The author was not above bending—and sometimes breaking—the truth to suit his purposes. On pp. 208-09 he has the following to say about Dr. Frederick Cook:

During the “Belgica” expedition, Cook stayed comfortably at Harburton [sic, Harberton] while the rest of the ship's company went south, picking him up on their return.

In fact, Cook went to Antarctica with the Belgica and was credited by Roald Amundsen and other crew members with saving their lives when the ship became trapped in the ice. He did indeed visit Harberton before and after Antarctica, but certainly did not stay there while the others went south. As a close friend of the Bridges family, Barclay presumably knew very well the actual facts of the matter. Cook's former friend and later rival the explorer Robert E. Peary, the New York Times and others launched a smear campaign against Cook, and it's tempting to surmise that Barclay lied about the facts as part of that campaign.

The editor of Monumenta Cartographica (Dr. Frederik Caspar Wieder, Librarian of the University of Leiden) has interpreted a “PERISCH” legend on one of the globe gores as follows:

“If this word is divided into three parts, we get the meaning of it: PER I SCH, the I indicating Joannes, the SCH Schöner, i. e. per I. Schöner— by Johannes Schöner.”

However, the legend is in fact “PERISCII”—a word to describe “Those who live within a polar circle, whose shadows, during some summer days, will move entirely round, falling toward every point of the compass.” (Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary). The word appears directly below the Antarctic circle on the globe gore. In The Mapping of the World, editor R. A. Skelton writes:

“The craftsman-artist could well be from the school of Schöner, … The gores are tentatively dated c. 1535; they could be earlier but are unlikely to be as early as 1523-24 as stated by Wieder.”

Waldseemüller's map seems to favor Portugal over Spain. As noted by Peter Dickson (p. 28), “… there is no sign of the demarcation line established by the Treaty of Tordesillas … [and] … the placement of that little Portuguese flag near the southern end of what we know today as Argentina was quite brazen in legal terms.”

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