The World of Gerard Mercator

by Andrew Taylor

  Still, he was not satisfied. In the legend to the map, he appealed directly to those who bought it to supply him with yet more information, more sketches of particular areas, more mathematical coordinates and estimates of distances between places. He was planning a new world map, he said, and such information would make it more complete and more accurate—but he would also use it in revising and updating the second edition of his map of Europe.

  While traveling to the Frankfurt fair in autumn of 1554 to sell his new map, he renewed his acquaintance with Abraham Ortelius, the young map colorist-turned-dealer from Antwerp. Ortelius, fifteen years younger than Mercator, had an even keener eye for a bargain or a business opportunity than he did, as he would show when he produced the world's first atlas some years later. He traveled to fairs in England, France, and Italy to buy and sell maps, and avidly developed friendships with geographers and cartographers who might be useful to him.5After their meeting in Frankfurt, he became a close friend and lifelong correspondent of Mercator's.

  The work of revision kept the map of Europe on Mercator's desk for nearly twenty years. It seems to have sparked an explosion of the intellectual work that remained closest to his heart, as if the move to Duis­burg and the rush of regard and acclamation that greeted the map had released a new flood of energy in his middle age.

  In mapping the continent, he was trying to produce a still image of a moving target. The surveying work of the regional cartographers gave him a firm foundation on which to build a map of the settled lands of old Europe, but in the less inhabited areas, the known coastline was changing almost as rapidly as it was in the Americas and the Far East. While Spanish and Portuguese expeditions were pushing their discoveries farther west and east, the English were dominating the northern seas. Mercator was not satisfied with the maps that were available of the Far North, and he was delighted to advise in the planning of new expeditions in search of a northeastern passage to the Orient.

  His old friend and pupil John Dee was instrumental in involving him in this northern campaign, deftly exploiting his ties with Europe's most honored cartographer in his efforts to persuade Queen Elizabeth to back the expeditions from the 1550s onward.* He showed Mercator's maps and quoted his name and reputation to lend powerful support to his arguments. Such involvement, even at a distance, in the arguments of the English court, with its seething religious and political dissent, its spies and informers, would later draw Mercator into danger; but then, he was well satisfied with the new information that filtered back to him from the English expeditions. By the time the second edition of his map was published in 1572, he was able to correct the errors on the northern coastlines that had troubled him before. He redrew the northern extremities of the Scandinavian peninsula and the adjoining White Sea, together with a new legend acknowledging his debt to "the most famous navigation by the Englishmen of the north-east sea." Moscow was moved to a new and more accurate latitude on the fifty-sixth parallel, and the rivers and mountains to the north of the Black Sea were extensively redrawn. In all, six of the fifteen original plates were beaten out, repolished, and newly engraved.

  THE LATER HISTORY of Mercator's European map is a somber exam­ple of the fragility of large printed maps. It was believed for centuries that all the hundreds of copies of the 1554 edition that were printed, many of them colored, varnished, and hung in noble houses, church buildings, and other public places, had been either lost or destroyed. The map survived only in references by other contemporary geographers and in the writings of Walter Ghim, who said that it "attracted more praise from scholars everywhere than any similar geographical work which has ever been brought out."''6 Then, toward the end of the nineteenth century, a student in Breslau municipal library, then in Germany and now in Poland, found a torn and crumpled document filed away in the archives:A single copy of Mercator's great work had survived.'7

  That precious map vanished, probably forever, in the confusion of 1945, another victim of World War II. It had been meticulously reproduced, but experts assumed that there would never be more than a modern copy of Mercator's map to be seen—until 1967, when a Dutch schoolmaster was thumbing through collections of prints in a Brussels shop, looking for views of old Amsterdam. Among the assorted boxes of photographs and tattered cardboard and paper sheets was a book of some fifty maps, about i6'A inches tall and iiVi inches wide, torn and frayed around the edges, which had apparently been rebound, recol-ored, and occasionally "improved" by an eighteenth-century Cistercian monk, who had written his name on the first page.

  Today, the book is one of the most treasured possessions of London's British Library.* Handwriting experts confirmed that the pen strokes and flourishes were identical with the style of Mercator's own handbook on italic writing. Further detailed study showed that two of the maps, showing Tyrol and Lombardy, had been drawn and annotated by Mercator himself—the only manuscript maps by him that are known to have survived—and that the rest of the book had been produced by cutting sections from several prints of his wall map of Europe. Mercator's lost work, or almost all of it, had been rediscovered for a second time.

  One theory is that the book was compiled for the use of Duke William's gifted eldest son, Karl Friedrich, who set out on a tour of Italy in the 1570s, shortly before his death from smallpox at the age of eighteen. In view of Mercator's dismissive criticisms of the work of Italian cartographers, it is significant that the two manuscript maps of Tyrol and Lombardy, drawn by Mercator himself, cover some of the areas of northern Italy where the boy was to travel. Making up the patchwork atlas would have been a relatively quick and easy way of maintaining contact with the ducal court—Mercator was always alive to such commercial opportunities—which might also be a source of geographic information. Duke William's chief magistrate, the strongly Catholic Werner von Gymnich, was traveling with Karl Friedrich, and Mercator wrote to him later asking for information about the journey to be incorporated into his later maps.

