Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Vicente y Bennazar, Andres

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Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography

Vicente y Bennazar, Andres

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This is a fictitious person. The subject is described as publishing a map of the world clearly displaying both North and South America in 1476, however nobody had sailed to the Americas until Christopher Columbus in 1492, i.e. 16 years later. The first known map to show the continent of South America separated from Asia in a way that reveals the existence of the Pacific Ocean was in fact published in 1507, or after the subject would have died.

138131Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography — Vicente y Bennazar, Andres

VICENTE Y BENNAZAR, Andres (ve-then'tay), Spanish geographer, lived in the second half of the 15th century. He published at Antwerp in 1476 four charts, representing the four continents of the world. Unlike Columbus, he did not imagine America to be part of Asia, but represented it as a distinct continent and, what is more remarkable, as a continent divided into two parts by an isthmus. This publication, at so early a date, and before columbus's discovery, has caused much discussion. Some authorities think that Vicente y Bennazar had arrived at the conclusion that America existed as a distinct continent; others, that such an opinion was general among scientific circles in the 15th century; and still others, that he only intended to reproduce the lost Atlantis spoken of by Plato and the ancients.