In the middle of the fifteenth century Jacobus Angelus, a Florentine scholar, was wandering around Constantinople’s manuscript dealers, looking for early versions of Homer to translate from Greek into Latin. But instead he found something rather more valuable – a work that would once again change the way we looked at the world. Ptolemy’s Geographia was suddenly back on the map.
Translated by Angelus, the first printed copy of Ptolemy’s book appeared, without maps, in Vicenza in 1475. But it was an edition published in Bologna two years later that swiftly became the most sought after and influential publication of its day. The reason? Of its sixty-one leaves, twenty-six were engraved maps, making it the first atlas of the ancient world to be printed in the modern one.
There is evidence that Ptolemy’s work had been circulating in the Arab world since the eighth century. But in fifteenth-century Italy it was a different story. Geographia was regarded as a revelation and, when visualised with woodblocks or copper-plate engravings and then coloured, a thing of beauty. The Ptolemy maps were also augmented for the first time with intricate cartouches, typeset place names and adorned with red-cheeked heavenly cherubs blowing gales from the edges. It was the rediscovery of the world in all its complex and strict alignment, and although the projection was to change (and the geography expand), the recreated Ptolomaic worldview at the height of the Italian Renaissance set a template that we still recognise when we look at a map today. It was, finally, definably where we live.
The rediscovery of Geographia signalled a golden age of map making. The new editions of the Ptolemy atlas – vividly instructional and genuinely exciting – established the novel concept of cartography as both art and science. They also triggered the first craze for collectors, with maps and globes becoming expressions of wealth and influence.
But why had it taken so long for maps – particularly world maps – to be considered important again in Europe? Perhaps it was serendipity, a timely alignment of the burgeoning printing industry, sturdier ships for travel and trade creating demand for updated maps, and a new banking and merchant class for finance. Intellectual reasons, too: a less fearful religious worldview created a quest for knowledge that for centuries had been considered irrelevant to a life of modest Christian duty.
Claudius Ptolemy – icon of Renaissance cartography – depicted on the 1507 Waldseemüller map.
Maps were no longer just things for cathedrals, shrines and palaces. Indeed, the Church’s last great medieval cartographic hurrah had occurred with the completion of the Fra Mauro map in Venice in 1459. It is difficult to imagine two more contrasting cultural artefacts within such a short period (merely two decades apart) than Mauro’s hand-coloured parchment and the modern printed updated editions of Ptolemy from the 1470s. It was as if the entire world had been modernised overnight by a combination of old mathematical geography and new technology.
But just as the Italian wealthy began to pore over their Ptolemys in crisp new printings, a thought probably dawned: they no longer actually lived in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Soon, Ptolemy editions were being supplemented by modern maps reflecting discoveries since 150 BC. The finest of these was printed in Ulm in 1482 by one Johannes Schnitzer of Armsheim. The first great German contribution to cartography, it featured five new woodblock maps and was the first printed world map to show Greenland. But there was a bigger issue to contend with. Europe stood at the dawn of the Age of Discovery, the age of great navigators eager to open up the world. To Bartolomeu Dias, John Cabot, Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Hernán Cortés, the components of Ptolemy’s map, if not its temperament, would shortly appear distinctly limited. Not least when a new and unexpected continent drifted into view.
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We cannot be sure precisely which maps accompanied Christopher Columbus on his four celebrated trans-Atlantic voyages between 1492 and 1504, but it would be fair to suggest he had a recent printing of Ptolemy, the Travels of Marco Polo and a letter of guidance from Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, the Florentine physician and astronomer who decades earlier had suggested to the King of Portugal that a journey to the riches of Asia might be attained far more easily by sailing westward rather than around the base of Africa. Columbus had presented this ‘great idea’ as his own, along with Toscanelli’s greatly underestimated measurements of the globe, which explains not only how he persuaded the Spanish court to sponsor his voyages, but how he confused China and Japan with the Bahamas.
