Theater of the World

by Thomas Reinertsen Berg

  During the 1500s, the production and sale of nautical charts, pilot books and maritime atlases developed into an independent branch of cartography, and as the waters of northern Europe started to equal trade regions such as the Mediterranean in importance, these areas were also more thoroughly mapped. The first pilot books were handwritten texts combining descriptions of navigable waterways, ports and the tides with simple maps and drawings of landmarks along the coasts, and were created by experienced seamen, rather than cartographers.

  The first printed pilot book, De kaert vader zee (Nautical Chart), was published by Jan Seuerszoon in 1532, and provided detailed descriptions of the North Sea coast, France, Spain and the south coast of England, as well as information about how to sail to Norway, Gdansk, Gotland, Riga and Tallinn.

  Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer set a new standard when he published his Spieghel der zeevaerdt (Mariner’s Mirror) in 1584. This was a two-volume work in the same format as Ortelius’s Theatrum, also printed by Christopher Plantin in Antwerp, and a clear indication that the Dutch were setting sail for ever more distant horizons. In the preface, Waghenaer explains that he himself sailed from the Spanish city of Cádiz to the western coast of Norway. One route map covers the area from the North Cape to the Canary Islands, and from Iceland to the Gulf of Finland, and in Waghenaer’s subsequent publication, Thresoor der Zeevaert (Treasure of Navigation), the maps also covered the Norwegian coast along the entire county of Finnmark all the way to Arkhangelsk. A notable feature of the maps of Norway created by the Dutch was the denoting of so many lumber mills–‘zaghe’ and ‘zaghen’. For the Dutch, Norway was first and foremost a place to purchase timber for shipbuilding, and the reason they called the Oslofjord ‘Zoenwater’–the town of Son in Akershus was an important port of export for timber.

  Not wanting to miss out, Willem Blaeu jumped on the pilot book bandwagon and published his Het licht der zeevaert (The Light of Navigation) in 1608–the work that represented his breakthrough as a cartographer. The book followed the same template as that used by Waghenaer–a rectangular format featuring a number of chapters of text along with outline drawings of the coastlines. The book was innovative in that Blaeu used the astronomy he had learned from Brahe to make the navigation more accurate, but it also shamelessly copied Waghenaer’s content. This didn’t stop Blaeu from protesting loudly when he himself became the victim of plagiarism, however–or from requesting that the authorities protect him from the vultures who made pirated copies of his maps as soon as the pilot book was published. He could provide for his family honestly and by the grace of God, he claimed–if only certain people would stop copying his maps before the ink had even dried.

  Blaeu was not the only cartographer to complain–plagiarism flourished in the 1500s and 1600s, and a cartographer might easily accuse another of stealing a valuable detail he had recently received from a sailor who had just returned home. Some even went as far as intentionally including minor geographical errors–a non-existent city or lake–in order to find out whether their maps were being copied by others. Cartographers might collaborate, only to later get into a heated disagreement where insults and court cases flew thick and fast, before agreeing to collaborate on new projects once again. Cartographers are human too, after all.

  In 1618, cartographer Johannes Janssonius moved into the property next door to Blaeu. The two were already acquainted, having fallen out in 1611 when Janssonius published a world map suspiciously similar to one Blaeu had created three years earlier, and ending up as neighbours only intensified what would become a long and active hostility towards one another. Just two years later, when the copyright on The Light of Navigation expired, Janssonius printed his own version, under the same title and using the same title page, not even bothering to remove Blaeu’s name. Blaeu responded by publishing a new and better book: Zeespiegel (Sea Mirror).

  Janssonius was married to Elisabeth, the daughter of Jodocus Hondius, a Flemish cartographer who had fled Flanders in 1584 to escape the religious conflicts. Hondius had established himself in Amsterdam in 1593, where four years later he would draw a map of the Nordic region that would come to play an important role in Danish-Norwegian history.