  A section from Mercator's 1554 map of Europe, featuring France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, as well as parts of England, Spain, and Italy

  The original printed map of Europe was cut into sections and bound to form the book, so it is impossible to see the full sweep of the design as Mercator intended.* Two soft, curling sheets of gray cardboard are all that are left of the original covers, with one remaining scrap of leather still clinging precariously to them; paper strips hold the boards together in place of a spine. Inside, some of the pages are patched and mended, and the ancient pasting that holds others together in a delicate jigsaw of paper fragments is starting to come away. Carefully propped on a lectern now, it has none of the grandeur of a finely balanced globe; there is no feeling of wonder as there might be in touching the delicate brass machinery of an astronomical instrument, no sense of sheer imposing size as there would be with a wall map. It is impossible even to be sure that it was Mercator himself, rather than some assistant in the workshop, who cut and pasted the original map to make the book. And yet it is hard not to be awed by the thought that Mercator's own hand once drew the two manuscript maps of Lombardy and Tyrol that are among its pages, and that the "lost" map of Europe has survived.

  *The globes were never delivered to Murad, who had a reputation for indulging his love of beautiful things. One order from his palace in Istanbul was for one hundred thousand tulip bulbs, while others were for clocks and other instruments to add to his magnificent collection. It is not known why he never received Mercator's globes, which remained in the possession of the same family in Germany for some four hundred years.

  *The first expedition, which left in 1553, aiming to reach Cathay and the Indies by sailing around the north of Russia, ended in disaster, with two of its three ships icebound and stranded off the coast of Lapland. Their crews, more than seventy men, died from scurvy and exposure, while men from a third ship, the Edward Bonaventure, had to struggle overland to seek help at the court of the Russian tsar Ivan the Terrible in Moscow. A second attempt to find a
northeast passage in 1556 also ended in failure but established a profitable trading route to Russia through the White Sea.

  *The library invested $1.2 million in buying the book at auction from a private collection in 1997.

  *In the library now, the book is carefully preserved inside a sturdy modern slipcase and is jealously guarded—a note in capitals inside the case warns that it "must not be issued without the permission of the reading room supervisor, and then it should only be issued under very close supervision"—but for all the attentions of its eighteenth-century restorer, and for all the care of the library authorities today, it seems somehow an incomplete memorial to the great cartographer.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A Mysterious Commission

  IN BREMEN, Jan Vermeulen's school was struggling. By the summer of 1559, there were only twenty pupils at the desks, and the death of his wife meant that he had to cope with all the tasks of running the school alone. Mercator saw an opportunity to bring his old friend to Duisburg to join him.

  That same year, a group of leading citizens had set out proposals for a new preparatory school—in theory at least, a first step toward setting up the ill-starred university, and a source of students for it once it opened. Mercator was called on to draw up the curriculum and study-plans, and to offer lectures in mathematics to the most talented pupils. There was no need for papal approval for such a venture, and on Wednesdays and Saturdays at 9 AM, Gerard Mercator the cosmographer, the internationally known cartographer, and the civic dignitary became once more Mercator the pedagogue, with students sitting around him in Duisburg's old market hall as he returned to the teaching life he had last tried at Leuven twenty years before. Among his pupils was Johannes Corputius, who would later use the mathematical skills Mercator taught him in constructing his famous bird's-eye panorama of Duisburg.

  Judging from his attitude toward his sons' education, he would have been a hard master, as ready as the teachers of his own youth had been to resort to beating his pupils to impress his lessons upon them. In his teaching, as in his studies, he was painstaking, thorough, and intense— qualities that may have been less appealing to the boys than they were to their parents. He demanded much from his young charges, as is shown by his response to an invitation toward the end of his life to take over the education of a young boy from Zurich. Writing to the boy's father,1 the Protestant pastor Wolfgang Haller, he recommended a program of lessons based on his own methodical studies of Euclid, working painstakingly through to the detailed study of the classical geographers.

  Vermeulen was the ideal choice as rector, and soon after the school opened, Mercator used his influence to persuade his friend to join him in Duisburg. He was, as Vermeulen put it in a letter, "honouring an old friend with a position of standing,"2but he was also recruiting a teacher whose high standards matched his own. Vermeulen's reputation—not least with Mercator's own two younger sons, who had spent time in the school at Bremen—was that of a harsh disciplinarian whose lessons were punctuated with strict physical discipline. His indignant reply to a letter from Bartholomew complaining about his time as a pupil inadvertently gives a vivid picture of life in one of Vermeulen's classes.

