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.
f f f
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.’
Pocket Map
California as an Island
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.
Chapter 7
What’s th
e Good of Mercator?
He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.
‘What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?’
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
‘They are merely conventional signs!
‘Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank:’
(So the crew would protest) ‘that he’s bought us the best –
A perfect and absolute blank!’
Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark
Well, what is the good of Mercator’s famous world map of 1569? It’s riddled with distortions and full of countries many times larger than they really are. And yet, astonishingly, it’s still essentially the map we use today. Countries have been added of course, and the shapes of coasts and borders have been corrected and politically adjusted, but the map that shaped the end of the Renaissance, saw in the Enlightenment and adorned Victorian classrooms remains the display of choice, right through to the latest Google Maps. It is the definitive icon of our world and to mess with it looks like terrorism. Not that people haven’t tried.
We aren’t looking at one map, of course, but a projection of the world – a template for all maps. Which is perhaps a little ironic for Gerardus Mercator, born in Flanders and working at the time in Duisburg, on the Rhine, was not himself a prodigious cartographer. When he laid out his famous world projection in 1569, at the age of fifty-seven, he had produced less than ten maps. But his new one was an undoubted wonder – mathematically meticulous and constructed with startling scale and ambition. It measured roughly 2 × 1.25 metres over eighteen printed sheets and must have stunned all who saw it.
The things that look wrong to us now – Greenland the size of Australia rather than a third of it, an Antarctic continent that bumps raggedly and indefinitely along the base – were not the strangest things then, for exact proportionate sizes were not yet known and the polar regions were but dismal myth. The strangest thing to his contemporaries was that Mercator, a man who had never been to sea (and would never go), would so effectively help the mariner plot a true course across the oceans after so many centuries of intuitive guesswork. The military would also have cause to be grateful to him: he helped them more accurately fire their cannons.
The Mercator map’s main attribute was technical: it provided a solution to a puzzle that had been troubling map-makers since the world was recognised as a sphere, which is to say back to Aristotle. The problem was: how does one represent the curved surface of the globe on a flat chart? The strict and well-established grid of latitude and longitude was all very well for theoretical coordinates, but the navigator pursuing a constant course sailed on an endless curve. Mercator had already displayed this curving course on his globes through his rings or ‘rhumb’ lines, and now he wanted to convert them to a map, and enable any navigator to swiftly locate his position and find his way to any destination.
Mercator had struggled with the problem for a while. You can too: take a nice furry tennis ball, draw a few shapes representing countries on it and slice it in two. Then make some more nicks on the cut sides and flatten it out. The countries will bulge up in the middle, and in order for the tennis ball map to lie flat the middle must be shrunk and the edges expanded. Now try to do this accurately, so that sailors bring their cargo home. Mercator’s quest was to find a way of doing so by mathematical formula.
In 1546 he wrote to a friend that the same journey by sea between two places would often be described in ships’ logs with very different latitudes. The maps were simply misleading: ‘I saw that all nautical charts … would not serve their purpose.’ He wasn’t the first one to see this, but the problem only really presented itself in the sixteenth century with the refinement of the compass and the classic voyages of discovery that tacked their way across new oceans. In the space of a few decades there were numerous new and often cranky projections of the world: the Azimuthal and the Azimuthal Equidistant, the Orthographic, Gnomic, Stereographic, Cordiform, Pseudocordiform, Globular, Trapezoidal and Oval.
Almost all of these projections depended on the graticule system of latitude and longitude, and most marked the Tropics and the Equator. Not all of them were aimed at seafarers; some were better suited to celestial or polar mapping, while others were illustrative and impressionistic. Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Durer had also had artistic shots at the problem.