  VOYAGE TO THE NORTH | One day in 1597, King Christian IV of Denmark was given Hondius’s map by his advisors, and saw that Hondius had drawn Sweden as extending all the way to the Varanger Peninsula with access to the sea in the north. Northern Norway was cut in two–Vardøhus and its environs were isolated from the rest of the kingdom of Denmark-Norway.

  The map made the king see the seriousness of the situation: Swedish and Russian expansion posed a threat to the old hereditary areas. As one of the king’s advisors wrote: ‘Not so long ago, Kola belonged to Norway, but due to the oversights of the Danish and Norwegian commanders, the Russians have been able to take possession of the area.’ The English, Dutch, Scots and French also sailed through Danish-Norwegian waters–‘per fretum nostrum Norvagicum’ (‘our Norwegian straits’)–to undertake trading activities on the Kola peninsula, and most failed to pay the toll demanded by the king in Vardø.

  Christian IV started investigations into what his ‘evil neighbour’–Sweden–was doing to gain access to the sea and then decided to personally inspire his subjects. In April 1599, the royal ship set sail from Copenhagen along with seven others, all setting their course for the far north. Flying his colours to show his supremacy, the king sailed all the way to Kola–the voyage a demonstration of power affirming Denmark-Norway’s right to the northern regions.

  The Swedes, however, did not surrender so easily. For King Charles IX of Sweden, the mapping of Finnmark was of primary interest, and so in 1603 he tasked civil servant Andreas Bureus with drawing a map of the Nordic countries. Nine years later, Bureus submitted to King Gustav II Adolph of Sweden his Lapponia map–a prelude to his large map of the Nordic region that was yet to be finished. Bureus took measurements and made observations as he travelled around on public business, gathering information about the other Nordic countries–and here Scavenius pops up again. At some point, Bureus obtained a copy of Scavenius’s map of the Diocese of Stavanger. Where Bureus obtained the map is unclear, but like Scavenius, Johannes Rudbeckius, the bishop of Västerås in Sweden, drew a map of his diocese, and may have received a map from his Norwegian colleague, which he then allowed Bureus to copy. Regardless, the reproduction of the Diocese of Stavanger on Bureus’s map completed in 1626–Orbis arctoi nova et accurata delineatio (New and Accurate Section of the Northern World)–is clearly based on Scavenius’s map.

  Mercator’s famous map of the world is actually a nautical chart intended to make it easier to navigate between the continents. Note the map of the North Pole at the bottom left. Mercator added to this because he knew that his projection contorted the geography of the polar region beyond comprehension. Various versions of his projection continue to be used today.

  The king of Sweden was extremely pleased with the map, which allocated Sweden far larger areas in the north than the country actually possessed. He decided that the map should be printed and sent to all the regents of Europe, and Bureus’s map thereby became the template for the cartographic representation of the Nordic region throughout the 1600s. Jodocus Hondius the Younger, brother-in-law to Johannes Janssonius, got hold of a copy in the year it was published, and his map of Europe from 1632 shows that Sweden had increasing access to northern waters.

  Like the Blaeu brothers, Jodocus Hondius the Younger was, as his name suggests, the second generation in the cartographic dynasty founded by his father. The Hondius family dominated the Dutch market for atlases–the foundations for this had been laid back in 1604, when Hondius the Elder paid ‘a significant sum’ for Mercator’s copper plates at auction. Just two years later he had published a new, updated collection of Mercator’s maps, supplementing the book with a drawing of himself and Mercator working on a pair of globes–despite the fact that by this time Mercator had been dead for over a decade.

  ATLAS | Mercator�
�s life’s work had been to create maps of all the countries of the world, but Mercator had never managed to complete the task he’d set for himself. In the years subsequent to his meeting Ortelius in 1554, he had missed out on a professorship, completed a rigorous land survey of Lorraine that had almost killed him, engraved maps for others and started planning a work about the history of the entire world. But in order to provide a good overview of this history, Mercator also had to give a good overview of the world, and therefore sat down to draw a new world map. In 1569 he published his Nova et aucta orbis terrae descriptio ad usum navigantium emendate accommodata (New and More Complete Representation of the Terrestrial Globe Properly Adapted for Use in Navigation)–a world map drawn using Mercator’s groundbreaking projection, which has continued to shape the west’s view of itself right up to the present day.

