Another OCSE member then explains that Mercator’s Europe is drawn considerably larger than South America, whereas in reality South America’s 6.9m square miles is almost double Europe’s 3.8m square miles. Then there is Germany. Germany appears in the middle of the map, whereas in fact it should be in the northernmost quarter. ‘Wait,’ Josh Lyman says. ‘Relative size is one thing, but you’re telling me that Germany isn’t where we think it is?’
The Peters-Gall Projection: a ‘washing line’ of countries
‘Nothing’s where you think it is,’ the chief OCSE man says. He then clicks up the Peters Projection and the OCSE propose that the world map should be flipped so that the northern hemisphere is put on the bottom. A new slide shows what it will look like.
‘Yeah, but you can’t do that,’ C.J. Cregg reasons … ‘Because it’s freaking me out.’
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Peters died a year after the episode was broadcast, his projection ridiculed as much for the smug superiority of its proponents as for itself. In fact, the principal objections often centred on the fact that the supporters of Peters exaggerated both their claims and their outrage, perpetuating the myth that two thirds of Mercator’s map is dedicated to the northern hemisphere and only one third to the southern. And the Gall-Peters has its own distortions (particularly severe between 35° north and 35° south, and between 65° and the poles), rendering some African countries and Indonesia twice as long north-south as they really are. The Royal Geographical Society’s quarterly journal began its review of Arno Peters’ book The New Cartography (1983) thus: ‘Having read this book many times in German and English, I still marvel that the author, any author, could write such nonsense.’
Other projections have also found favour, including one produced by the American cartographer Arthur Robinson which combined elements of Mercator and Gall-Peters, and was adopted by the US map-making company Rand McNally. It first appeared at the height of the Cold War in the early 1960s, but argued against the perceived menace of the USSR by greatly reducing its surface size.
There are so many possible projections, each with their own particular political agenda and limitations, that there is a way of measuring their spatial prejudices as a chart, known as the Tissot Indicatrix of Distortion. This could take, say, the Winkel Tripel Projection of 1921 (yes, this is a real thing) and overlay it with a pattern of stretched circles to show the degree of corruption over any one area (a perfect circle showing true unity, an oval stretched north-south reflecting a north-south distortion).
Will one projection emerge victorious? It’s already happened. Mercator’s map casts its shadow over the digital world just as it did in the world of those navigators opening up new trade routes half a millennium ago, and the possibilities for its future manipulation are therefore limitless. It is the projection used not only by Google Maps, but also (with a spherical interpretation) by its rivals, Microsoft’s Bing and OpenStreetMap. Even in the virtual age it is the ocean-crossing of least resistance. Any alternative would have to be imposed centrally by a court bigger than the United Nations, whose logo, incidentally, is a projection of a globe centred on the Arctic Circle and wreathed in olive branches that first appeared twelve years after Mercator’s.
Yes indeed: the Postel Azimuthal Equidistant of 1581 still has its influential supporters.
Pocket Map
Keeping It Quiet: Drake’s Silver Voyage
When in 1580 Francis Drake returned triumphant from his unintentional circumnavigation of the world, Elizabeth I declared two things: her delight at the fact that his cargo had enabled her to pay off the national debt (she knighted him the following year); and her wish that Drake’s route to the world’s untapped riches remain secret by staying off the maps. Nervous of their necks if they disobeyed, the nation’s cartographers upheld her decree, at least on paper. When one of them finally broke cover after nine years, the map that emerged was intricate, accurate, and struck as a solid silver medallion to be worn around the neck.
There are nine known copies of the Silver Map of Drake’s Voyage, two of them in the British Museum, one in the Library of Congress. Eight of the medallions are almost identical, with a diameter of 69mm, and a small tang at the top, which can be pierced to take a chain. But only the Library of Congress medallion has a tiny oval addition on one side with details of its date, maker, and origination: Michael Mercator, 1589, London.
Michael Mercator was a grandson of Gerardus Mercator, and the world displayed on his Silver Map was drawn from various Dutch, Flemish and English sources. Significantly, it was based on his grandfather’s famous projection. But precisely how he obtained the details of Drake’s route (which he shows with a dotted line) is unclear. Several accounts of Drake’s great voyage were published shortly before the Silver Map was cast, most notably by the English geographer Richard Hakluyt, but any new discovery that appeared on a map was certainly not credited to Drake before 1589, the year after the defeat of the Armada.
How hard must it have been for Drake and his crew to keep the details of their circumnavigation concealed for nine years? Columbus had been under no such restraint in 1492, and nor was Juan Sebastian Elcano, who completed Magellan’s circumnavigation in 1522. Drake had only his riches, valued at some £1000, to console him.
The world around your neck: Drake’s silver medal, enlarged to show the impressive detail of his ragged circumnavigation.
Inevitably, secrecy spawns speculation. And no one speculated more than the two most famous map-makers of the age, Gerardus Mercator and Abraham Ortelius. Drake reached Plymouth at the end of September 1580, and only ten weeks later Mercator wrote to ‘Master Ortelius, the best of friends’ that ‘I am persuaded that there can be no reason for so carefully concealing the course followed during this voyage, nor for putting out differing accounts of the route taken and the areas visited, other than that they must have found very wealthy regions never yet discovered by Europeans …’ But he got it wrong: he assumed that Drake’s expedition ‘pretend[ed] they secured through plunder’ their ‘huge treasure in silver and precious stones’. But, in fact, that was precisely what had happened.
