For a long time, this map had been associated with Richard Eden’s ‘The Decades of the Newe World’ printed in London in 1555. However, there was no proof of it beyond that already described in my book. In 2015 an example of Giordano Ziletti’s edition of Pedro de Cieza de León’s ‘La Prima Parte Dell’Historie del Peru’ printed in Venice, 1560, was offered on the market. A example of this map was found bound within. The work was first printed by Ziletti in Venice, 1557. A search online located examples at the John Carter Brown Library (B557 C569p) and the Library Company of Philadelphia (Am 1557 Cie Aa557 V 5 Vol.1) both found to include a map. That found at the John Carter Brown Library is even illustrated online. There are earlier Venice editions of the work but by different printers and publishers and no reference to these appears to record the presence of a map, only those by Ziletti. A comparison and study of the watermarks on the maps confirms they are from paper stock found in north east Italy c.1550-60. Ziletti went on to print the 1564 and 1574 editions of Girolamo Ruscelli’s edition of Ptolemy’s ‘Geographia’.

The map is derived and enlarged from Jean Bellère’s first printed in Antwerp, 1554. ‘The abundant placenames, particularly in North America, originate from the travels of three people, Ayllón, Gomes and Fagundes. Luís Vasquez de Ayllón attempted an unsuccessful colonisation on the south east coast. Estavão Gomes in 1525 set sail to find a passage to Asia and explored the region of New England. About the voyage of João Alvarez Fagundes, little is known; his landfall is believed to have been the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The Azores are shown far too close to the continent, no west coast is depicted and the Amazon River is curiously flowing north as in the Nicolai map published in the same year. The double-headed eagle holds the coat of arms of Castile and Leon’ (Burden 20). An extremely rare map, the last example found loose on the market was in the mid-1970s when John Jenkins, the bookdealer from Texas, sold one to a private collector. Provenance: Ex Michael Zinman, Westchester, NY, 2003; private English collection. Brown Library, John Carter. (1980-97). European Americana 556/13 (1557) & 560/12; Burden (1996) 23; Sabin (1868) 13049 & 13052.