The Map Thief (8 page)

Mapmaking hadn’t totally atrophied in Western Europe during the
Middle Ages. World maps, or
mappaemundi,
were mostly diagrammatical in nature, consisting of a large
O
with a large
T
drawn inside separating the three parts of the world (Europe, Asia, and Africa). These
T-O
maps were, of course, useless for navigation—serving as more of a way to understand cosmology than a practical tool for getting from place to place. But one group of people actually needed maps they could use: sailors. Starting in the 1300s, traders plying the Mediterranean began constructing nautical charts called “portolans,” covering small areas of the coast, with virtually no detail of the interior. After a French crusader brought the compass from the Middle East, mapmakers employed two other features as well: strategically placed “wind roses” pointing out the cardinal directions, and spiderwebs of “rhumb lines” showing the bearing needed to sail from one to another.

In the fourteenth century, regional centers consolidated the best mapmakers in Pisa, Genoa, Sicily, Majorca, and Barcelona. Their maps included broader and broader areas, including some attempts at world maps. To fill the blanks in information, they relied on Christian myths and travelers’ tales. The kingdoms of the Antichrist, Gog and Magog, were located in Far Eastern Asia, just north of the realm of Cathay, the fabulously wealthy kingdom of Kublai Khan mentioned in the writings of Marco Polo. In the eastern ocean were the island of Zipangu (Japan) and the wealthy islands of the Indies, which Marco Polo had also mentioned. Beyond that was located the earthly paradise of the Garden of Eden, the source for the great rivers of the world.

Another important feature was the kingdom of
Prester John, a Christian king who had set up shop somewhere in East Africa and was supposed to unite with the kings of Europe to battle the Antichrist during the “end times.” Not content to wait until Armaggedon, European kings made seeking out Prester John a priority. The only problem was a gauntlet of Mongols and Turks that prevented Christian caravans from passing. It was the
Portuguese who first searched for a way around the impasse by attempting to sail around Africa instead. Starting in the early 1400s the Portuguese king’s third son, Henry the Navigator, began mounting expeditions down the African coast, funding them with gold and slaves acquired in the journeys. In 1488, explorer Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope. A decade later, Vasco da Gama kept going, sailing across the sea to the coast of India, which he reached in 1498.

Even as mapmakers were adding incrementally to the knowledge of the coastlines, bigger developments were afoot in Germany that changed the world in more significant ways. An inventor in Strasbourg named Johannes Gutenberg was working on a secretive new technique to cut down on the laborious process of hand-copying manuscripts. His
printing press, the world’s first, worked by pressing a sheet of paper down on woodblock letters arranged on a form. Gutenberg started small, with handbills and calendars, but after he produced his first Bible in the 1450s, Gutenberg presses began spreading throughout Europe. Humanists began printing their own editions of ancient works, including Ptolemy’s
Geographia.

The first edition of Ptolemy’s work, without maps, came out in Venice in 1475. Within two years, an edition was produced in Bologna, maps and all. That edition made use of new copper engraving techniques, which allowed for more precise detail than the clunky woodblock method. Other editions followed, in Rome in 1478 and 1490; Florence in 1482; and Ulm, Germany, in 1482 and 1486. Beginning with the Florence edition, mapmakers began doing something revolutionary: using the latest information from portolan charts to produce modern maps along with reproducing the ancient ones. The Ulm edition went further,
altering Ptolemy’s maps themselves with new discoveries in Scandinavia. First timidly, then boldy, other mapmakers began redrawing Ptolemy’s maps to reflect current learning.