Columbus’s sailings are familiar – as, too, his striking miscalculations. Following Toscanelli, he argued that the journey from Lisbon to Japan would be only 2,400 nautical miles rather than about 10,000, and the kingdom of Cathay would appear as a huge glittering bauble soon after. But we should remember that he was working from a system of ‘dead reckoning’, navigating by a nervous combination of compass and stars, making exact measurement impossible.*
When Columbus eventually set sail from the southern Spanish port of Palos de la Frontera on Friday 3 August 1492, he had spent a decade trying to convince European courts of the worth of his voyage. The Portuguese king had rejected his plans when Dias had rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, believing the desired route to the east had already been settled. Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand required much persuading before finally consenting, against the advice of a Royal Council which argued that Columbus had got his sums wrong and his demands were too high. He was eventually allowed governance of any lands he discovered and a cut, passed down to his family, of the value of the natural treasures he found.
He sailed with three ships and about ninety men, and it wasn’t long before the onset of disillusion. Japan failed to appear as anticipated, and Columbus was forced to calm a mutiny when his crew reasoned that they had been duped. After varying winds and a journey far longer than expected (about 150 miles a day on some days, 25 on others), land was sighted on 11/12 October, and Columbus set foot on a small island in the Bahamas called Guanahani, which he renamed San Salvador (Holy Saviour). He assumed he had reached Asia and called the local Taino tribe ‘Indians’.
He spent a few days visiting nearby islands and the north coast of Cuba, which he initially took to be China. He then rounded Hispaniola, so-named because it reminded Columbus of Spain, and after a storm wrecked one of his ships he set down thirty men at La Navidad, a Haitian bay. It was the first acknowledged European settlement in the Americas.
Columbus’s longer second voyage drew him deeper into the Bahamas in 1494, where he still thought he was on the eastern shores of Asia. Then on 4th August 1498, on his third voyage, Columbus and his crew became the first Europeans to set foot on mainland South America, setting down at the Paria Peninsula of what is now Venezuela.
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The first map to show Columbus’s discoveries is less familiar than his own story. In 1500, his Spanish-Basque navigator Juan de la Cosa drew something that should have made him one of the most famous and enduring cartographers in history; that it didn’t work out like that was due to the fact that his work was lost for more than three hundred years, only to be rediscovered in Paris in 1832.*
The beginnings of the New World as Juan de la Cosa remembers the voyages of Columbus.
Measuring 99cm by 177cm, dotted with coloured inks, de la Cosa’s lost map combines the naive wonder of the New World with symbols from the Middle Ages. There are castles and enthroned monarchs in tents; three wise kings are trotting through Asia; the compass rose shows a nativity scene. It may now be found under glass in the naval museum at Madrid, where it tells one important story above all others – the solid land barrier blocking a smooth western route to the Orient.
It is assembled from several pieces of parchment, and you need to walk around it to view all the text and drawings. The old world looks reasonably accurate: Britain and Ireland are clearly recognisable; Africa has mountain ranges and an unusual absence of animals; while the description on the map of Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India in 1498 makes it newly accessible. The New World is drawn from personal sea charts and memory, as Juan de la Cosa sailed with Columbus as his master pilot on the Santa Maria in 1492 and 1494, and subsequently on other Castilian voyages.
The map is part of a specific cartographic tradition – the portolan manuscript sea chart. Portolans are as old as the European mariner’s magnetic compass, and for about two centuries the two depended on each other for the growth and safe passage of Mediterranean trade. From about 1300, navigators used maps of straight but criss-crossing lines (known as ‘rhumb’ lines) to plot their way through open water and along coasts, each line fanning out from up to thirty-two compass points (the name derives from the Italian portolano, relating to ports or harbours). The lines didn’t represent direct routes in the way a road map can, but more of a safety net for increasingly adventurous sailors; they marked a way back to dry land the way a silken thread may once have guided mythical heroes.
