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If true, then the small, unnamed island shown to the far north in the “Mundus Novus” portion of the egg-globe’s western hemisphere — a crude depiction of the “New World” as it was understood just a few years after the discovery voyages of Christopher Columbus, John Cabot and others — is the earliest image of Newfoundland or any other part of Canada on any surviving globe in the world.

Missinne told Postmedia News that the isolated land mass shown well above two Caribbean islands — “Isabel” (Cuba) and “Spagnolla” (Haiti/Dominican Republic) — “must be Newfoundland.” The claim, he said, is strengthened by the image of a west-bound ship off the island’s eastern shore, a scene that Missinne argued represents the vessel piloted by Portuguese explorer Gaspar Corte-Real “with full sail going west, trying to find new territories.”

Corte-Real is believed to have reached the shores of Newfoundland and Labrador in 1501, about four years after the Anglo-Italian Cabot, also known as Giovanni Caboto, first sailed to the same region during his history-making voyage aboard the Matthew.

Cabot is known to have created maps and a globe showing his Newfoundland discovery, according his entry in The Dictionary of Canadian Biography, but such artifacts have not survived.

In Missinne’s article, which touts the ostrich-egg artifact as the “earliest surviving globe showing the New World,” the Austria-based collector-researcher states that he “initiated research into the globe because I was skeptical about its date, origin, geography, and provenance.”