  As its name suggests, the map was primarily created to simplify navigation. Mariners were struggling to follow a straight course across the seas using nautical charts that featured lines of latitude and longitude that twisted and turned to simulate the spherical shape of the Earth, and Mercator’s solution was to straighten them out. Instead of adding the lines of longitude curving from pole to pole, he inserted them as straight lines beside each other, and made all the lines of latitude equal in length instead of increasingly shorter circles towards the poles. This meant that the directions of north–south and west–east became straight lines that were much easier to navigate by–even sailors wishing to travel diagonally, to the north-west or south-east, could use a ruler to find the course from port to port.

  The projection, however, had an inherent error–it resulted in the areas along the equator being represented correctly, while the areas to the north and south expanded as the lines of longitude, which should meet at the poles, were kept apart. This prevented the poles from ever meeting, and caused the lines of longitude to extend into infinity.

  To compensate for this, Mercator’s map is the first map of the world to feature a separate map with the North Pole at its centre down in the bottom left corner, beside which Mercator wrote: ‘As our chart cannot be extended as far as the pole, for the degrees of latitude would finally attain infinity, and as we yet have a considerable portion at the pole itself to represent, we have deemed it necessary to repeat here the extremes of our representation and to join thereto the parts remaining to be represented as far as the pole.’

  Mercator’s polar map has a fanciful geography, in which the North Pole is symmetrically surrounded by four large islands. In a letter, Mercator wrote that his depiction of the area was based on the eyewitness account of an English monk who visited the northern regions in the year 1360. The book the monk wrote about his travels, Inventio fortunata (The Discovery of Fortunata), was given to the king of England as a gift, but has since been lost. Mercator learned of the book from another book, Itinerarium by Jacobus Cnoyen, in which the monk’s tale is retold by a priest from the northern regions who visited King Magnus in Bergen in 1364. Mercator wrote:

  The priest […] related to the King of Norway that in 1360 AD, there came to these Northern Islands an English Minorite from Oxford who was a good astronomer, etc. Leaving the rest of the party who had come to the Islands, he journeyed further through the whole of the North, etc., and he put into writing all the wonders of those islands, and he gave to the King of England a book which he called in Latin Inventio Fortunatae. This book began at the last climate, that is to say in Latitude 54°N; and it continued all the way to the North Pole.

  Inventio fortunata provided a somewhat motley description of the northern regions. According to the monk, northern Norway bordered on a mountain range on four islands comprising a ring around the North Pole at 78 degrees north. Between the islands, broad rivers flowed into a polar sea towards an enormous maelstrom. At the Pole itself was a huge, black mountain of magnetic stone. The island closest to Europe, which bordered on Norway, was inhabited by people no more than four feet tall. Mercator wrote that the monk had clearly only been able to complete such a journey with the help of magic.

  Today, most historians agree that even if the monk did not travel all the way to the North Pole, it is fairly certain that he made it to the area around southern and western Greenland, and travelled on to Canada, since he described a heavily forested landscape. The description of all the islands and the strong tidal currents is an accurate description of what is today known as Baffin Bay. The Magnetic North Pole is also situated in this area. The priest who met the monk and then travelled on to meet King Magnus was probably Ivar Bårdsson, religious leader at the bishop’s palace at Gardar, Greenland, for several years. We know that he visited Bergen in the year 1364.

  Mercator, who was otherwise scientifically inclined, used Cnoyen’s presentation of Bårdsson’s account of what the English monk had seen 200 years earlier to create a map of the northern regions. The map follows the description closely, with a few exceptions. Mercator did not connect Norway to one of the North Pole’s islands because he knew that it was possible to sail past Vardøhus and on to Russia–this is already evident on his map of Europe from 1554.