The enormous map on the wall of the Beinecke Library by
Henricus Martellus is a good example (
Figure C
). Dating from 1489 or 1490, it re-creates much of Ptolemy’s speculative geography, including a giant island of Ceylon larger than the Indian subcontinent from which it dangles. But it also updates Ptolemy’s coastlines in Europe to create a more accurate picture of the known world at the time. Most striking, however, is its depiction of Africa, which incorporates Dias’s discoveries to extend the southern coast of the continent through the bottom border of the map, surrounding it with water for the first time. Martellus also added a few speculations of his own, increasing the length of Asia by seven thousand miles and including a sweeping promontory known as the “dragon’s tail” that made the trip east to the Indies seem even longer than it was. At the same time, he shrunk the distance between Portugal and Zipangu to less than half its actual eleven thousand miles, making the trip west across the Atlantic seem easy by comparison.

This is the world as it was known on the eve of Columbus’s first voyage, in 1492. At the time, no learned person actually believed the world was flat. Nearly a hundred years of Ptolemy had put an end to that misconception. But now as these maps showed the distance around the world growing shorter, a group of Renaissance scholars began speculating that it might be possible to sail west from Europe to all the riches of the Indies, the lost kingdom of Prester John, and even the Garden of Eden itself. If not for these maps,
Christopher Columbus never would have set sail with the confidence that he could cross the ocean. His voyage, in turn, forever changed mapmaking in the process.

—

IN THE SUMMER OF 1901,
a Jesuit professor poking around the garret of Wolfegg Castle in the German Alps came across a heavy book with a red beechwood cover and hogskin backing. Looking inside, he made one of the greatest cartographic rediscoveries of all time—the lost map of the world made by Martin Waldseemüller in 1507. Printed on twelve sheets, the map was one of the first to incorporate the new discoveries of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, and the first one to show the New World as its own continent, separate from Asia (
Figure 4
). But what made it so important to history was a single word printed on the southern continent of the Western Hemisphere: “America” (
Figure 5
).

FIGURE 5
MARTIN WALDSEEMÜLLER. “UNIVERSALIS COSMOGRAPHIA” (DETAIL). ST. DIE, 1507.

Waldseemüller’s map was the first map to use the word, and it was more than a decade before it next appeared. The map stayed at Wolfegg for more than a century before the US government purchased it for $10 million—the highest price ever paid for a map. Now it is permanently displayed at the Library of Congress as the “birth certificate of America,” an accurate name since Waldseemüller’s map is responsible more than any other document for the name of the continent today. And the fact that it is not called Columbia can be summed up in one idea: Sex sells better than God.

Before he made history, Columbus was a Genoan merchant captain based in Portugal, carrying cargo up and down the Atlantic coast. When the printing press took off in Europe, however, he began reading Marco Polo’s accounts of gold mines, perfumes, and ivory to be found in the Cathay and made it his mission to see them. He pushed Ptolemy and Martellus to the extremes to estimate a distance of twenty-four hundred
miles between the Canary Islands and Japan—a quarter of the actual distance. Much of the history is well-known. When his appeals to John II of Portugal were unsuccessful, he turned to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, who agreed to finance his expedition in exchange for sovereignty over any lands he discovered.

A month out to sea, a crewman on the Niña sighted an island, which Columbus naturally assumed must be part of the Indies, a group of islands Marco Polo had described as being in the Sea of Cathay. For the next six months, he traipsed around one island after another, asking every native he met about the location of the gold mines of the Great Khan. Of course, what he’d really found were the Caribbean islands of Cuba and Hispaniola. On three later expeditions, he explored southward to reach the northern coast of Venezuela by 1498, the same year Vasco da Gama reached India.

Eventually, frustrated by his failure to find gold and riches, Columbus began conceiving a more and more grandiose view of himself and his expeditions in order to justify his voyages—eventually believing he had found nothing less than the mythical Garden of Eden. He spread his theories upon his return to Europe in a work called the
Book of Prophecies
, adopting the name “Christ-bearer” and drawing upon biblical passages to prove his voyage had been foretold as a signal for the end of history. All along, he vehemently disputed any hint that he had failed to reach the Orient, making his crew members sign a document attesting that Cuba was part of mainland Asia.

