ABSTRACT
The extent of speculation about the Atlantic, in both world maps and sea charts, is the most remarkable feature of the cartography of the time. It shows what a stimulus to the imagination Atlantic exploration was, and how consciousness of an exploitable Atlantic grew in the century before Christopher Columbus's voyages. Inclusion of speculative islands might as well be read as evidence of the sailors' knowledge of the Atlantic, as of their ignorance. Maps of even greater magnificence, larger and more densely illuminated, are recorded but lost. In the late fourteenth century, the anonymous author of the Libro del conoscimiento de todos los reynos constructed from the legends of maps a fantastic journey of the imagination which reached beyond the limits of the known, even of the accessible world. The fourteenth-century maps of the Azores should be considered vindicated, while fifteenth-century maps of America should not.
