Page 212 - Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands

212 from Italy to the Canary Islands

Foreign historiographical sources

a) FRANCOPHONE SOURCES

n the previous chapter, we discussed the Italian sources that speak
of Lanzarotto Malocello. We are now going to examine foreign
sources and especially French ones, since it is from France that we
can recover more precise information on our personage thanks to the work
of Charles de la Roncière, former president of the French Navy Academy
and (honorary) Chief Curator of the National Library of France.
The late Professor Charles de la Roncière wrote several times on the
subject; a first time incidenter tantum while discussing various schools of
medieval cartography (Revue d’Histoire économique et social Vol. XLV -
1967- No. 1 - p. 7 ff) and a second time in his own earlier study of 1958
(when he was also a member of the Academy of Colonial Sciences) ti-
tled la scoperta della terra [The discovery of Earth] published by SAIE,
Turin, which on p. 109 states that the geographer El Idrisi identified the
Canary Islands with the Fortunate Isles or Islands of the Blessed, although
he still thought of them as cloaked in an aura of legend, as the Arab geog-
rapher wrote that one of the islands was depopulated due to a multitude of
snakes, that another had a big dragon that had killed Alexander the Great
there, and yet another had “monstrous birds armed with rapacious beaks”
(superstitious sailors had probably spotted ocean albatrosses, whose wing-
span is three meters, along with frigate birds or Atlantic puffins, birds with
considerable beaks).
According to de la Roncière, Lanzarotto landed on the island in 1312,
and built a castle there where he resided for twenty years until the Guanxì
natives revolted and forced him to abandon the island and the castle. The
castle was re-used by the two Normans de Béthencourt and de la Salle
from 1402 until 1418, when Spain acquired the Canary Islands as their
domain.
The website http://canaries.ifrance.com titled “The discovery of the
Canaries” tells us that in 1630, a piece of work with an impossibly long ti-
tle appeared in Rouen, “Le Canarien, o storia della prima scoperta e con-
quista delle Canarie svolta nell’anno mille quattrocentodue dal Missire
Jean Bethemcourt, ciambellano del re Carlo VI. Scritta al tempo stesso da
F. Pierre Boutier e Jean Le Terrier prete, domestici del suddetto Signore e