Inevitably Ptolemy had already tackled the issue first – twice. He named one projection ‘inferior and easier’ and one ‘superior and more troublesome’. The former, his by now classical grid system, was naturally limited: in the first projection, for example, his latitude began at his equator (pitched at 16˙25° south to 63° north), while longitude, extending to a mere 180 degrees of the sphere, had a zero meridian beginning at the Blessed Isles, a land now regarded as either the Canary Islands or Cape Verde. Nonetheless, given the limitations posed by an inadequate supply of coordinates, the area covered by his projection is a remarkably good approximation of the true relationship between countries that we recognise today.
The way the world looks, then and now: Mercator’s 1569 classic, printed over eighteen sheets and demanding a double page of any book.
Mercator’s map drew heavily on Ptolemy’s gazetteer and refined it with recent discoveries, notably the outline of North America, which was fully realised, indeed almost plump. But his enduring breakthrough was his new Conformal projection, the method by which he manoeuvred his latitudinal rings to keep all the angles straight (the lines of latitude became further apart as they moved from the Equator). Mariners would thus be able to navigate across the map in straight lines, in keeping with the desired direction of their flickering compass.
Mercator used the blank space on the unexplored interior of North America and his empty oceans to justify his new device to all who might find his projection unfamiliar. He explained that he intended ‘to spread on a plane the surface of the sphere in such a way that the positions of places shall correspond on all sides with each other both in so far as true direction and distance are concerned, and as concerns correct longitudes and latitudes.’ In so doing, Mercator had created a grid which, in the words of his recent biographer Nicholas Crane, ‘would prove as timeless as the planetary theory of Copernicus. In seeking the essence of spatial truth, he had become the father of modern mapmaking.’
g g g
What has happened to Mercator’s projection since? It has inevitably been modified and improved.
This process began almost as soon as his world map was first published (most notably by Edward Wright, Edmund Halley and Johann Heinrich Lambert), and has continued up to Google – which, extraordinarily, found Mercator’s neat and symmetrical rectangles perfectly suited to the pixelated tiles that make up a digital map.
The projection’s resilience is even more remarkable when one considers the forces that have raged against it for the last four hundred and fifty years. In 1745 a Frenchman named César-François Cassini de Thury suggested using a cylindrical projection, sometimes shown as two hemispheres placed on top of each other with their centres at the poles. This showed a true scale along its central meridian and all places at right angles to it, but a varying level of distortion elsewhere. A more radical transformation was proposed by the Scottish astronomer James Gall at a meeting in Glasgow in 1855. Gall highlighted the essential fault with the Mercator projection – the shapes of the land masses were vaguely right, but their sizes were wrong. Applying his new ‘stereographic cylindrical’ theory first to the constellations and then to earth, he found a way of flattening the earth to a more compact scale, while also decreasing some of Mercator’s distortions (although introducing others).
Without due acknowl
edgement, many of the attributes of Gall’s work were picked up by the German Arno Peters in the mid-1970s and turned into a hot political quarrel that has still not entirely subsided. The argument was relatively simple: because of its high-latitude distortions, the Mercator map over-emphasised the size and significance of the developed world at the expense of the under-developed (which tended to be closer to the Equator). Peters’ cylindrical projection (now generally known as the Gall-Peters projection) was therefore put forward as both an anatomically and politically correct alternative, and even though its claims were not novel (and it was often compared to a washing line on which countries had been hung out to dry), its alternative to the ‘cartographic imperialism’ and ‘Euro-centric ethnic bias’ of Mercator’s map took on a voguish momentum.
The screenwriter Aaron Sorkin summarised it caustically in an episode of The West Wing in 2001, a scene in which the Press Secretary C.J. Cregg and Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman attend a briefing by members of the fictional Organisation of Cartographers for Social Equality. The OCSE were pushing for the President to ‘aggressively’ support legislation that would make it mandatory for every school to use Peters rather than Mercator. ‘Are you saying the map is wrong?’ Cregg asks. ‘Oh dear yes,’ the OCSE representative replies as the slideshow behind him displays same-size images of Africa and Greenland. ‘Would it blow your mind if I told you that in reality Africa is fourteen times larger?’
On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does Page 9