Cantino planisphere
It was valuable at the beginning of the sixteenth century because it showed detailed and up-to-date strategic information in a time when geographic knowledge of the world was growing at a fast pace.
Among them was Alberto Cantino, who was sent to Portugal by Ercole I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, with the formal intention of horse trading, while secretly collecting information on Portuguese discoveries.
[2] A popular theory, introduced in the earliest studies of the map,[3] suggests that the Cantino Planisphere was ordered to an official Portuguese mapmaker, who made a copy of the royal cartographic pattern, the so-called Padrão Real, kept in the Armazéns da Índia.
This old map, made of six glued parchment sheets, was kept in the Ducal Library, Ferrara, for about 90 years, until Pope Clement VIII transferred it to another palace in Modena, Italy.
In the Cantino planisphere, latitudes were incorporated only in the coasts of Africa, Brazil and India, while Europe and the Caribbean Sea continued to be represented according to the portolan-chart model [6]).
Gaspar Corte-Real and his brother Miguel, members of the Portuguese royal household, sailed West under Manuel I of Portugal to find a Northwest Passage to Asia.
Several theories offer potential explanations for this land that terminates in a peninsula, labeled "C. do fim do abrill" or "‘Cape of the end of April", pointing towards the Caribbean.
[11] The Brazilian coast was certainly the last to be added and reached its present form in three phases: to the first belong an initial coastline running to southeast from Golfo fremosso to Cabo Sam Jorge, and from there, to north of Porto Seguro, continuing further south to the tip of the landmass.
Vera Cruz, so called by this name, was found by Pedro Alvares Cabral, a gentleman of the household of the King of Portugal, which he discovered in going as commander of fourteen ships that the King sent to Calicut and, on the way to India, he came across this land here, which he thought to be mainland [terra firma], in which there are many people who are observed, men and women, to walk about as naked as their mothers bore them: they are rather fair-skinned than reddish brown and have very slick hair.
[12]Only a relatively small portion of the coast, between the flag near the Vera cruz inscription and the northern side of the baia de todos os santos would have been surveyed, in 1500, by the fleet of Pedro Álvares Cabral.
[2] To the second phase belongs the pasting of the strip of parchment between Rio de sã franc° and Golfo fremosso, which would have been based on the information brought by the fleet of João da Nova, who arrived in Lisbon in September 1502.
[13] The European rediscovery of Greenland is thought to have been by João Fernandes Labrador and Pedro de Barcelos between 1495 and 1498, and also visited by Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), in the English expedition of 1498.
