When Queen Elizabeth had come to the throne in 1558, she inherited a debt-ridden country, and her "navy" consisted of just twenty-two usable vessels. The continuing sense of military tension in England as much as a simple lack of skilled engravers had prevented the printing of new maps. For more than fifty years, successive governments since Henry VIII in 1509 had been aware of the use invaders could make of reliable maps of the country, and had been determined to take control of any cartographical work that went on. Detailed maps would show a potential invader not just possible landing grounds and routes across the country but also the exact places where they might find Catholic allies. The great flowering of new cartography in the mid—sixteenth century never reached England. It had been one of the best-mapped countries in Europe in the Middle Ages, but there had been no maps published there since the introduction of printing, and no globes constructed.6
Mercator never revealed the name of the man who had asked him to engrave the map—he had been supplied with the drawing by "an English friend," he said—or that of its original creator. There are some clues:One convincing suggestion* is that the map might have been the work of a Scottish priest, John Elder, who had close connections with leaders of the French Catholics, particularly the cardinal of Lorraine, uncle of Mary, Queen of Scots. Elder was also a confidant of the close-knit and subversive circle of exiled English Catholics—although he himself was no longer in exile. He had returned to England late in 1561, first promising Elizabeth's secretary of state, Sir William Cecil, that he could be of service and then secretly offering his loyalty to the Scottish queen.
Elder was a spy, a double agent—"as dangerous for the matters of England," said Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, Elizabeth's trusted ambassador in France, as anyone he knew7—and a man with a network of alliances among English, French, and Spanish Catholics. Cecil himself was warned by one of his many informants that Elder had "the wit to play the spy when he list"8—surely a masterpiece of understatement. He was, at the very least, under the close eye of the authorities, and a risky man with whom to have dealings. It is possible that Mercator himself never knew who had compiled the map—even more likely that he did not want to know—but if he did, such a tangle of secret loyalties and deceptions would have been a powerful reason to keep quiet.
Despite Mercator's lifelong silence about the project, Christopher Plantin's order-book in Antwerp tells an interesting story. Over the next twelve years, he sold ninety copies of the map of the British Isles—forty of them in Paris, and more to Spanish officials and their friends on the European mainland. Several went to the Jesuit Douai College, which was closely associated with the Catholic seminary that smuggled priests into England. The map itself would have tempted Mercator to become involved, despite its lack of a grid of latitude and longitude and its occasionally distorted coastline. It gave him names, locations, and other details about the British Isles that he would later incorporate into his own work, and that he could not have found elsewhere. At about 35/2 inches by 50/2 inches, it was the largest and most detailed printed map of the country to have been produced, and it had some 2,500 names marked on it. Nevertheless, Mercator took pains, in the legend he wrote and printed on it, to deny any responsibility for its content: "A certain friend offered me this depiction of the British Isles. I present it to you just as it was brought to me."
Duisburg was a long way from England, but if the map had seriously worried Sir William Cecil and Elizabeth's agents, they could certainly have reached Mercator to do him harm there. Years earlier, he had faced imprisonment and possible execution by the Catholic authorities as a dangerous reformist; by accepting the unorthodox commission, he found himself involved in Catholic intrigues against a Protestant ruler. He had shown before, in the alacrity with which he supplied surveying instruments to Charles V, that his own religious and political feelings would not stand in the way of commercial profit, and with the English map he demonstrated that geographic information, the indispensable raw material of his mapmaking, could also tempt him into dangerous areas.
DEE' S ENTHUSIASTIC PROMOTION of Mercator's name at court was part of a determined effort to encourage exploration in the Far North. This effort to find a new passage to the Orient, either to the northwest or the northeast, was the focus of English attempts to gain a share of the profits to be made from exploration and discovery for most of the sixteenth century. It was the result of years of frustrated ambition dating back almost to Columbus's first voyage of 1492.
