* But the Mercator Atlas did become popular fifteen years later. Following the death of Mercator’s son, the Dutch cartographer Jodocus Hondius bought the family’s copperplate engravings, added almost forty maps of his own (including new interpretations of Africa and America), and the new volume went through twenty-nine popular editions and translations in as many years.

The New World shapes up nicely in Ortelius’s ‘Theatre of the World’, an atlas featuring 228 exquisite and detailed plates.

* But we have also lost something. The “G” in “Gerry” was hard; we have long since learnt to mispronounce it.