Sketch of the floor plan of Palazzo Zen as divided up by the three surviving Zen brothers after the death of Francesco. Caterino Zen and his son Nicolò the Younger lived in the apartment on the far right. (illustration credit 8.2)
After a lifetime in government, he reached the highest echelons of power, thanks to a succession of high-profile appointments in defense and land management—his two areas of expertise. In 1564 he turned down the governorship of Cyprus in order to remain in Venice, apparently to stay near his dying wife. The following year he was appointed to the Council of Ten, the secretive heart of executive power in the Republic. Before the year was out, however, his health took a turn for the worse and he died “after twenty days of high fever,” at the relatively young age of fifty.
Nicolò the Younger’s book on the Zen voyages, on the other hand, went on to enjoy an unexpectedly long life, stirring up controversy for the next four and a half centuries. Its early appeal is easy enough to understand. Here was a travelogue about a region of the world that had yet to be properly explored and mapped, a region that could prove to be the gateway of a northwest passage to Cathay—that Holy Grail of Renaissance navigation.
The book came with an added attraction: a map of the North Atlantic that showed islands and regions never seen before. Map mania was then at its peak, not just among professional cartographers but among general readers as well. Unprotected by copyright, thousands of maps and charts were copied, modified or simply picked for their choicest parts. So the inclusion of the Carta da navegar in the back of the book is bound to have pushed up initial sales.
However, as the Age of Discovery wound down in the second part of the sixteenth century, cartographers gradually unveiled the true outline of the world. The initial fascination with Nicolò the Younger’s map would probably have faded if a copy had not traveled from Venice to the German town of Duisburg, just over the Rhine, and found its way to the cluttered workshop of Gerard Mercator.
A New Ptolemy
The year is now 1569, a little more than a decade after the Zen map was first published. The most eminent cartographer of his time is putting the finishing touches to the great achievement of his career: the first complete map of the world. It is a beautiful piece of work. Mercator has glued together eighteen separate sheets into a very large map measuring roughly six and a half feet by four. The drawings are done with great artistry and the lettering is impeccable. In fact, the whole composition is a feast for the eyes in addition to being a cartographic marvel.
The outline of Europe, Africa and Asia—the regions that constituted the old Ptolemaic world—are drawn with relative accuracy. The New World, on the other hand, still appears as if through a disfiguring lens, with North America billowing like a huge cloud out of Aladdin’s lamp while beneath it, South America is shriveled and shapeless.
In the early 1560s, the great cartographer Gerardus Mercator received in Duisburg a German translation of Nicolò the Younger’s book on the Zen voyages. (illustration credit 8.3)
At the top center of the map, between the Old and the New Worlds, one is suddenly on very familiar ground: Greenland weighs down from the Arctic over Estotiland; right below it is Frisland; Drogio and Icaria make their appearance as well. Mercator has inserted all the major pieces of the Zen puzzle in his map, rearranging them slightly in order to squeeze them all in.
I believe this single act on the part of the man many regard as the founder of modern cartography goes a long way towards explaining the extraordinary influence (“and so unwarranted!” I can hear the critics exclaim) that Nicolò the Younger’s simple Carta da navegar had on the history of mapmaking.
MERCATOR WAS born Gerhard Kremer in a small river port south of Antwerp in 1512. His father, Hubert Kremer, was a poor tenant farmer who supplemented his meager income by working as a cobbler. After his death, in 1526 or 1527, Uncle Gisbert, a minister, became young Gerhard’s guardian. He sent him to an elite school in Brabant and then to the University of Louvain, where Gerhard latinized his name to Gerardus Mercator. He studied mathematics and astronomy with the great Gemma Frisius and took on cartography to support his growing family—in 1536 he had married Barbara Shelleken, a girl from Louvain, and they had six children.
Mercator sold his first globe in 1535. He produced a beautiful map of the Holy Land in 1537. The next year he made his first attempt to piece together a world map, and followed that with a map of Flanders. There was apparently no clear direction to his work, except the one dictated by commissions; his maps and globes sold well at the fairs.
After the Reformation, the Low Countries became the scene of intense religious violence. One day Mercator was dragged away from his workshop and thrown in jail as a suspected Lutheran (we do not know whether or not he was; he always kept his religious beliefs a secret). He was released thanks to his academic connections, but not before seeing several of his prisonmates go to their deaths: two were burned at the stake, another was beheaded and a woman was buried alive.
He returned to his family and his cartographical work wary of the heavy climate of intolerance. In 1552 he left Catholic Brabant and moved with his family to Duisburg, across the German border, in the small duchy of Cleves-Jülich-Berg. In 1564, the duke chose him as his official cartographer. It seemed the start of a productive time, but religious strife once again brought death and destruction to the region. The plague returned in 1566 to take its own grim toll. In quick succession, he lost his daughter Emerentia, two grandsons and his son Bartholomeus.
Mercator emerged from the depth of personal tragedy clinging to the most ambitious plan a cartographer could possibly conceive: to map the entire universe—the world and the heavens—into a unified cosmographia. He never did complete the mapping of the heavens. But his 1569 map of the world was to make him immortal.