Juan de la Cosa’s portolan was one of the last of the breed, soon to be replaced by printed maps representing a more accurate projection of the world (the rhumb lines did not take the earth’s curvature into account, and so would be accurate only over short distances). His map was unusual in portraying the whole world rather than a particular trading area or coastal route, and as such has several compasses, each with its own directional markings. But this was less of a map to be taken on a voyage than one announcing great news and important discoveries, not least the landfall off the North American coast of Labrador and Newfoundland by John Cabot, clearly defined on the map by flags and text: Mar descubierta por los Ingleses. (‘Ownership’ and ‘discovery’ are onerous words, of course, considering the islands in question are already occupied by an indigenous population.)
A portolan sea chart with rhumb lines plotting the African coast, probably drawn in Genoa around 1492.
The new finds in the Bahamas are shown on a slightly larger scale: the archipelago of Guanahani, the settlement of La Navidad, the town of Isabella on Haiti. Martinique and Guadeloupe are grouped together as The Cannibal Islands, a practice witnessed by both Columbus and de la Cosa. To the extreme west, at the map’s narrowest point, is a trailing remnant of Christian map-iconography – Saint Christopher carrying a staff, symbolising Columbus bringing Christianity to new lands. Where the sea ends at the west of the map there is a large arc of green, presumably a bountiful but unidentified landmass; had de la Cosa identified it, he would have almost certainly mislabelled it Cathay (China).
Which is exactly what Giovanni Contarini did six years later, when his cone-shaped world map was the first to include the New World and the first to mis-identify it (the mis-identification became all the rage for a short while, as his map was reproduced in an edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia published in Rome). Contarini placed Japan (Zipangu) between Cuba and Cathay, while another huge white unexplained landmass beneath it, larger than Africa, went by the name of Terra S Crucis (Land of the Holy Cross).
But a year after that, the world changed forever: the word ‘America’ appeared on a map for the first time. Too bad that the man after whom it was named, Amerigo Vespucci, didn’t actually have much to do with the continent’s ‘discovery’.
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In 2003, the Library of Congress completed the purchase of an artifact that it had been pursuing for a century. Known as the Waldseemüller map, after its principal draughtsman, it consists of twelve woodblocks, each showing a different section of the world, roughly 8ft by 4ft when pieced together. Perhaps a thousand were printed at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but only one known copy survives. After protracted negotiations with its German owners, a sum of $10 million – the highest sum ever paid for a single map – was agreed for its transfer to Washington DC.
Those who view the Waldseemüller map in its hushed and low-lit environment beneath glass in the capital’s Thomas Jefferson Building swiftly come to regard it as money well spent, for it is certainly one of the most arresting and historically significant maps in existence. Like the Hereford Mappa Mundi, one may never tire of looking at it. Even if one may never fully understand it.
The map was made in 1507. Its creator knew it might baffle, and so unfamiliar were some of his revelations about the world that he inscribed a request for the patient indulgence of his viewing public; it was a request, in fact, not to be laughed at. The map included a new continent in the western hemisphere. But from a modern perspective the discovery of America is far from the strangest thing about it. The big conundrum is why he didn’t call the new continent Columbus.
The facts of the map are limited. It was drawn up in the north-eastern French town of St Dié and its principal draughtsman was the German cleric Martin Waldseemüller, possibly with assistance from his colleagues at the Gymnasium Vosagense, an intellectual circle that met to discuss theology and geography. The map was part of the Cosmographiae Introductio by Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, a publication which also included a much smaller world map cut into gores for a small globe, an introduction to geography and geometry, and an account of travels in the New World.
The knowledge portrayed on the map is far more detailed than anything that had preceded it. The map broadly follows one of Ptolemy’s projections but it shows the latest coastal news from Africa and India. Waldseemüller drew upon many sources and recent maps, almost certainly including the globe that his fellow German Martin Behaim constructed in 1492, just a few weeks before Columbus first set sail. Behaim, however, would have been astonished by Waldseemüller’s depiction of a large ocean stretching uninterrupted to the coast of Asia, evidently the Pacific. This was six years before Vasco Nunez de Balboa first described it, and fifteen years before Magellan’s first circumnavigation of the world in 1522 confirmed that it was there.
