At the top of the map is a ship anchored near a fish, with two people sitting on its back. The accompanying inscription tells a tale from the life of the Irish Saint Brandon, a charming medieval legend. Another immediately striking feature of the map is the number of islands, most of them legendary, and some of them adorned with parrots. With regard to the Hapgood hypotheses, the Caribbean portion of the Piri Reis map is particularly important. This part of the Piri Reis map is thus not based on maps from the ancient civilization postulated by Hapgood.
Further evidence is the fact that the map of the Caribbean area is so wildly inaccurate.
And so it should be on a Columbian map, for Columbus thought Cuba was part of the mainland of Asia, and drew it accordingly. The delineation of the coast of Brazil on the Piri Reis map is much more accurate than that of the Caribbean. The Nicolo de Canerio map, now in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and the Waldseemuller chart both show the east coast of South America, though schematically drawn, and a chain of mountains adorned with trees. All of these are related to each other and, almost without question, ultimately derive from a de Canerio-derived map. The map by Johannes de Stobnicza, in particular, could have been available to Piri Reis, for it was printed in Cracow, Poland, in an edition of Ptolemy, in 1512, the year before the Piri Reis map was drawn.