Mercator worked for years on the greatest technical problem confronting geographers at the time: how to transfer the spherical surface of a globe onto the flat surface of a map. Straightening the latitudinal parallels into a grid was easy enough; the difficult part was figuring out how to space them progressively toward the poles. He could not use calculus because the mathematical formulae that would have been necessary had not yet been devised. So he went about it empirically, checking one by one the coordinates at which the latitudinal parallels intersected the rhomb lines on his globes, and transferring them onto a flat map in order to achieve “the squaring of the circle.”
Mercator’s projection, as it came to be known, revolutionized navigation: an ocean-crossing sea captain could now draw his compass direction as a straight line between a point of departure and a point of arrival. All he needed to do in order to plot his course was to measure the angle it formed with any meridian and make the necessary adjustments to take account of compass deviation.
Detail of Mercator’s World Map of 1569. By inserting all the main components of the Zen Carta da navegar in his own world map, Mercator unwittingly prolonged the influence of the Zen map on cartography. (illustration credit 8.4)
Once Mercator had figured out the framework of his new world map, he diligently filled it in, drawing the continents and the oceans in a harmonious if somewhat distorted whole. However, when it came to the North Atlantic and the northern part of the New World, he had no reliable data—no reports based on firsthand observation. Possibly under pressure from his printer and his clients, Mercator nevertheless agreed to trace the outline of that murky area that was suddenly attracting so much attention in European capitals. And he turned for help to the only cartographical source available to him: the Zen map.
The catalog of Mercator’s library indicates he did not own a copy of the original 1558 Marcolini edition, but he did have a later German edition. In 1561, Girolamo Ruscelli, a well-known printer in Venice who held Nicolò the Younger in the highest regard (“an authority universally thought to have few equals in the whole of Europe”), had published his own version of the Zen map as an addendum to a new edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia. The Ru
scelli edition was snatched up by Joseph Moletius, a translator and bookseller then living in Venice, who quickly put together the German edition that ended up in Mercator’s library.
It was a considerable, and uncharacteristic, leap of faith on the part of Mercator. But in a moment of pressure, he evidently chose to take Ruscelli’s inflated comment about Nicolò the Younger at face value and to believe in the accuracy of the Zen map. In Mercator’s defense it has been said that he relied on the Zen map because it bore the seal of approval of Giovanni Battista Ramusio. But it didn’t. The story of the Zen voyages was not published in the Ramusio great travel series (Navigationi et viaggi) until 1574—seventeen years after Ramusio’s death and five years after Mercator’s world map came out. The irony is that when Paolo Ramusio, son of Giovanni Battista, finally published the Zen story (without the map) in 1574, he did so largely because Mercator had given it a patent of legitimacy by including the Zenian islands on his world map!
BY THE end of 1569 Mercator’s printer, Christophe Plantin, had sold more than forty copies of the world map, but after the initial boom, sales quickly declined. Abraham Ortelius, the most successful mapmaker of those years and a good friend of Mercator’s, brought out his own heart-shaped map of the world, complete with a full panoply of the Zenian islands. If Columbus was the first to reach the southern shore of the New World, Ortelius explained, “the North part was long ago found out by certain fishermen of the isle of Frislanda, driven by tempest on the shores thereof, and was afterwards, about the year 1390, discovered anew by one Antonio Zeno, a gentleman of Venice.”
This little map, more wieldy than Mercator’s, became the centerpiece of a portable little atlas, Theatrum orbis terrarum, which Ortelius brought out in 1570, taking the wind out of Mercator’s sales. Although Mercator did not become rich, his stature grew enormously as a result of his world map. Ortelius himself acknowledged his debt to “the best geographer of our time.” No doubt a little peeved by his friend’s financial success, Mercator nevertheless praised him “for collecting the maps into one manual that can be bought at a small cost, kept in a small space and be carried about where one pleases.”
A British Impyre
JOHN DEE WAS AT HIS HOUSE in Mortlake, on the Thames, working on the preface to the first English edition of Euclid’s Elements, when he heard that his old friend Mercator had finally published the first complete map of the world. The two had met during their student days at Louvain, where Dee, then a Cambridge scholar, had gone to study mathematics and astronomy. They had spent much of their time together, debating late into the night about everything from the position of the magnetic pole to the abstruse mathematical formulations of Pedro Nunez, the great Portuguese cosmographer.
In the twenty years since their first meeting, Dee and Mercator had corresponded regularly, and their friendship and professional collaboration had deepened with time. Following his tour on the Continent, Dee had returned to England and established his reputation as a mathematician, a geographer and an astronomer. He was also Queen Elizabeth’s favorite astrologer, famously picking the date of her coronation (January 15, 1559).
Impressed by his friend’s achievement, Dee was also seized by the opportunities Mercator’s world map seemed to offer his country, especially with regards to the North Atlantic. He therefore added to the preface he was writing to his Euclid (a disquisition on the practical uses of geometry) a rousing call to action. English pilots, he wrote, should take advantage of England’s “most commodious situation for navigation to places most famous and rich.” Indeed, they were now being “half challenged by the learned,” i.e., great geographers like Mercator, to sail west to North America “and little and little wynne to the sufficient knowledge of that trade and voyage: which now I would be sorry should remain unknown and unheard of.”