How could Waldseemüller possibly have known of it? A cartographer’s ghostly intuition? Or was there, perhaps, another map, containing news of other explorations, that has since been lost to us?
Waldseemüller’s other great revelation, his new western hemisphere, was depicted on three vertical panels on the left side of his map. We vaguely recognise the shapes, and we may forgive his depiction of a clear waterway between North and South America, rather than an isthmus. But we are still struck by the lonely presence, in the bottom left-hand corner, of a word that the world was previously unfamiliar with: ‘AMERICA’.
It appears over land we would now regard as central South America, and in a box of Latin text beneath it there is an explanation. The land is something ‘of which the ancients make no mention’ and its inclusion here is based on ‘true and precise geographical knowledge’. Intriguingly, the text box is rather larger than the type that fills it, suggesting there may have been plans for a more detailed description that never materialised.
America was named after Amerigo Vespucci, a skilled but minor Florentine navigator with a background in finance; for a while he worked for a bank in Seville that provided some of the funds for the early voyages of Christopher Columbus. Vespucci and Columbus became friends, and it is likely that Columbus fired Vespucci’s passion for exploration. But only one of them set sail in 1497 to land on the coast of Venezuela.
The twelve panels of the majestic Waldseemüller map – all the better for an elongated America (far left). The figures at the top are Ptolemy and Amerigo Vespucci.
Between 1495, when he loses his job at his bank, and 1499, when he is seen aboard a Spanish ship bound for the coast of South America, we have no record of Vespucci’s whereabouts. On that trip, which set off more than a year after Columbus landed on the Paria Peninsula, he was under the command of the Spanish conquistador Alonso de Ojeda (the crew also included Juan de la Cosa), and it may have been Ojeda who recommended Vespucci for further voyages to the coast of Brazil. He ended his days in what may be called cartographic administration, providing sea charts for many Spanish voyages along the South American coasts. When he died aged 60 in 1512, leaving his impoverished widow to apply for financial assistance from the state, Amerigo Vespucci (or Americus Vesputius, as he was sometimes known) was probably unaware that yet another version of his name would render him immortal.
How did this come to be? The anomaly appears to have arisen from the wide circulation of two printed letters, at least one of which had come to the attention of Martin Waldseemüller in northern France by the time he drew his map in 1507. The first, the copy of a four-page letter apparently written by Vespucci, was published in Florence in 1503 and described a voyage to the coast of South America in the summer of 1501. The voyage was not as significant as its reporting: Vespucci’s letter popularised the phrase ‘New World’, and it was the first to describe such an appealing and abundant coastline, ‘a more temperate and pleasant climate than in any other region known to us’.
Vespucci’s second letter, written in 1504 to a childhood friend who had risen to become the head of the Florentine government, described four voyages over thirty-two pages. The second and third trips took place between 1499 and 1502 and ventured to a similar stretch of coast described in his first letter. The fourth trip, from 1503 to 1504, is unlikely to have taken place at all, as the records show Vespucci was stationed on dry land in Spain. But it is the first trip that has caused most controversy. The letter claims that Vespucci landed on the South American continent a year before Columbus.
Waldseemüller’s label: a new continent takes shape – and name.
In his book The Mismapping of America, the forensic cartographic historian Seymour Schwartz has no qualms in calling this voyage ‘a fraud’ and one that ‘totally misrepresented the fact that the voyage … took place in 1499, one year after Columbus.’ But we are uncertain as to who perpetrated the fraud – or downright forgery of the letters – or why.