A year after Columbus's first landfall, the Spanish cleric Rodrigo Borgia sought to bring order to the changing map of the world. But where Mercator, decades later, strove to do so through years of dedicated scholarship, Borgia acted with a single stroke of his pen. It was an act of monumental arrogance, even for a man who had bribed and maneuvered his way through the Catholic Church with a silky determination that had brought him honors and unimaginable wealth. His ecclesiastical career, like that of Antoine de Granvelle in the Low Countries, had also brought him a new name—but whereas Granvelle had to be content with a cardinal's hat, Rodrigo had won the ultimate prize and became God's vicar on Earth, Pope Alexander VI.
He had been proclaimed pope in August 1492, while Columbus's ships were still battling through the Atlantic, and within months of his election he drew a line around the globe to share it between Europe's great maritime powers, Spain and Portugal. The world he divided was barely understood—it still seemed likely that Columbus had reached Asia rather than discovered a new continent—but Pope Alexander's line circled it with brash confidence. It ran due north and south a hundred leagues to the west of the Cape Verde Islands,9giving all the newly discovered lands to the east of the line to Portugal and those to the west to his native Spain. However, instead of settling a dispute, the division of the globe started years of skirmishing and bitterness.
Pope Alexander appeared to have merely formalized an arrangement that already existed in practice. Columbus's voyage had established the interest of his Spanish sponsors in routes to the west, and Portugal's well-defended control of the seas that led to the Spice Islands in the East appeared unchallengeable. At least that was the theory. But as there was no reliable way to fix a line of longitude, there were constant quarrels between the two nations about where the line on the map actually fell across the globe.
By the time Charles V inherited the Spanish throne in 1517, there was growing dissent, too, from the nations who had missed out in the pope's arbitrary division of the spoils of exploration. Francis I of France, who had been Charles's rival for the imperial crown and whose constant wars against him brought both leaders to the brink of bankruptcy, declared sarcastically, "I should very much like to see the passage in Adam's will that divides the New World between my brothers Charles V and the King of Portugal.""'10 In England, the serpentine Sir William Cecil was uncharacteristically blunt when he later told the Spanish ambassador to London, "The Pope has no right to parcel out the world, and give and take lands to whomsoever he pleases.""11 Elizabeth's privateers made the point more forcibly by unofficially plundering Spain's ships and settlements in the Americas, and even made their own voyages through the Portuguese East. But for all the skirmishing and bad-tempered diplomacy about trade, the fact remained that the Spanish and Portuguese had got there first.
For the English, the only way was north. If they wanted a share in the apparently limitless wealth to be gained through trade with Cathay, they had to find their own way there. The English diplomat Robert Thorne, who was living in Seville and had already invested in Spanish expeditions to the Americas, wrote to Henry VIII as early as 1527, summing up the general sense of frustration. To east and west, there seemed to be simply nothing left to find. "There is one way to discover, which is to the North. For out of Spain they have discovered all the Indies and seas occidental, and out of Portugal all the Indies and seas oriental," he told the king.12
Where that "one way" north to the Indies would be discovered, whether to west or east, was bitterly di
sputed by merchants, scholars, and sailors, but the incentive was clear. A new route to the Indies would revo-lutionize the trade routes of Europe as surely as Vasco da Gama's voyage to India had done. If English seamen could reach the East by sailing around the north of either America or Russia—a much shorter route than the Spanish and Portuguese took to the south—they might challenge their trading rivals on their own terms.
That determination faltered as the Muscovy Trading Company, set up to mount fresh expeditions, turned its attention to building profitable trading links with Ivan the Terrible in northern Russia, from where ships brought back furs, ropes, fish, and timber for Elizabeth's growing fleet. During the 1560s, there were bitter theoretical arguments at the court over whether the northeastern or the northwestern route offered the best chance of success, but no more expeditions.
Mercator's world map of 1538, still the most authoritative view of the world available, showed chains of mountains blocking any sea route around northern Russia to the Mare glaciale and the so-called Eastern Indian Ocean, while to the northwest, he marked a passage"13 running temptingly through to the uncharted western coast of the Americas and thence to the Indies. There were old stories of Indians blown onto the coast of Europe, presumably driven from Cathay through a northwest sea passage.
