to
the Catalan voyage of 1346 and may be taken as one result of the same,
we come to Spanish parallels; but until the death of Henry in 1460,
Italian draughtsmen were in possession, and Fra Mauro's great map of
1459, the evidence and result, in great measure, of the Navigator's
work, could only be drawn by Venetians for the men whose discoveries it
recorded.

But there is one other point in Italian map-science which is worth
remembering. At a time when most schemes of the world were covered with
monsters and legends, when cartography was half mythical and half
miscalculated, the coasting voyagers of the Mediterranean had brought
their _Portolani_ or sea charts to a very different result. And how was
this? Did they get right, as it were, by chance? "They never had for
their object," says the great Swedish explorer and draughtsman, Baron
Nordenskjold, "to illustrate the ideas of some classical author, of some
learned prelate, or the legends and dreams of feats of Chivalry within
the Court circle of some more or less lettered feudal lord." They were
simply guides to mariners and merchants in the Mediterranean seaports;
they were seldom drawn by learned men, and small enough, in return, was
the attention given them by the learned geographers, the men of theory,
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

But these plans of practical seamen are a wonderful contrast in their
almost present-day accuracy to the results of theory let loose, as we
see them in Ptolemy and the Arabian geographers, and in such fantastics
as the Hereford Mappa Mundi, so well known in England. Map-sketches of
this sort, were unknown to Greeks and Romans, as far as we can tell. The
old Peripli were sailing directions, not drawn but written, and the only
Arabian coast-chart known to us was copied from an Italian one. But from
the opening of the twelfth century, if not before, the western
Mediterranean was known to Christian seamen--to those at least concerned
in the trade and intercourse of the great inland sea,--by the help of
these practical guides.

[Illustration: THE LAURENTIAN PORTOLANO OF 1351. (SEE LIST OF MAPS)]

From the middle of the thirteenth century, when the use of the compass
began on the coasts of southern Europe, the Portolani began to be drawn
with its aid, and by the end of the same century, by the time of our
Hereford map (_c._ 1300), these charts had reached the finish that we
see and admire in those left to us from the fourteent