John Dee, astrologer, mathematician and advisor to Elizabeth I, “declared to the Queen her title to Greenland, Estotiland, Friseland.” (illustration credit 8.5)
DEE’S LONGTIME passion for geography evolved into a keen interest in geopolitics. England, he believed, had fallen dangerously behind Spain and Portugal in the race to claim territory in the New World. The initial spurt of interest in transatlantic exploration during the time of Henry VII, culminating with John Cabot’s hasty landing in Newfoundland (1497), had been followed by a prolonged lull as Henry VIII turned his attention to ecclesiastic politics and the concentration of power at home. Dee argued it was high time to catch up with the other powers by unleashing British imperial ambitions in North America. He gravitated into the orbit of powerful court figures like Francis Walsingham and William Cecil, who were stoking Queen Elizabeth’s interest in oversea dominions, and he devoted the next few years of his life to building his case for a “British Impyre”—a term he was the first to use in print.
Dee had a very precise idea of what had to be done. Mercator’s world map showed a clear passage north of Estotiland, a large and apparently very navigable canal that ran straight through to the Pacific and from there to fabled Cathay.1 However, Dee disagreed with Mercator about the nature of Estotiland: whereas the great cartographer from Duisburg showed it to be part of the continental landmass, Dee argued that it was actually an island. And the source for this information was none other than the fisherman’s tale he found in the book on the Zen voyages—of which Dee owned a heavily annotated first edition in Italian.
Antonio Zen says in the narrative that the shipwrecked fishermen “discovered an island called Estotiland” (my italics). Dee believed it was Baffin Island, off the coast of northeastern Canada. “It will be universally agreed,” he gloated, “how lucky I have been in this new locating of the island of Estotilant [sic] …; or, at least how carelessly others studied the brief account of the noble [Venetians].”
Dee saw Estotiland as both the gateway to vast and wealthy territories in North America and the ideal point from which to control access to the Northwest Passage. In other words, it was a strategic objective: the key to English expansion in North America and the cornerstone of the British Empire to be. Heavily influenced by the descriptions in the Zen narrative, Dee became convinced it could easily be acquired and settled and defended and therefore rallied support for an initial voyage of exploration.
MARTIN FROBISHER, a tough, courageous sea captain who had risked his life many times exploring the West African coast, was part of a new generation of swashbuckling mariners that included Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh. They hung around Elizabeth’s entourage looking for funds with which to finance adventurous missions abroad. Michael Lok, Frobisher’s financial partner, was a businessman experienced in subarctic trade routes. He eventually found enough backers to finance a small expedition to Estotiland and the Northwest Passage. Several close advisers to the queen—Walsingham, Cecil, the earl of Leicester and Lord Warwick—were among the stockholders.
Dee was closely involved in planning the itinerary of the voyage. He provided Frobisher with maps and nautical instruments and tried to teach him the rudiments of astronomy, with little success—although Frobisher came from a well-to-do Yorkshire family he had only a minimal education. But Dee made sure he did not leave without a copy of the Zen map.
The fleet was very small for such an ambitious journey. Three vessels in all set sail from Ratcliffe on June 7, 1576, headed for Shetland on the way to Frislanda: two thirty-ton ships, the Michael and the Gabriel, with a combined crew of thirty, and a seven-ton pinnace with only four men aboard. From Shetland they sailed north to Iceland, where they were hit by a heavy storm; the pinnace was lost with all its crew. Frobisher continued west along the sixtieth parallel, the old Norse route to Greenland. Toward mid-July he struck the southeastern coast of Greenland, roughly at the point where a deep glacier known today as Hvitserk, the White Shirt, broke up into the sea spawning mountains of ice “rising like pinnacles of steeples, and all covered with snow.” Frobisher and his men were convinced they had reached Frislanda because Nicolò the Younger had placed it at a latitude
of 60˚ on the Zen map.
The visibility was very poor and in that misty, icy labyrinth, the two ships lost contact. The Michael eventually turned around and headed home while Frobisher and his crew continued west aboard the Gabriel. At the end of July they made landfall at Resolution Island, off the southern tip of Baffin Island—the Estotiland of the Zen map in their view. They cast about for several days in heavy fog, winding their way among bergs and floes; occasionally they managed to land on an island to collect samples to be shown as proof of possession of these territories. Among the objects brought on board the Gabriel was a small black rock that sparkled in the sunlight.
At last Frobisher found the opening to what seemed like a long narrow channel on the sixty-third parallel and he slowly advanced in the belief he had found the elusive passage to the Pacific. Actually, the strait—known today as Frobisher Bay—turned out to be a narrow fjord roughly 140 miles long. After eight days of navigation, Frobisher went ashore, climbed to the top of a mountain, took in the view—a maze of islands and lakes and inner seas—and returned to proclaim he had seen “a great open sea whereby to pass to Cathay and the East India.” It is not clear what this “great open sea” was—it might have been Hudson Bay—but Frobisher was convinced he had seen the Pacific Ocean shimmering in the distance.
Irresistible North Page 16