The early expeditions of 1553 and 1556 had concentrated on finding the northeast passage despite Mercator's map. There were stories to support that possibility too, eagerly seized on by its proponents: The horn of a unicorn, an animal well known to thrive in Cathay, had been found on the shores of the Barents Sea north of Russia. How else could it have got there, other than by floating down the clear waters of a northeastern passage? And where the horn of a unicorn could go, a well-equipped merchant ship could surely follow.*
For Mercator, the expeditions were the first of a series of disappointments that were to blight the final decades of his life. They started in excitement and optimism. The geography of the Far North was one of the most frustrating uncertainties of the age, and around the North Pole itself, there was an infuriating mixture of myth, rumor, and ancient stories; a passage to either the northwest or the northeast would have settled once and for all one of the remaining mysteries of geography. Mercator died still believing that one would eventually be found. But for all the amendments the reports of the explorers enabled him to make to the detailed depiction of northern Scandinavia and Russia on his map of Europe, the big questions about the form of the North Pole and the coastlines of northern Russia and America still remained unanswered.
Those first explorers also focused attention on the problem Mercator had already faced in his first world map: the contrast between the curve of the Earth and the flatness of the map. The simplistic projection of the maps they used meant they were virtually useless. Each line of latitude was a circle divided into 360 degrees of longitude, but the closer it was to the Pole, the smaller was its circumference, so that each degree represented a shorter distance to be sailed. The sailors knew that, since lines of longitude converge on the poles, the value of each degree of longitude would change the farther north they went, but they had no way of calculating exactly how great that change would be—and traditional maps ignored it completely.
It was almost impossible for a navigator either to calculate his position precisely or to map the complex network of islands, inlets, and peninsulas through which the expeditions had to thread their way. When the stranded ships of the first major expedition to the Northeast in 1553 were found by Russian fishermen a year later, the written log of the dead captain was recovered. One entry described how they had sighted a deserted coastline and fixed its location: "This land lyeth from Seynam east and by north 160 leagues, being in latitude 72 degrees." But for all the navigator's attempts to leave some record of his achievement, the details were too inaccurate for later travelers to be sure exactly where the observations had been taken.
Over all the expeditions loomed the unanswerable problem of projection. For all their bravery, the mariners lacked the means to navigate their vessels with any certainty or to record the discoveries they made. Neither courage nor seamanship could solve the problem—but mathematics might.
*Made by Peter Barber, map librarian at the British Library, in The Mercator Atlas of Europe, ed. M. Watelet (Pleasant Hill, Oregon: Walking Tree Press, 1998), and in conversation with the author.
*Today, with no unicorns found in Cathay or anywhere else, it seems more likely that the fabulous "horn" would have been the spiral tusk of a narwhal—impressive, perhaps, but no sign of a seaway through the East—but that piece of evidence carried great weight for a while among the acriminous exchanges in the English court.
Chapter Fifteen
In the Forests of Lorraine
IN THE EARLY 1550s, as the English were starting to extend their influence into the far northern seas, King Henry II of France suddenly pushed his power to the east, seizing the bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun from the duke of Lorraine. This was the invasion that prompted Charles V to lay siege to Metz, and which led to his debacle before the city walls, his retreat to Brussels, and his abdication—but at the same time, it showed Duke Charles of Lorraine that he was faced on both sides by overwhelming power.
His dukedom was a magnificent and gilded trap. The lands that he assumed on the death of his father in 1544 were sandwiched between the borders of the kingdom of France to the west and the Holy Roman Empire to the east, putting him in the position that any leader dreads— caught in the middle, between two powerful enemies. He was the son-in-law of King Henry and related on his mother's side to the emperor Charles V,'1 but with the two great powers sporadically at war throughout his reign, there was no security in family connections. His lands were part of the "Spanish road," the crucial supply line through which Charles could move troops from his Italian possessions to Germany and the Low Countries—a route of march that caused perennial consternation among the French as large bodies of well-armed and disciplined soldiers marched along their borders. Only through astute diplomacy backed by military strength could Lorraine hope to maintain its independence of either side, and Duke Charles's policy was to talk peace and prepare for war.