Mercator and Ortelius were intrigued not only by Drake’s haul but also by rumours of two sightings that, if true, would once again transform the look of the world. And these rumours were true: Drake and his men had landed in the upper parts of California (which he named Nova Albion), and sailed past the islands of Tierra del Fuego, which were thought previously to be part of the giant unmapped southern continent of Terra Australis.*
That all this appeared credited to Drake for the first time on a fancy piece of jewellery designed to be hung around the neck of privileged Elizabethans was remarkable in itself, but the medallion offered even more: it is without doubt the smallest map to document so much geographical significance on one side, and conceal so much ruthless piratical history on the other.
The map contains 110 place names. Europe includes the recognisable landmarks of Hibernia, Scotia, Moscouia and Gallia, while Africa boasts Aegypt, Maroco, Mozambique and Serra Lione. China and Japan are present without further detail. On the western side, North America shows both Nova Albion and Californea, while South America features Panama, Lima, Chili and Peru. Frisland still sits mythically in the Atlantic, while there are also the enticing Pacific possibilities of Cazones (Santa Domingo), I. d. los Reyes (possibly Christmas Island) and Infortunates Insules (conceivably Easter Island).
Drake’s route through this world was shown as a dotted line, already an established technique in the sixteenth century (Magellan and his crew, who predated Drake’s circumnavigation by sixty years, had their journey dotted on several globes and maps). In addition to the line, eight inscriptions provide an unexpectedly large amount of additional information about his voyage, including departure and arrival dates, the passage through the Strait of Magellan and the discovery of New Albion. But the map cannot show everything.
The historian Miller Christy published a study of the Silver Map
in 1900 and it became clear as he traced Drake’s route on the medallion that it relied almost entirely on opportunism. All sailors are reliant on fair winds, clear skies and suitable weather, but in the sixteenth century other obstacles were just as likely to throw out what passed for planning. Navigational instruments were unreliable; other explorers from other dominions wanted the same things you did and thus had to be engaged; and the maps beyond Europe were both incomplete and wrong. Drake’s passage was affected by all these factors. He left Plymouth on 13 December 1577 with five ships, gave Spain a wide berth to avoid detection, and struck the north-west coast of Africa a fortnight later. He reached the Cape Verde Islands, sailed down the coast of Brazil, and entered the Strait of Magellan in August; the medallion shows his newly named Elizabeth Island. But he was then forced south against his will by a two-month storm, which enabled him to recognise Tierra del Fuego as an archipelago and, beneath it, the latterly named Drake Passage, the strip of ocean connecting the Atlantic and Pacific (Drake did not sail through this notoriously stomach-churning passage himself).
The rest of Drake’s route depicted on the map was equally eventful. Two ships in his convoy foundered in storms (two others had already been broken up after crossing the Atlantic); then sailing northward up the coast of South America he encountered his biggest hauls of silver from the Spanish, and, just as valuable, some of their maps. His hull full and glistening (the Silver Map may have been made from his haul), Drake feared revenge if he returned home by doubling back, so he kept going, towards what he hoped would be the famed Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific around the north of North America. Instead he sailed into the area described ominously only two years before by Sir Martin Frobisher as ‘The Mistaken Strait’ (renamed Hudson Strait in 1609), and thereafter resolved with his crew to return home from San Francisco, through the Indian Ocean and round the Cape of Good Hope. Miller Christy contends that ‘it is probable that he had never, up to this point, contemplated a circumnavigation of the Globe.’
Chapter 8
The World in a Book
In the spring of 1595, five months after his death at the age of eighty-two, Gerardus Mercator introduced a new word into the European dictionary: atlas. His inspiration wasn’t the figure we’re familiar with – the muscle-bound Titan holding up the heavens on his shoulders – but a rather more learned, bearded fellow, a mathematician and philosopher draped in fuschia robes as he measures a basketball-sized celestial globe with a pair of compasses. That at least is how he appears at the beginning of Mercator’s Atlas, alongside a 36,000-word dissertation on the Creation, several poems in Latin, and 107 maps.
It was the magnificent culmination of a life’s passion. You could buy it at the Frankfurt Book Fair that year, and if you didn’t put your back out getting it home (it was five volumes bound as one) you could marvel at what were consistently the most accurate and complete country maps available, dexterously hand-coloured, with the world elegantly flattened in his novel world-changing projection.
The Atlas was the work of someone who prided himself not on the ornate but on the painstaking. We have seen that Mercator was not hugely prolific, and his maps and globes were intended for a discerning market rather than the masses targeted by his commercial rivals. His son Rumold and his grandson Michael, who completed the atlas after Mercator’s stroke in 1590 and then saw it through the press and binding, shared a similar dedication to their work, travelling to London from their base in the Rhineland to obtain the latest discoveries and coordinates.
