I have been unable to obtain a high resolution scan of this map and so cannot read what is written where Ile Saint Jean might be. This is a job for the future, and it might take some time to get that image.

 

Ten years later in 1560 Ferrando Bertelli engraved on a copper plate this detailed map of the Atlantic Ocean flanked by what was known of the Americas, Western Europe and Africa. It gives you a fine idea of what a large engraved map could be produced at this time. The map is very rare and is mostly know by having been bound into school atlases by a Roman man called Antonio Lafreri.

The map, which shows rare details of North America, is said to be based on French models.

 

1560 – Ferrando Bertelli, Atlantic Ocean, 14 x 9.5 inches, engraved on copper, printed in Venice.

Thus we are not surprised to see Larcadia still visible. The name Canada appears again and even Montreal, called here Othelay (Hochelaga) is visible. This would imply that the cartographer was familiar with Jacques Cartier’s voyages in the 1530s.

The Gulf of Saint Lawrence is completely lacking in articulation but, as in other maps of this period, an island called San Juan is to be seen in the top right of the detail. I think that it is our island.

This map is 14 x 9.5 inches and the amount of information contained in it is astonishing. This Venetian map shows the very high quality of maps that were coming out of Italy at this time, making it one of the great cartographic centres of Europe.

 

In this small engraved map of the New England coast and the Maritimes done in 1561 by Girolamo Ruscelli and now in the University of Wales collection, we see all the familiar features noticed in the previous maps we looked at, the most prominent being the repetition of information gleaned from French sources. Thus we see Larcadia where we expect it to be and, clearly visible in the detail, the island of S Juan.

 

1561 Girolamo Ruscelli, Tierra Nueva, University of Wales.

Here is a detail of the area in question.

 

 

In 1566 Nicolas Desliens produced this large 450 x 270 cm parchment map of the world. It is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale. It is part of a famous group of maps that were produced at that time in Dieppe where there was a concentration of geographers who archived all the material that could be found on the shape of the world – old and new. Again, following convention, South is at the top, and to make the land masses more intelligible I have inverted the picture.

 

1566 Nicolas Desliens, Mappamundi, 45 x 27 cm, Bibliothèque Nationale, ark:/12148/cb40593.

At a glance you rapidly ascertain what was known in the middle of the Sixteenth Century and what was still completely unknown – terra incognita. Great emphasis is given to those areas claimed by France, not limited solely to New France in Canada. The map also features a lot of information brought back to Dieppe by mariners about the possible nature of the land that would one day be known as Australia, which as I have said before, is not to be confused with the ancient imaginary continent of Terra Australis invented by Greek geographers to fill in an empty space they felt should contain a continent.

When you look at the inverted detail of the Maritimes and Quebec things begin to make more sense, at least concerning those parts which had been colonised and which were of economic interest.

The Gulf of Saint Lawrence is of no interest at all to the cartographer and is decorated with red specks that represent its various islands.

 

There is one more contender to consider in our search for Ile Saint Jean and it is the small 11.5 x 9.5 inches Cornelis van Wytfliet map of Nova Francia et Canada printed in Louvain in 1597.

1597 Cornelis van Wytfliet, Nova Francia et Canada, 11.5 x 9.5 inches, Louvain.

Kershaw in Vol. I, p. 43 tells us that it is largely taken from a big Mercator map published in 1569. He makes much of the fact – erroneously, I think –  that it depicts Ile Saint Jean for the first time and places it somewhere along the coast of Labrador where it is labelled Y de S. Johan. He quotes Ganong (1897) in support of this proposal. While it is true that the other appearances of Ile Saint Jean in the maps of the 1560s we have examined earlier are placed in improbable locations, this particular placement, thirty years later, can be no more than a similar detail, imitating earlier practices.

Well, we have reached the end of our time in the Late Middle Ages and the Sixteenth Century without unambiguous evidence for the existence of the Island of Saint John. So as not to end on a sour deprived note we are going to cheat and insert a foot, or just maybe a toe or two, into the Seventeenth Century to peek at the 1601 map of le 12 de Juillet by Guillemme Levasseur of l’Ocean Atlantique – A Dieppe. Such is its title.

 

1601 [Carte de l’Océan Atlantique] / A Dieppe Par Guillemme Levasseur, le 12 de Juillet 1601, painted on parchment, 74,5 x 99 cm , Bibliothèque nationale de France, ark:/12148/cb43591772n.