How can we be sure they were forgeries? Schwartz has several planks of evidence. Between 1500 and (probably) 1504, Vespucci wrote three letters whose authenticity has never been in doubt, and in one he clearly describes landing at the Paria Peninsula a year after Columbus. Schwartz also asserts that, throughout his life, Alonso de Ojeda always supported the primacy claims of Columbus over Vespucci. Further evidence comes from a trial that took place in 1516 brought by the heirs of Columbus against the Treasury of Spain (though famous, Columbus did not leave a fortune). During the trial, none of the hundred witnesses disputed the fact that Columbus was the first to set foot on South American soil.
Amerigo Vespucci depicted on Waldseemüller’s map, beside the new western hemisphere.
All of which makes Waldseemüller’s misjudgement the more curious. Vespucci is honoured with a portrait at the top of the map, where he is shown opposite the only other figure, Ptolemy. There are two images of globes here, too: Ptolemy sits beside the older known eastern hemisphere, while Vespucci sits beside the new western one. Vespucci is also included in the map’s title: Universalis cosmographia secunda Ptholemei traditionem et Americi Vespucci aliorum que lustrationes (‘A drawing of the whole earth following the tradition of Ptolemy and the travels of Amerigo Vespucci and others). Christopher Columbus is certainly one of the ‘others’, but Waldseemüller justifies his naming of the country he ‘discovered’ in unapologetic terms within the written introduction to the map. ‘Inasmuch as both Europe and Asia received their names from women, I see no reason why anyone should justly object to calling this part Amerige, i.e. the land of Amerigo, or America, after Amerigo, its discoverer, a man of great ability.’
A few years later there is some evidence that Waldseemüller regretted his choice. In 1513 he produced his first edition of Ptolemy’s Atlas with new maps in Strasbourg, and on the page showing the New World, South America is labelled ‘Terra Incognita’. But there is also an inscription that translates as ‘The lands and adjacent islands were discovered by Columbus sent by authority of the King of Castile.’ This time it was Vespucci who went unnamed. Then, three years later, when Waldseemüller published a new twelve-sheet world map called the Carta Marina, the two get equal billing. Both are mentioned in the text, although South America now has two new names that credit neither: ‘TERRA NOVA’ and ‘TERRA PAPAGALLI’ (The Land of Parrots).*
But it was too late. The name America had already begun to appear on other maps, including influential mass-produced works by Peter Apian and Oronce Fine. And then forever more.
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The misnaming of America has caused both alarm and amusement for five hundred years. In the seventeenth century, the important Scottish cartographer John Ogilby speculated that the prime reason Vespuccio took preference over Columbus ‘by a lucky hit’ was due to ‘the gingle of his Name Americk with Africk’. Yet as a coda to the wayward naming of things, consider this story about the conquistador Hernán Cortés.
Cortés has a significant place in map history, having made the first printed map to show the Gulf of Mexico, the first dated map to name Florida, and the first plan of an American city, a place he named Temixtitan (on the site of the present Mexico City). But the map story that endures about Cortés is his naming of another place.
In 1519, about to set foot in Mexico, Cortés invited some natives to join him for a conversation aboard his ship, and asked them for the name of the place he was about to pillage for its gold. One man replied, ‘Ma c’ubah than’, which Cortés and his men heard as Yucatan, and named it thus on his map. Just over 450 years later, experts in Mayan dialects examined the tale (which may in any case be apocryphal) and found that ‘Ma c’ubah than’ actually means ‘I do not understand you.’
Before The Beach Boys, before Hollywood, before even the Gold Rush, California was known for being distinct from the rest of America. In fact, it was an island.
We are now sure – because we have seen it on maps – that California is firmly attached to Oregon, Arizona and Nevada. Even south of San Diego, when it eventually becomes the Mexican state of Baja California, it is firmly hitched to the mainland. But in 1622, something untoward happened. After eighty-one years officially attached to a huge landmass, California drifted free. It wasn’t a radical act of political will, nor a single mistake (a slip of an engraver, perhaps), but a sustained act of cartographic misjudgement. Stranger still, the error continued to appear on maps long after navigators had tried to sail entirely around it and – with what must have been a sense of utter bafflement – failed.
