Page 192 - Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands

192 from Italy to the Canary Islands

a) Pescio is the first Italian to challenge the thesis that Bartolomeo Pareto’s
cartography of 1455 is the first map showing the Canary Islands; the in-
cipit of the short chapter shows how this map came from the “Portolano
Mediceo” (Medicis’s Portolan Chart) of 1351, made by an anonymous
Genoese, and since the 1351 portolan chart reports Lanzarote with an
outstretched Genoese flag, he concludes that the discovery had been
made a century earlier than previously thought.
b) In conclusion of the aforementioned six pages, Pescio quotes the Nor-
man knight Jean de Béthencourt, who in 1402 obtained lordship over
the island where he landed and where some unspecified shipmates al-
legedly found “un vieux chastel que Lancelot Maloisel avait jadis fait
faire a ce que l’on dit”, that is, an old castle - because it must have been
already several decades old - that this knight knew very well had been
built by “Maloisel”; as a result, Pescio concludes that Lanzarotto must
have lived there for years before returning to Genoa in 1330.

4) Sixteen years after Pescio, a fourth and last Italian author brought forth
original elements never before mentioned by Italian sources.
We are speaking of the excellent work by Rinaldo Caddeo, Le Navi-
gazioni Atlantiche di Alvise da Cà da Mosto [The Atlantic Navigations of
Alvise da Cà da Mosto], published by Alpes, Milan 1928.
The book itself is not overly long but is packed with new elements,
since, in Chapter II - “La scoperta degli arcipelaghi atlantici nei secoli
XIII e XIV” [The discovery of the Atlantic archipelagos in the 13 and 14
th
th
centuries], there are five pages devoted to Malocello (from p. 53 to p. 57),
which we summarize below.
a) Lanzarotto would not have landed in Lanzarote before 1310 (in support
of this dating, Caddeo quotes D’Avezac, who dates it back to 1275; Co-
dine, who also states the same date; Desimomi, “late thirteenth to early
fourteenth century”; and Kunstmann, between 1346 and 1351).
b) Lanzarotto Malocello was supposedly a native of Varazze, because
Caddeo reports a coeval letter of reply by the then Podestà of Varazze
A. Laiolo, who writes: “to Varazze goes the honour of being the cradle
of so fearless a sailor”.
c) Caddeo relates a passage by de la Roncière (Histoire de la Marine
Française, Paris 1914, Vol. III, p. 104) where it is stated that Lanzarot-
to’s descendants moved to France as captains of galleys in 1338, and
changed their name to “Maloisel”.