For as much as you, Christopher Columbus, are going by our command, with some of our vessels and men, to discover and subdue some islands and Continent in the ocean, and it is hoped that by God’s assistance some of the said islands and Continent in the ocean will be discovered and conquered by your means and conduct, therefore it is but just and reasonable that since you expose yourself to such danger to serve us, you should be rewarded for it. And we being willing to honour and favour You for the reasons aforesaid; Our will is, that you, Christopher Columbus, after discovering and conquering the said islands and Continent in the said ocean, or any of them, shall be our Admiral of the said islands and Continent you so shall discover and conquer; and that you be our Admiral, Viceroy, and Governor in them and that for the future you may call and style yourself D [Don] Christopher Columbus and that your sons and successors in the said employment may call themselves Dons, Admirals, Viceroys and Governors of them; and that you may exercise the office of Admiral, with the charge of Viceroy and Governor of the said islands and Continent….
Given at Granada on the 30th of April in the year of our Lord 1492, I the Queen, I the King, by their Majesties Command, John Coloma, Secretary to the King and Queen.15
Columbus’s diaries show that he sailed with maps of the western Atlantic.16 The log entry for Wednesday, October, 4, 1492, when he was approaching the Caribbean,17 says this: “I should steer west south west to go there [that is, to reach the islands he is seeking] and in the spheres which I have seen and in the drawings of Mappae Mundi it is in this region.”18
Is there a map we can tie to Columbus before he set sail?
Marcel Destombes described two maps that he had studied in the Biblioteca Estense Universitaria now in Modena. I quote Arthur Davies’ description of Destombes’s discovery:
One was a chart of the Atlantic and bordering lands listed as CGA 5A. This map originally extended further north, west and south but had been cut so that it now extends from Normandy to Sierra Leone and eastwards to Naples and Tunis. Destombes concluded from [what Destombes calls] Rhumb lines that the map was designed to extend west as far as the legendary islands of Antilia and Satanaxia (Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe). He [Destombes] assigned his map without hesitation to Bartholomew Columbus on the basis of his excellent lettering and its Genoese style of cartography.19
In high excitement, Marcella and I set off for Modena. Dr. Aurelio Aghemo was most courteous and helpful and enabled me to have a photo of two versions20 of CGA5, a copy of which is reproduced in color insert 2. As may be seen, the two maps have been torn in half and the left halves, which could show the Americas, have been destroyed. We can say for sure this tear is deliberate, for the coast of West Africa down to Cape Blanco (21° N) is shown, as is the Gulf of Guinea farther south. The bit of coast between the two, that is, the coast along the “bulge” of Africa, is missing. Someone does not want people to know what was originally on the left-hand portion of those two maps. So what gives us a lead as to what the missing part once showed?
Clearly it showed the Atlantic—but how much of it and how far west? Did the map originally go as far west as Professor Destombes thought? Did it show the Americas, and if so, how much?
Professor Destombes used what he called rhumb lines to support his supposition. I initially tried a different approach by analyzing what was depicted on CGA5A, which from now we will call the Columbus map because of Bartholomew Columbus’s writing on it. The map has several distinctive features, not least a mass of names around the Bight of Benin, south of the “bulge” of Africa. My first step was to see if those names corresponded with the names on other maps drawn around 1480–1485, the most likely date of the Columbus map (Professor Davies indicates that Columbus had his map before 1492).
I quickly found that the Waldseemüller (1507) and the Columbus map shared common names in Guinea, from Rio de Lago to Capo di Monte, though the Columbus map showed more names and much more detail. I then reduced the Columbus map and the Waldseemüller to the same scale and cut out West Africa from the Columbus map, placing it on top of the Waldseemüller, so names common to both were in the same place. Finally I projected the rhumb lines from the Columbus map onto the Waldseemüller. Five sets terminated precisely and neatly on Cuba and South America from the Waldseemüller (using the Canaries as 0° W, as Waldseemüller did)—see color insert 2.