At the same time Columbus was captaining vessels in Portugal, an Italian named
Amerigo Vespucci was working as a merchant in Seville, Spain, speculating on goods throughout Europe. He set sail with one of the later expeditions financed by Ferdinand and Isabella—or rather said he set sail, since historians debate whether he actually left land, much less commanded two ships. What seems beyond dispute is that he wrote several letters about his expeditions detailing these new lands. Originally, hitting the coast of South America, he claimed to have discovered the “dragon’s tail” on the edge of Asia, but in later letters he wrote that he sailed much farther south than any land existing on current maps—pointing to the existence of a new southern continent.

Much more astonishing, however, were Vespucci’s descriptions of the natives of these lands, which are particularly explicit: “
Everyone of both sexes goes about naked, covering no part of their bodies, and just as they issued from their mothers’ wombs,” he said. “
The women,” he continues, “although they go naked and are exceedingly lustful, still have rather shapely and clean bodies, and are not as revolting as one might think.” He adds tantalizingly: “
I have deemed it best (in the name of decency) to pass over in silence their many arts to gratify their insatiable lust.”

Such details and intimations ensured a hearty reception for the letters back in Europe, where an anonymous printer turned them into a pamphlet distributed throughout the continent. One who read them was a young German humanist named Martin Waldseemüller, who was embarking upon a new edition of Ptolemy’s
Geographia
along with a Greek and Latin scholar named Matthias Ringmann. Obtaining an early copy of Vespucci’s letters, they realized excitedly that here was “a fourth part
of the world” to join the traditional medieval triumvirate of Africa, Europe, and Asia. At the same time, they acquired charts smuggled out of Portugal that showed what the new continent might look like. With this new information, Waldseemüller and Ringmann scrapped their Ptolemy project in favor of a new publication,
Introduction to Cosmology,
which included a map detailing these newly discovered lands. Cobbled together from sources including Ptolemy, Martellus, and the Portuguese charts, the map squeezed a new continent in the far southwest corner. In the accompanying text, Ringmann explained that since all the other continents were named for women, they gave this continent a feminized name, adapting Amerigo to coin “America.”

It took only a few years for Waldseemüller to doubt their decision. After Ringmann died in 1511, his partner issued several new maps in which America was no longer surrounded by water, and no longer even called America, but instead labeled “Terra Incognita.” Perhaps he felt he’d jumped to conclusions too quickly, or had begun to feel that Vespucci had exaggerated his claims. By that time, however, it was too late. With a thousand copies printed, the map had taken on a life of its own, spawning multiple imitators over the next decade and spreading the name “America” around Europe. Nothing cemented it more, however, than its inclusion on maps of the most successful mapmaker of his time, Gerard Mercator.

—

LOOKING AT MAPS
from the sixteenth century, it’s amazing how quickly the details are filled in. The world maps made by German cartographers in the first quarter of the century are grossly misshapen, with a distorted Africa, remnants of the “dragon’s tail” in Asia, and barely a suggestion of North and South America. By the time Gerard Mercator published his famous map of the world in 1569, however, Europe, Asia, and Africa have assumed their familiar shapes, and even North and South America have acquired roughly their proper outlines. In 1578, English chronicler George Best wrote with astonishment, “
Within the memory of man, within these fourscore years, there hath been more new countries and regions discovered than in five thousand years before.”

Around this time, the mapmaking center of Europe shifted again, from Germany to the
Low Countries—and there it stayed for a hundred
years. From roughly 1570 to 1670, the Netherlands and Belgium ushered in a golden age of mapmaking that coincides roughly with its golden age of painting and still stands as the pinnacle of cartographic beauty (if not accuracy). The shift mirrored political changes at the time: At the start of the century, the region was a soup of gerrymandered counties and duchies sandwiched between France and the Holy Roman Empire. A string of marriages by the ambitious Burgundian dukes, however, gradually unified the area under the Habsburg family. One of them, Philip the Handsome, married Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter Joanna the Mad to inherit the throne of Spain and most of southern Italy.