The name California first appeared on a map in 1541. It was drawn as part of Mexico by Domingo del Castillo – a pilot on an expedition by Hernando de Álarcón – and it is shown as a peninsula and labelled. Its first appearance on a printed map occurred in 1562, when the Spanish pilot and instrument maker Diego Gutierrez again wrote its name at the tip of a peninsula, a very minor detail on a busy and very beautiful engraving of the New World. The map, the largest then made of the region at 107cm by 104cm, may have been engraved after Gutierrez’s death by Hieronymus Cock, an artist who clearly took great delight in imaginative trappings: huge ships and legends populate its seas, with Poseidon driving horses on a seaworthy chariot, a huge gorilla-type creature breaking the waves while it dines on a fish, and terrible goings-on in Brazil, where the natives are seen slaughtering human flesh, curing it from a tree, and then roasting it.
California subsequently appeared attached to the mainland for sixty years. And then off it floated into the Pacific, where it remained a cartographic island for more than two centuries.
Its first known insular appearance occurred in 1622, on an inset on a title page of a Spanish volume entitled Historia General. Two years later it was drifting free, bounded by the Mar Vermeio and Mar Del Zur on a Dutch map by Abraham Goos. But it received its most prominent currency on a London map of 1625 entitled ‘The North Part of America’. This accompanied an article about the search for the Northwest Passage by the mathematician Henry Briggs. He supplemented the great untracked northerly spaces towards the Arctic with text describing the wonders of his map, ‘Conteyning Newfoundland, new Eng/land, Virginia, Florida, new Spaine … and upon ye West the large and goodly lland/of California.’ On the eastern seaboard both Plymouth and C Codd are placed in Massachusetts, but not yet Boston (and not yet Manhattan: the first mention on a printed map, by Joannes de Laet, occurred five years later, when it was named as Manhattes.)
The misconception persisted for decades. It was the seventeenth century’s forerunner to a mistake on Wikipedia – doomed to be repeated in a thousand school essays until a bright spark noticed it and dared to make amends. Compiling a paper for the California Map Society in 1995, Glen McLaughlin and Nancy H. Mayo catalogued 249 separate maps (not including world maps) which cast the Golden State adrift. Their names carry bold assertions, with no wiggle room: ‘A New and Most Exact map of America’ claimed one, while another promised ‘America drawn from the latest and best Observations.’ Between 1650 and 1657, the French historian Nicolas Sanson published several maps which showed California as an island, and their translations into Dutch and German ensured that they superseded Briggs as the most influential mythmakers for half a century. But they also promoted newer, truer discoveries, including the first cartographic depiction of all five Great Lakes.
California – drifting happily away as an island on a Dutch map from 1650.
Even when new maps were published showing California attached to the mainland (the most significant accompanying the personal accounts of Jesuit Friar Eusebio Kino, in 1706), the island kept on appearing. In the end, though, it was killed off by a royal decree issued by Ferdinand VII of Spain in 1747, which denied the possibility of this Northwest Passage with the reasonably clear statement: ‘California is not an Island.’ Yet news travelled slowly. California appeared as an island on a map made in Japan as late as 1865.
And how did it all begin? The cartographical point zero has been tracked to a Carmelite friar named Antonio de la Acensión who sailed with Sebastian Vizcaino along the West Coast in 1602–3 and kept a journal. Two decades later he is believed to have mapped his trip on paper, which featured California as an island nation. The map was sent to Spain, but the ship on which it travelled was captured by the Dutch, and it ended its journey in Amsterdam. In 1622, Henry Briggs wrote of seeing this map of California in London. And shortly afterwards, the map drawn from the one ‘taken by Hollanders’ was set in copper and began its journey through the world.