  "What are those 'blows of students' which you mention? What 'whippings'? What 'sticks'? What 'harsh slavery' does your mind imagine?" he demands.'3 Bartholomew's original letter is lost, but the message of Vermeulen's denials is clear enough—although grumbles about strict discipline did nothing to damage his standing in Mercator's eyes. Vermeulen recognized that the main interest of the city authorities was that he should be "intent on his teaching, and not troublesome in matters of religion."4They had clearly heard of his outspoken rigor in the cause of Church reform, but Mercator's recommendation was enough to ease their anxieties. A little later, he showed his regard for the widowed Vermeulen in the most convincing way possible: A few months after the schoolmaster's arrival in Duisburg, the town's municipal accounts recorded a gift of sixteen quarts of wine to celebrate his wedding to Mercator's daughter Emerance.

  Mercator's involvement with the school lasted only three years, and in 1562, he handed over his duties to Bartholomew. His cartographic studies were taking up more of his time: The revisions of the map of Europe were a constant anxiety, and the success of the map had brought more commissions. Mercator was already known across Europe and in particular, thanks largely to the efforts of John Dee, in the court of Queen Elizabeth of England. He had never crossed the English Channel, but Dee, who had provided maps and advice on navigational techniques for expeditions to the Far North since the first attempt in 1553, quoted his name and his opinions frequently in pressing the case for northern exploration. The new map of Europe and Dee's recommendations reinforced his fame among sailors, explorers, philosophers, and mapmakers in England. Together, they were at least partly responsible for the arrival on his desk in the early 1560s of a mysterious new map that threatened to draw him into the fringes of the Tudors' world of secrecy and intrigue.

  Even in the security of his home in the Oberstrasse, Mercator was almost obsessively cautious in his dealings with authorities and always anxious not to make enemies. Just as he never spoke about his fearful time in Rupelmonde Fort, so he never mentioned this map and its clandestine connection with English politics. There are no names, and no firm dates;5it is only possible to piece the story together by deduction and guesswork from scraps of evidence, hints, and account books.

  The traveler who arrived at Mercator's workshop in Duisburg was expected, for he carried a precious package with him that would not have been allowed out of its owner's hands unless the project and its price had been agreed in advance. Like John Dee, who had made the trip from Cambridge to Leuven about fifteen years before, he had traveled for several days over rough and unmade roads on the grueling journey from England, but the name of the town he started from, the route he took from the Channel to the Rhine, who he was, and who had sent him will never be known.

  This was a straightforward commission, although one of a type that Mercator had never accepted before. The traveler brought with him a map, already researched, drawn, and finished, from which he wanted a copper printing plate prepared. There was no doubting the need for a new map of the British Isles and, on the face of it, nothing more natural than that Europe's leading cartographer and engraver should be asked to produce it. However, researching it, designing it, comparing one record with another, obtaining measurements and coordinates as he had done so successfully in the map of Europe, were not part of the commission. Mercator was simply to engrave a plate of a map drawn by somebody else.

  That sort of work was common enough for most of his contemporaries, but Mercator always prided himself on his skill as an original cartographer as well as an engraver. This was, in any case, different from the usual printing commissions. From a cartographical point of view, it was exciting enough—a highly detailed map of Britain of a quality that had never been seen before, and a piece of work that a dedicated mapmaker like Mercator would appreciate—but politically, it brought with it the smell of the execution fires. If such a map had fallen into the wrong hands in England, it would have been enough to send its author, its owner, even the man who carried it, to the gibbet.

  The early years of Queen Elizabeth's reign were tense and apprehensive. In 1561, the new queen had been on her throne for barely three years. She had inherited the crown from her half sister, Mary, replacing the latter's fervent Catholicism with a strongly nationalistic Protestantism, and ending the hopes of the Spanish that Mary's marriage to King Philip of Spain might win England back to the true faith without a fight. Tudor England was agog with talk of Catholic plots and Romish priests slipping secretly from country house to country house.

  To the north, the government of the young Mary, Queen of Scots, had called in French troops in an attempt to stave off a Protestant uprising, and looking south, years of tension with France had exploded into open warfare, with English soldiers fighting on behalf of Protestant rebels in
Normandy. Catholic France and Spain were unpredictable enemies; England was on tenterhooks, waiting to be invaded.

  If these were not normal times, this was not a normal map either. Most of the work in preparing it was evidently done during the early years of Queen Mary's Catholic regime, and it showed a country that was apparently loyal to the Catholic Church. New bishoprics, which had been established by Henry VIII in defiance of the pope, and which Catholics at the start of Mary's reign had hoped might be abolished, were not shown on the map at all. Many Catholic monastic establishments were marked; so too were the areas controlled by Scottish and Irish Catholic clans. At best, the image of Britain that it presented would not have found favor in Queen Elizabeth's court; at worst, it was a map designed for an invading army.