In 1688 Father Vincenzo Coronelli of the order of Friars Minor, cosmographer of the Most Serene Republic of Venice, distributed to his subscribers map sheets cut to be fitted together to form the surfaces of globes over a meter in diameter, the largest printed globes yet made and triumphs of the art and science of the seventeenth-century cartographer. The coastlines of the continents were laid out with impressive accuracy, except for the east coast of Australia, both coasts of the Pacific north of Japan and California, parts of the American and Siberian Arctic, and Antarctica; these were either left blank or sketched in to represent some mariner’s vague report or guess. The interiors of the continents reflected Jesuit knowledge of the valleys of the Yangtze, the St. Lawrence, and the Paraguay and recent European explorations up the Senegal and the Zambesi and down the Mississippi. Only in Siberia and Central Asia did the Coronelli globe not display the best European knowledge; for those regions the great Amsterdam merchant-politician Nicolaas Witsen knew more, derived from a century of Dutch trade with Russia, but he had made little of his knowledge public.
Coronelli filled some of the oceanic blanks on his globe with fine small pictures of the European wooden ships that were the global ligaments of 1688. The world of wooden ships included the Spanish galleons that carried silver across the Atlantic and the Pacific and the complex commerce in slaves, gold, cloth, guns, and much more that linked West Africa with Europe and the Americas. Europeans crossing the oceans were building small settler societies in the New World and on the fringes of Asia and Africa and were confronting an undreamed-of variety of peoples, from the great civilizations of Asia to the comfortable agricultural villages of North American Indians to the physically but not psychically meager circumstances of the Aborigines of northwestern Australia.
Father Coronelli himself displayed a confident mixture of faith and empiricism. An influential member of the Franciscan order, one of the intellectual and spiritual glories of the Middle Ages, he was a proud citizen and official of Venice. Venice still was a great Mediterranean power but was watching leadership in European politics, commerce, and culture shift steadily from Italy to France, the Netherlands, and now England. He had gained some of his geographic knowledge on a long stay in France, where he built the largest globe yet seen, over thirteen feet in diameter, for Louis XIV. He stayed in the good graces of his patrons and rulers in Venice by mapping their conquests in the eastern Mediterranean.
In 1684 Father Coronelli founded the world’s first geographic society, the Cosmographic Academy of the Argonauts. Among the patrons of the academy were the doge of Venice and Jan III Sobieski, king of Poland and savior of Vienna from the Turks. Branches were established in Milan and Paris. Subscribers included illustrious savants all over Europe; even Father Ferdinand Verbiest, serving as astronomer at the far-off court of Beijing, was enrolled, presumably by a Jesuit colleague visiting Europe. For 3 lire per month subscribers received six plates every month for a great atlas Father Coronelli was producing piece by piece. The triangular globe sheets were also sold by subscription, for 504 lire.
Father Coronelli worked ceaselessly to cultivate his relations with all the princes of Europe, to obtain every new bit of geographic information, and to improve his cartographic and printing workshops in the Franciscan convent in Venice. In one portrait, and in a delightful visual joke in which he peers out around the corner of a cartouche on the 1688 globe, he has a bit of a gleam in his eye and a certain far from ascetic roundness in his face. In the brown robe, rope belt, and sandals of the order founded by Saint Francis of Assisi, he fitted his works of cartography and promotion around the Franciscan schedule of devotions. Many days he must have taken a gondola down a side waterway and out onto the busy Grand Canal, to the gloomy velvet-hung chambers of the Palace of the Doges—still today redolent of the implacably thorough and conscientious government of the Venetian Republic—to consult with the city authorities. Occasionally he must have had to go a bit farther, to the great shipyard called the Arsenal, with its assembly-line stages for the building of war galleys. He was at home in this world of power; indeed, his work depended on the patronage of the powerful. And his maps, which recorded the advance of explorers who were the vanguard of European power, symbolically asserted the power to organize and ultimately to control. Spiritual heir of Saint Francis and anticipator of the geographic societies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rooted in unchanging verities of God and Man but open to every new discovery by Man on God’s earth, he and his globes open up to us many facets of the world of 1688, including seas known and unknown, shores surveyed and others not yet reached.
The intensity of commerce connecting Europe, Africa, and America made the South Atlantic one of the best-known and most regularly crossed stretches of open ocean in 1688. It was almost two hundred years since the first projections westward of Spanish and Portuguese power, anti-Muslim, militantly Catholic. No one could have imagined at the outset how those small beginnings would lead to the westward flow of willing and unwilling emigrants and the eastward flow of treasure, the building up in the Americas of new capital cities, new worlds of commerce, power, and plunder. Predators followed as well as settlers. Both predators and settlers had long since found their way across Panama and around South America into the vastness of the Pacific and even across it. On all these new shores they found strange peoples, some of whom, like the miners of Potosí, had their lives transformed by the coming of the Europeans, while others, like the Caddo of modern Texas and the Bardi of Australia, would preserve their ways of life intact for many more years.