Destombes was quite right—the rhumb lines extended to Antilia and Satanazes and farther—to the Pacific coast of South America. It cannot be a coincidence that all the ends of the rhumb lines fall on a circle. In my submission, this is the evidence that the Columbus brothers had a map that showed the Americas. Columbus himself acknowledged in his logs that he had seen Caribbean islands on a world map. He was also contracted to become viceroy of land across the ocean. This hypothesis is further supported by Schöner’s 1515 copy of a globe, which shows the Americas, and accords precisely with Toscanelli’s description.
Moreover, as we will see in the next chapter, the Columbus map, Schöner’s globe, and the Waldseemüller are all derived from the same source.
Let’s turn now to Johannes Schöner, who must have been a recipient of the original globe because his drawing matches Toscanelli’s description. Schöner certainly could not have met Toscanelli or the Chinese ambassador. He was not born until January 16, 1477, in Karlsstadt, in what is now the German province of Thuringen. He attended school nearby at Erfurt. The area, as I know well, is a pleasant wooded countryside famous for its plums. It is about as far from the sea as is possible in Europe, with no nautical tradition whatsoever.
Johannes does not appear to have been a renowned scholar; he left school to study at the University of Erfurt but seems to have flunked his exams—he left with no degree. He was ordained a priest in 1515 and became a prebend, an apprentice, at the church of Saint Jacob Bamberg. He was punished for failing to celebrate mass and relegated to the small village of Kirchenbach, where he was detailed to officiate at early-morning mass.21 How, one may wonder, did this priest produce not only maps of South America and the Antarctic before Magellan set sail, but also elaborate star globes of the Southern Hemisphere?22
There are no prizes for guessing the obvious answer: he must have copied them. But from whom?
In January 1472, Toscanelli’s friend Regiomontanus had a printing press installed in Nuremberg, as earlier described. When Regiomontanus died in 1475, his press reverted to Bernard Walther, who had provided the finance for it. In a letter to a friend on July 4, 1471, Regiomontanus wrote:
Quite recently I have made observations in the city of Nuremberg…for I have chosen it as my permanent home not only on account of the availability of instruments, particularly the astronomical instruments on which the entire science is based, but also on account of the great ease of all sorts of communication with learned men living everywhere, since the place is regarded as the centre of Europe because of the journeys of the merchants.23
In 1495, Johannes Schöner also moved to Nuremberg, where he studied practical astronomy under the same Bernard Walther who had financed Regiomontanus and taken back his printing press. When Walther died, Schöner inherited Regiomontanus’s library and printing press as well as Regiomontanus’s nautical instruments, globes, and treatises; Schöner published Regiomontanus’s Tabula and his book on spherical triangles. All of these legacies are now in the Austrian National Library in Vienna.24
Regiomontanus had intended to publish his own world map but died before doing so.25 Schöner inherited this unpublished map and published it under his own name. Hence his 1515 and 1520 copies. After Magellan returned, Schöner published his 1523 globe, which he maintained did not improve upon his 1515 and 1520 (pre-Magellan) maps.26 The 1523 globe did, however, correct the width of the Pacific across which Magellan had by then (1523) sailed.
Finally, is there any corroborative evidence that Pope Eugenius IV or his successors obtained a world map showing the Americas before Columbus set sail for the Americas?
After Columb
us’s death, his family instituted legal proceedings against the Spanish monarchy, the Pleitos de Colón (Pleadings of Columbus). Evidence was given at these proceedings on behalf of Martín Alonso Pinzón, Columbus’s flag captain. Pinzón’s son stated that his father had seen a copy of a map of the Americas at the papal court in Rome and had based his own expedition to the Americas upon it.27 However, his father had decided to join Columbus’s expedition instead.
From Schöner, Magellan, Columbus, Regiomontanus, and Pinzón, we now have evidence corroborating the existence, noted by Toscanelli in his letters, of a world map showing the Americas. Toscanelli told the truth. He had met the Chinese ambassador, who had given him a globe or map showing the way to the Americas and around the world. We must now find the original that Toscanelli copied.
11
THE WORLD MAPS OF JOHANNES SCHÖNER, MARTIN WALDSEEMÜLLER, AND ADMIRAL ZHENG HE
In 1507 Johannes Schöner bound the different sheets of Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map together and placed them inside a cover. This is the set preserved at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Waldseemüller’s world map shows South America and the Pacific. The first question is, how did Waldseemüller know of the Americas and the Pacific before Magellan set sail? The second is, how did Schöner get a copy of Waldseemüller’s sheets in order to bind them?
