The citations thus far given identify the Island of the Seven Cities
with some legendary, but generally believed-in patch of land afar out
in the ocean--sometimes with the Island of Brazil, more often with
Antillia. But the earliest of them dates six or seven centuries after
the supposed fact, and it may well be that a distinction was made
at first, which became lost afterward by blending. In a still later
stage of development the name of the Seven Cities becomes separate
and strangely migratory, not avoiding even the mainland. We know, for
instance, what power the Seven Cities of Cibola had to draw Coronado
and his followers northward through the mountains and deserts of our
still arid Southwest until all that was real of them stood revealed
as the even then antiquated and rather uncleanly terraced villages of
sun-dried brick which are picturesquely familiar on railway folders and
in the pages of illustrated magazines.
But this was not the only part of North America on which the romantic
myth alighted. The British Museum contains in MS. 2803 of the Egerton
collection an anonymous world map,[131] (Fig. 8), forming part of a
portolan atlas attributed by conjecture to 1508, which shows, somewhat
as in La Cosa’s map of 1500, the Atlantic coast distorted to a nearly
westward trend, with the Seven Cities (Septem Civitates), represented
by conventional indications of miters, scattered along a seaboard
tract from a point considerably west of “terra de los bacalos” and
the Bay of Fundy to a point nearly opposite the western end of Cuba.
The cartographer’s ideas of geography were exceedingly vague, but
apparently he conceived of Portuguese episcopal domination for the
coastal country between lower New England and Florida as we know them
now. Perhaps, however, he merely meant to set down his cities somewhere
on the eastern shore of temperate North America and has strewn them
along at convenience.
[Illustration: FIG. 8--Section of the world map in the portolan atlas
of about 1508 known as Egerton MS. 2803 in the British Museum, placing
the Seven Cities in North America and the name “Antiglia” in South
America. (After Stevenson’s photographic facsimile.)]
Incidentally, this map is also interesting as one of a few which
inscribe Antillia, with slight changes of orthography, on some part of
the mainland of South America. In this instance “Antiglia” occupies a
tract of the northwestern coastal country apparently corresponding to
contiguous portions of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.
LATER REAPPEARANCE AS AN ISLAND
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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