Although Columbus made his first landfall on one of the Bahamas, and Cuba was soon after occupied, no definite knowledge seems to have been obtained of the great mainland so near them. There is nothing in narrative or map to betray any suspicion of its existence prior to the year 1502, when a map executed in Lisbon at the order of Cantino, an Italian merchant, for Hercules d’Este, shows a mainland north of Cuba, terminating near that island in a peninsula resembling Florida. The tract of land thus shown has names of capes and rivers, but they can be referred to no known exploration. To some this has seemed to be but a confused idea of Cuba as mainland;[794] by others it is regarded as a vague idea of Yucatan. But Harrisse in his _Corte-Real_, where he reproduces the map, maintains that “between the end of 1500 and the summer of 1502 navigators, whose name and nationality are unknown, but whom we presume to be Spaniards, discovered, explored, and named the part of the shore of the United States which from the vicinity of Pensacola Bay runs along the Gulf of Mexico to the Cape of Florida, and, turning it, runs northward along the Atlantic coast to about the mouth of the Chesapeake or Hudson.”[795] But leaving these three claims in the realm of conjecture and doubt, we come to a period of more certain knowledge. The Lucayos of the Bahamas seem to have talked of a great land of Bimini not far from them. The Spaniards repeated the story; and in the edition of Peter Martyr’s _Decades_ published in 1511 is a map on which a large island appears, named “Illa de Beimeni, parte.”[796] Discovery had taken a more southerly route; no known Spanish vessel had passed through the Bahama channel or skirted the coast. But some ideas must have prevailed, picked up from natives of the islands, or adventurous pilots who had ventured farther than their instructions authorized. Stories of an island north of Hispaniola, with a fountain whose waters conferred perpetual youth, had reached Peter Martyr in Spain, for in the same edition of his _Decades_ he alludes to the legends.