The dukes of Lorraine had always had sharp teeth in the face of attack—it was at the walls of their ancient capital of Nancy that Charles the Bold, one of the ambitious dukes of Burgundy, had fallen in 1477—but Duke Charles's response in the years following the French attack in 1552 was particularly imaginative and determined. Antonio de Bergamo, one of the finest Italian specialists in military design, was brought in to rebuild Nancy as an impregnable stronghold; the mines and salt pits that produced the duke's revenues were reorganized to make them more profitable; a single system of weights and measures was introduced to encourage trade; and strict new laws were enforced against the vagabonds, footpads, and unemployed mercenary soldiers who infested the roads. And Duke Charles commissioned a map of his lands.
Such a new map would be of immense military value in organizing the defenses of the dukedom, and it would be important in encouraging efficient administration—but it would also be a powerful statement of the independence of Lorraine. The Italians were known throughout Europe as the finest military architects, and in Antonio de Bergamo Charles had commissioned the most famous of them. In the same way, he looked for an expert to make a complete and original survey of his dukedom, using Gemma's methods of triangulation.
The request was made formally early in 1564 through Duke William, at whose court Mercator was official cosmographer, but by the time it reached Mercator himself, it was more an order than an invitation. Duke Charles had asked for him by name, Duke William had agreed to the request, and the project was so wide-ranging and of such importance that it required Mercator's personal attention. He had already carried out numerous small-scale surveys for private commissions in Duisburg and had surveyed much of Flanders for his map of 1539, and he attacked this fresh challenge with the vigor and physical determination of a man in his tw
enties. It tested his mastery of every aspect of his craft, from surveying to designing and drawing. The project became one of the longest and most taxing of Mercator's career, and it almost killed him.
Mercator's sons, Arnold, Bartholomew, and Rumold, were all in their twenties, helping him in his workshop and developing their own skills. Bartholomew, at twenty-four, had already taken over many of his teaching duties at Duke William's preparatory school and with his father's patient instruction had become proficient with Gemma's planimetrum. Mercator therefore brought him to Lorraine, and they spent long months in the field, crisscrossing the dukedom with their imaginary triangles. It was an extremely challenging task: Lorraine stretched for more than 250 miles southward toward the towering barrier of the Vos-ges Mountains, with little-used tracks that suddenly plunged into dark valleys, and endless hillsides of barely penetrable forest. Gemma had developed his method of surveying by casting imaginary triangles for miles across the long, flat horizons of Flanders; in Lorraine, Mercator and Bartholomew had to work piecemeal, moving slowly from hill to hill and from village to village.
There were some existing documents on which Mercator could draw—Martin Waldseemiiller, who came from the town of St. Die, in Lorraine's southern Rhineland, where there had been a flourishing tradition of local cartography, had presented Duke Charles's grandfather with a map of his lands some fifty years before—but Mercator and his son carried out the most detailed survey of the dukedom that had ever been made. Mercator's practical skill as a surveyor is one of the traits that marked him out from other cartographers who were working at the same time, and he took his own measurements whenever he could, a grueling and physically demanding operation.
Exactly what happened to Mercator in Lorraine is uncertain. From the sketchy account Walter Ghim gave, it appears to have been another crisis about which Mercator himself wanted to say very little later in his life. "The journey through Lorraine gravely imperilled his life, and so weakened him that he came very near to a serious breakdown and mental derangement as a result of his terrifying experiences," Ghim wrote.2 His frustratingly coy account is the only record. Some later writers have put forward a theory that Mercator may have been attacked by one of the many armed gangs of robbers that infested the forests of Lorraine, but this does not seem to be borne out by Ghim's words. Ghim said he was weakened by the journey—a phrase that suggests exhaustion rather than any robbery. The most likely explanation of Mercator's collapse is that he simply succumbed to the physical and mental pressure of a cripplingly onerous task.
The World of Gerard Mercator Page 17