The Atlas was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth and the praise lavished on the British Isles was profound. The island was blessed with ‘all the goods of heaven and earth … neither the rigours of winter are too great … nor is the summer’s heat … Indeed, Britain is the work of joyous nature; nature seems to have created her like another world outside the world.’ (It was quite a contrast to the Ancient Greek view of Britain as wretched and perennially wet). The Atlas also contained other unrecognisable novelties, such as a circular map of the North Pole, shown as a rocky island divided by four rivers, and the fictional island of Frisland, at that time a popular apparition near Iceland.
Despite everything, the Atlas did not sell well.* To some it was not ornate enough, but others were just happy with what was already available. For while Mercator was the first to give us a name to describe a bound collection of maps of the same dimensions, he didn’t create the concept. That had already happened in northern Italy.
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The early collection of twenty-seven ancient Ptolemy maps printed in Bologna from 1477 could justifiably be called the first of the breed, with Martin Waldseemüller and two colleagues making the first modern atlas in 1513 by combining the Ptolemy maps with twenty contemporary regional woodcuts of their own. This contained one of the earliest examples of colour printing, and the first map in an atlas entirely devoted to America (it is titled Tabula Terre Nove, and has an unusual textual reference to Columbus as a Genoese explorer sailing under orders from the King of Castile).
Atlas lends his name to the dictionary via this appearance in Mercator’s masterful work from 1595.
It was in Venice that the atlas became a craze. In the 1560s mapsellers had the idea of allowing customers to build their own atlas from the stock on display. If you didn’t like the Spanish maps on offer, you simply didn’t put them in your book. But if you were intrigued with the emerging face of South America you could choose two or three (perhaps conflicting) impressions. Most buyers would select one single-sheet copy of the latest work of the leading cartographers – Giacomo Gastaldi was strong on Africa and Arabia, whilst you might choose Paolo Forlani for South America and George Lily for the British Isles. These would then be folded and bound between covers of your choice, a unique and discerning collection, the cartographic iPod of its day.
This bespoke service was also popular in Rome, where one publisher, Antonio Lafreri, lent his name to the practice and produced the finest known example, a two-volume compilation known as the Lafreri-Doria Atlas. This contained 186 printed and manuscript maps, and in 2005 was sold at Sotheby’s in London for a princely £1,464,000.
The Doria Atlas was bound in about 1570, the same year that saw the publication of the first atlas we would recognise as such – a book of uniform size and style, containing maps primarily drawn or compiled by the same hand. The Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of Abraham Ortelius was a huge and instant success, despite the fact that it was the most expensive book ever produced. Its title (‘Theatre of the World’ – the word Atlas was still twenty-five years away) was both apt and dramatic, for in its various editions over forty-two years it ran to 228 different plates, ranging from local maps of Palestine, Transylvania and the island of Ischia to the latest impressions of America, China and Russia. The Theatrum also included a collection of historical and mythical maps: the Kingdom of Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece.
The books were produced at the press of Christopher Plantin and their colours were rich and saturated, the lettering (in Latin) elaborately cursive. The cartouches (a map’s decorative emblems) burst with vivid additional information – the natural history of a region, a town plan, or a genealogical tree. Ortelius was also a generous publisher: by including an index of map-makers he had relied upon for source material he created an invaluable checklist for future historians.
The Theatrum sold 7,300 copies in thirty-one editions, and at least 900 survive. To leaf through one today is to get a (misguided) sense of a world as a fully realised enterprise, an ordered place from which cartographic dalliances with geographical guesswork and overbearing religion had been banished in favour of science and reason. The Age of Exploration was not quite over, but Ortelius’ great work already looks unimprovable, and certainly must have seemed so to its eager purchasers.
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The fact that the Theatrum was published not in Italy but in Antwerp marked the beginning of a
major shift in cartographic power. The path of the popular atlas – from Italy to the Rhineland and Belgium, and later to the Netherlands, France and Great Britain – provides an accurate weathervane of the course of the golden age of cartography. The factors that determined this movement were predictable: the rise and decline in economic strength brought about by trade and naval power. This in turn reflected the ability and willingness of monarchies to commission new explorations, and the availability and prosperity of skilled draughtsmen, paper-makers, printers and bookbinders.
But there was another factor too – raw and rare talent, a combination of inspiration and tutored craftsmanship, for surveying, plotting, drawing, engraving, compiling, illuminating and colouring – that cannot be wholly explained by financial or other economic perspectives. The vision of seeing the world anew, and the ability to express it, was what set Waldseemüller, Mercator and Ortelius apart.
It is too simplistic to plot the shifting cartographic dominance of one European country over another in terms of decades. But certainly there are trends: Germany’s role in the revival of Ptolemy was crucial in the late fifteenth century (there were important printings in Ulm and Cologne), while Martin Waldseemüller and Martin Behaim both produced maps and globes with exciting new discoveries and ways of showing them. Italy’s vibrant printing trade undoubtedly also benefitted map-making in the same period. But it was the Low Countries that turned cartography into a new commercial artform. In the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a new generation of map-makers transformed an arcane, intellectual and exclusive activity into a booming industry.
On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does Page 10