A rare early map of the American continent by Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485-1557). This is the first edition of the second woodblock cut, as the first published in 1556 was destroyed in a fire at the printing house of Thomaso Guinti in November 1557. This second woodblock first appeared in the second edition of the book published in 1565. Cartographically it is virtually identical to its predecessor, the notable difference being that the title is now across upper left and right.

One of the key cartographic questions of the day was the existence of any land bridge between Asia and America. In this map Ramusio leaves it unanswered. “This is the first printed American map to include any of the names from the travels of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado of 1540-42; it is pre-dated by that of the world attributed to Sebastian Cabot in 1544. Coronado was the first European to travel extensively the south-western part of North America. The account of his journey appears within the book. He was searching for the great cities of Cibola and Quivera, both of which proved disappointing. The latter, appearing for the first time on a printed map, is here placed to the north-west of Cibola, when in fact it was to the north-east in the Great Plains. The Sierra Neuadas appear for the first time, following the voyage of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, in 1542, when he sailed two vessels along the Californian coastline as far as Santa Barbara.” (Burden).

“Ramusio was born in Venice and spent most of his life as a civil servant to the Venetian Republic. He travelled a lot in his service, was well versed in languages, and became knowledgeable in geography.” (Burden). The map was published in the third volume of his ‘Navigationi et Viaggi’. The work was a collection of several voyages all over the world. The third volume dealt entirely with the New World. “In the introduction to the volume he writes that he had asked Giacomo Gastaldi to make one general and four special maps of those parts of the earth. It has been assumed, by Nordenskiöld and others, that this refers to the continental map of America, those of Brasil, Taprobana, Africa, and this one.” (Burden). In South America the most dominant regional name is ‘El Peru’. In small er text are ‘Brasil’ and ‘Chili’. The Strait of Magellan separates the continent from the mythical large southern continent. Provenance: Richard B. Arkway 1999; Juan and Peggy Rada Collection. Borba de Moraes (1958) vol. 2, p. 172; Burden (1996-2007) nos. 24 and 34; Church (1907) no. 99; Nordenskiöld (1889) p. 115; Polk (1991) pp. 159-65; Sabin (1868) no. 67740; Suárez (1992) p. 98; Wagner (1937) p. 46; Wheat (1957) vol. 1, p. 21.