  In the midst of all this erroneous polar geography, however, is a mystery: the depiction of Greenland is strikingly correct. When creating a world map thirty years earlier, Mercator had followed the tradition stemming from Claudius Claussøn Swart, and presented Greenland as a peninsula linking to a large North Pole continent. But on his map from 1569, Greenland is a separate island–something Mercator simply couldn’t have known, because then–as now–the northern part of the country was packed in ice. Nor had any seamen at this time sailed far enough north to find themselves in the immediate vicinity. In 1924, the Danish polar explorer Lauge Koch wrote that up until 1852, 78 degrees and 20 minutes north marked the limit of the Europeans’ geographical knowledge of Greenland. But there is no denying that Mercator’s map represents Greenland more accurately than later maps from the 1800s.

  Mercator never stated the source of his information, which may explain why later cartographers ignored it. Perhaps they thought that it was simply impossible for him to have produced an accurate map of Greenland, and that what he had drawn was a product of his imagination.

  Most cartographers therefore continued to draw Greenland as part of the northern mainland. As late as 1865, August Petermann, one of the leading geographers of his time, claimed that Greenland was attached to Siberia. Only in 1891, when American polar explorer Robert Peary and Norwegian Eivind Astrup set out on an expedition to once and for all discover whether Greenland was an island or a peninsula, and from Navy Cliff saw the Independence Fjord stretching out into the Wandel Sea, was it established that Greenland is in fact an island. Mercator’s Greenland from 1569 remains one of cartography’s unsolved mysteries.

  Mercator’s new world map was not an immediate success–at least not at sea, possibly because it was over two metres wide. It was therefore not until 1599 that anyone used Mercator’s projection to create a new map, and another fifty years would pass before anyone used it to produce a nautical atlas. The map was simply too unusual for most seamen, and they didn’t like the enlarged land masses–but they eventually realised that this was the price that had to be paid for a map that more easily set them on the right course.

  As a 26-year-old, Mercator had vowed to create maps of all the world’s countries and regions, but forty years later had only managed to create maps of Flanders and Europe. In 1578, he wrote that the project–which he now looked forward to getting fully under way–demanded 100 maps. Time was running out–the 66-year-old noted that his eyes were no longer as sharp as they had once been.

  In the autumn of 1585, Mercator arrived at the book fair in Frankfurt with fifty-one maps of France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany. Expectations were high–everyone was looking forward to seeing the start of Mercator’s masterpiece–but unfortunately the disappointment was equally great. For a public who were used to maps adorned with sailing ships, compass roses, extravagant carto
uches, colour, mythical creatures and painstakingly crafted frames, Mercator’s were grey and boring, featuring few or none of the usual embellishments. Mercator was ahead of his time. The new maps were influenced by his idea for a ‘nieuwe geographie’–a new geography characterised by simplicity, objectivity and sober-mindedness–an idea much more common today than it was 400 years ago.

  But Mercator made no concessions to his audience at the next opportunity. His maps of the Balkans, Greece and Italy, published four years later, featured even fewer decorations–only one monster and two ships across a total of twenty-one maps.

  Mercator also wrote a preface to his great work, stating ‘I have set this man Atlas, so notable for his erudition, humaneness, and wisdom as a model for my imitation.’ Atlas was a Greek god who, after fighting for the Titans in the war waged and won by the Olympians, was condemned to hold up the sky on his shoulders at the western edge of the world. Both the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and the Atlantic Ocean are named after him. In later narratives, Atlas became a wise king of Mauretania, someone who knew all there was to know about the night sky, and it was to honour ‘Atlas, King of Mauritania, a learned philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer’ that Mercator titled his work Atlas, sive cosmographicæ meditationes de fabrica mundi et fabricati figura (Atlas, or Cosmographical Meditations Upon the Creation of the Universe, and the Universe as Created). The title page features Atlas, bearded and clad in flowing robes, studying two globes–one representing the Earth, and one representing the night sky.