Martin Waldseemüller was born at Wolfenweiler near Freiberg in 1475, two years before Schöner. His birthplace is about 250 miles from Schöner’s birthplace. Waldseemüller spent his working life as a canon at Saint-Dié. In 1487 he entered the University of Freiberg to study theology. There is no evidence that Waldseemüller was a particularly clever student or even that he obtained a degree. In 1514, as a clerk of the diocese of Constance, he applied for a canonry at Saint-Dié and obtained the post. He died there in 1522.
Waldseemüller had about a thousand copies of his 1507 map printed. In addition to the copy owned by the U.S. Library of Congress, a cutout set (ready to be made up into a globe) is owned by the James Ford Bell Library in Minneapolis. A third copy was acquired in 2003 by the well-known map dealer Charles Frodsham, from Christie’s auction house.
In the summer of 2004 I carefully examined Waldseemüller’s 1507 map. Its significance, of course, is that it showed the Pacific, South America, the Andes, and the Rocky Mountains before either Magellan set sail or Balboa “discovered” the Pacific. So it appeared someone had been in the Pacific before Magellan and had mapped 23,000 miles of American coastline.
On the map, the Americas look nothing like the continents; they appear more like an elongated snake. Waldseemüller had used the most extraordinary method to make his map.1 It was projected from a globe onto a flat piece of paper using a heart-shaped projection. As a consequence, a degree of longitude near the equator was some ten times what it was near the Poles and, conversely, a degree of latitude near the Poles was some ten times what it was near the equator. Even more curious, longitude scales varied from one part of the map to the other at the same latitude, and South Africa poked out of the bottom for no apparent reason at all. (See color insert 2 and the 1421 website for a picture of the map.)
For several months I tried to make sense of this. How could I convert what Waldseemüller had drawn into a map that we would all understand?
Then, at dawn on a lovely summer’s day, a heron arrived for his breakfast and perched very near the gazebo in which I was working. I watched him, admiring his patience as his neck craned over the New River, which runs at the back of our garden. After he pounced, his neck swelled. An electric shock went through my body, and it dawned on me that if I reversed Waldseemüller’s process—put back onto a globe what he had laid out on a flat piece of paper, and then photographed it—I might have a map in a form that would make sense to us today.
I rushed into the basement that serves as our 1421 offices and photocopied Waldseemüller’s map into black and white, using blue lines to emphasize longitude and red for latitude (see color insert 2). Then I went down the coast of South America and marked points a, b, c, and so on every ten degrees of longitude (yellow points). On a separate piece of paper I wrote the latitudes and longitudes of each yellow point. I repeated the process for the Pacific coast of South America and North America, then concluded with the Atlantic coast of North America. Next, I transposed these points a, b, c, and so on onto a globe, connecting the points. Then I photographed the globe (see color insert 2).
There on the globe was the world that Waldseemüller had originally copied: an extraordinary likeness of North and South America, which we would recognize today, with the correct landmass, shape, and position relative to Africa. Before Magellan set sail, Waldseemüller had produced a wonderful map of the Americas from a globe.
So how did this clerk in holy orders with no known knowledge of map collecting or cartography, working in what was then the landlocked backwater of Saint-Dié, manage to produce a globe with the first accurate description of the Americas?
Waldseemüller initially said he he got his information from Amerigo Vespucci. Assuming that Vespucci reached 45° S, and that Waldseemüller had received his reports, Waldseemüller could have obtained from him the information necessary to draw the Atlantic coast of South America. Vespucci was an excellent navigator and had Regiomotanus’s ephemeris tables, which enabled him to calculate latitude and longitude. Yet Vespucci never claimed to have reached the Pacific. He specifically told the Florentine ambassador that he had failed to find the passage that led from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the passage we now call the Strait of Magellan.
Waldseemüller’s map shows the Pacific, the Andes up to Ecuador, and then the Sierra Madre of Mexico and the Sierra Nevada of California. So for him to have credited Vespucci for his depiction of Pacific America (a credit he later withdrew) is nonsense. Waldseemüller must have copied his map—but from whose globe, and when?