It is another of those majestic painted parchment maps with its shape constrained by the shape of the animals that provided their hides for this masterpiece.

When we turn our attention to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence things begin to fall into place!

Ile Saint Jean may be at 90 degrees to its present location, but it is in the right place and approximately the right shape and size, and it is labelled I S Jean in red. We have found it!

 

At the start of this post we began trawling through the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, to look for the ocean that would take us to the New World where Ile Saint Jean, our Island Home, was located.  It took us about 210 years and still we found nothing we could be certain about. We had to cheat and leap into the next century – the Century of the Baroque – to find something that might indicate that at last, our Island had entered the consciousness of the French Crown, probably through the fishing enterprises of the Basques. The voyage was long, but not without its moments of excitement. Discovering the Atlantic Ocean does not happen every day and we saw it happen on a great parchment map in 1504.

In the next post we will continue to gather everything that can be found with the resources at hand about the perception and physical details of Ile Saint Jean in the Seventeenth Century.

 

Resources

Cartier, Jacques, with a foreword by Ramsay Cook, The Voyages of Jacques Cartier, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1993.

Champlain, Samuel de, The Works of Samuel de Champlain, Volume 5, The Champlain Society, reprinted by the University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1971.

Denys, Nicolas, The Description and Natural History of the Coasts of North America (Acadia), 1672, Translated and edited with a memoir of the author, collateral documents, and a reprint of the original, by William F. Ganong Ph.D., The Champlain Society, Toronto, 1908.

Douglas, R., Place Names of Prince Edward Island with Meanings, F. C. Acland, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, Ottawa, 1925.

Ganong, William F., A Monograph of the Cartography of the Province of New Brunswick, Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, Second Series 1897-98, Volume II, Section II, Ottawa, 1897.

Ganong, W. F., Crucial Maps in the Early Cartography and Place Nomenclature of the Atlantic Coast of Canada, University of Toronto Press and the Royal Society of Canada, Toronto, 1964, reprinted 2017.

Harvey, D. C., The French Regime in Prince Edward Island, (Reprinted from the 1926 edition), Ams Press, New York, 1970.

Hornsby, Stephen J., Surveyors of Empire: Samuel Holland, J. W. F. Des Barres and the Making of the Atlantic Neptune, Carleton Library Series 221, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 2011.

Kershaw, Kenneth A., Early Printed Maps of Canada, Vol. I – 1540-1703, Kershaw Publishing, Star Communications, Hamilton, Ontario, 1993.

Kershaw, Kenneth A., Early Printed Maps of Canada, Vol, III – 1703-1799, First Edition, Second Impression, Alexander Books, Ancaster, Ontario, 2002.

Lockerby, Earle and Sobey, Douglas, Samuel Holland: His Work and Legacy on Prince Edward Island, Island Studies Press, University of Prince Edward Island, Holland College, Charlottetown, 2015.

Loewen, Brad and Goya, Miren Egaña, “Le routier de Piarres Detcheverry, 1677. Un aperçu de la presence basque dans la baie des Chaleurs au XVIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, Volume 68, Number 1-2, Summer–Fall 2014.

Macnair, Andrew, Anne Rowe and Tom Williamson, Dury and Andrews’ Map of Hertfordshire: Society and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century, Windgather Press, Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2016.

Parshall, Peter and Rainer Schoch, Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth Century Woodcuts and their Public, National Gallery of Art Washington and Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nuremberg, Yale University Press, 2005.

Rayburn, Alan, Geographical Names of Prince Edward Island, Surveys and Mapping Branch, Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, Ottawa, 1973.

Sobey, Douglas, Early Descriptions of the Forests of Prince Edward Island – A Source Book – Part I, The French Period 1534-1758, Prince Edward Island Department of Agriculture and Forestry, Charlottetown, 2002.

Sociedad Estatal para la Exposicion Universal Sevilla 92, 15^th Century (catalogue of the 1992 Seville Universal Exposition Theme Pavilion), Centro Publicaciones, Seville, 1992.

Swift, Historical Maps of Canada, Prospero Books, 2001.

Thomson, Don W., Men and Meridians: The History of Surveying and Mapping in Canada, Volume 1 Prior to 1867, The Queen’s Printer, Ottawa, 1966.

Vincent, François, Les Voyages de Jacques Cartier: à la Découverte du Canada, Edled, Paris, 2006.

Wroth, Lawrence C., The Voyages of Verrazzano 1524-1528, Published for the Pierpont Morgan Library, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1970.