There is a host of evidence suggesting that Waldseemüller got his information from the same source as Schöner.
First, Schöner’s globe of 1515 and the globe shown on Waldseemüller’s map of 1507 are the same.
Photographic Insert 1
Admiral Zheng He, a pioneer of global exploration, who was in great part responsible for this remarkable adventure.
The Liu Gang 1418 /1763 map—a tribute to Zheng He’s courageous voyages of discovery.
Bronze Chinese lion figure at the entrance to the Emperor’s Summer Palace, Beijing.
Visitors at the Summer Palace, Beijing, c. 1902.
A view of the magnificent Forbidden City, Beijing, whose construction flourished under the great emperors of the Ming dynasty.
A delicate piece of beautiful Ming porcelain, as traded around the world by the Treasure fleet.
A view of the Great Wall of China snaking along the rugged mountain ridge at Simatai.
A vast fleet of Chinese junks could carry a considerable amount more than a caravan of camels!
The fleet journeyed northward up the crystalline Red Sea waters, through to the bustling souks of Cairo, and beyond.
12
TOSCANELLI’S NEW ASTRONOMY
Relations between China and the West began long before 1434. The Catholic Encyclopedia presents a concise summary:
Some commentators have found China in this passage of Isaias (xlix, 12): “these from the land of Sinim.” Ptolomy divides Eastern Asia into the country of Sinae and Serice…with its chief city Sera. Strabo, Virgil, Horace, Pomponius Mela, Pliny, and Ammianus speak of the Seres, and they are mentioned by Florence among the nations which sent special embassies to Rome at the time of Augustus. The Chinese called the eastern part of the Roman Empire Ta Ts’in (Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor), Fu-lin during the Middle Ages. The monk Cosmos had a correct idea of the position of China (sixth century). The Byzantine writer, Theophylactis Simocatta (seventh century) gave an account of China under the name Taugas. There is a Chinese record of a Roman Embassy in A.D. 166.1
Tai Peng Wang kindly provided Chinese description
s of papal envoys.2 The ambassador who reached Florence in 1434 was by no means the first. According to Yu Lizi, Yuan China called the Papal States “the country of Farang” and the Papal States as a whole “Fulin” or “Farang.”3 The official Ming history states that diplomatic exchanges between the Papal States and Ming China began as early as 1371, when Hong Wu, Zhu Di’s father, assigned a foreigner from Fulin or Farang called Nei Kulan (Nicholas?) as the Chinese ambassador to the Papal States to inform the pope of the dynastic change in China. Later on, Hong Wu appointed a delegation led by Pula (Paul?), who brought gifts and tribute to Farang.
After 1371, diplomacy between China and Europe was a two-way street, with the Papal States and China exchanging ambassadors. Yan Congjian in volume 11 of the Shuyu Zhouzi Lu described the visit of the Chinese ambassador to the Papal States in the reign of Zhu Di.
Yan Congjian starts by commenting that Italy’s climate was rather cold, then continues:
Unlike China, the houses here are made of cement but without roof tiles. The people make wine with grapes. Their musical instruments include clarinet, violin, drum and so on. The King [the pope] wears red and yellow shirts. He wraps his head with golden thread woven silk. In March every year the Pope will go to the church to perform his Easter services. As a rule he will be sitting on a red-coloured carrier carried by men to the church. All his prominent ministers [cardinals] dress like the King [the pope] either in green or beige or pink or dark purple and wrap their heads. They ride horses when going out…. Minor offences are usually punished up to two hundred times. Capital offences, however, are punishable with death usually drowning the offenders in the sea. These [Papal] states are peace-loving. As is often the case when a minor dispute or rivalry arose, the disputing states only waged a war of words in the exchange of diplomatic despatches. But if there were a serious conflict erupted, they were prepared to go as far as war. They made gold and silver coinage as their monetary currencies. But unlike the Chinese coinage, which can be stringed as a unit to count, there are no holes in their coinage for such purpose. On the back of the money is the face of the king [the pope] bearing his title and name. The law forbids any monetary coinage made privately. The land of Fulin produces gold, silver, pearls, western cloth, horses, camels, olives, dates and grapes.4
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