6. Mercator, preface to the Chronologia.
7. Molanus to Mercator, April 8,1575.
8. Three hundred years later, when Robert Browning wrote about the town of Hamelin, a few score miles upriver, where "The River Weser, deep and wide, / Washes its walls on the southern side," the terror was just a memory; he could afford to tell a lighthearted tale about the Pied Piper and the rats. In the sixteenth century, nothing was feared more than the plague.
9. Molanus to Mercator, May 19,1567.
10. Ibid. It is uncertain whether the reference to "brothers and sisters" means that any of Mercator's children in addition to Arnold were there, or whether she was accompanied by her spiritual "brothers and sisters" in the Church.
11. Boccaccio's account of the plague is included in the introduction to the Decameron (1349-51).
12. Molanus to Mercator, July 15,1567.
13. Ibid.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. The Sum of Human Knowledge
1. The question of dates was particularly topical: A slight underestimate of the length of the solar year when Julius Caesar instituted the Julian Calendar throughout the Roman Empire sixteen hundred years earlier had left the calendar and the solar year gradually slipping out of step by just under eleven minutes a year. While Mercator was working on his book, preparations were being made for the great reform of 1582 by which Pope Gregory XIII brought them back into line by the simple expedient of skipping ten days in October. It was a radical change, which left many people complaining bitterly that they had been robbed often days of their lives.
2. Ghim, Vita Mercatoris, p. 190.
3. Ibid.
4. Twenty years later, the German cartographer Sebastian Miinster had followed his edition of Ptolemy with a Cosmographia universalis, drawing on the researches of over 120 collaborators, which went into some forty editions over the next eighty years.
5. The dome of the cathedral was completed in 1436, following a design by Brunelleschi himself. A wooden model that he made is still on display in the museum of the Opera del Duomo, Florence.
6. The remark appears in da Vinci's Notebooks, quoted in Edwin Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1997), p. 66.
7. Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, The Life of Brunelleschi, ed. H. Saalman, trans. C. Enggass (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970), p. 44. The original book was written during the 1490s.
8. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, De Architectura libri decem.
9. During Mercator's lifetime, craftsmen were producing perspective machines on the same principle as a pinhole camera to produce a correct image of a scene that could be copied from a translucent sheet. In 1558, the Neapolitan scholar Giovanni Battista della Porta described in his Magiae Naturalis (Natural Magic) how such a device could be made and used.
10. In the second century BC, the astronomer Hipparchus of Nicaea suggested that lines of latitude, or climata, parallel to the equator could be fixed at regular intervals by making observations of the stars. Lines of longitude at right angles to them could be calculated by measuring the variation in the time of sunrise or sunset at different points, based on the fact that one hour of time difference would indicate 15 degrees of longitude, being one twenty-fourth of 360 degrees. His contemporary Eratosthenes of Cyrene made a similar suggestion but pointed out that the question was largely academic as there was no reliable way to take all the necessary observations. Ptolemy, working in the second century AD, devised more reliable instruments for taking astronomical observations but was still limited by the lack of reported figures from outside the eastern Mediterranean region. Many of the coordinates in his Geographia were necessarily estimated.
11. Martin Waldseemiiller used a version of the cylindrical projection for his world map of 1507, as did the Bristol merchant Robert Thorne when he constructed a map twenty years later to support his plea to King Henry VIII for an expedition to the Far North. Araham Ortelius and Mercator himself produced regional maps on a similar model.
12. Claudius Ptolemy, Geographia book 1, chapter xxiv, cited in Lloyd A. Brown, The Story of Maps (London: Cresset Press, 1951), p. 70.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. The World Hung on the Wall: The Projection
1. Ghim, Vita Mercatoris, p. 187.
2. Mercator to Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, February 23, 1546.
3. Similar maps in northern Europe were referred to as rutters, from the French word routier, meaning "something that finds a way."
4. Taylor, in Tudor Geography, p. 88, suggests that Rumold worked at the London office of the Cologne publisher and bookseller Arnold Birckman "between 1569 and 1575, and possibly for a longer period," but it is likely that he made frequent trips to London before he moved there to live.
5. The scale of this exaggeration is larger than one might expect: The sixtieth parallel on a Mercator map is twice as long as it should be, the seventy-fifth parallel fifteen times as long, and the eightieth parallel thirty-three times as long.
6. Mercator, legend to world map of 1569.
7. At various times from the end of the twelfth century the mysterious Christian kingdom of Presbyter, or Prester, John was reputed to be in the Far East, central Asia, India, or Africa. Marco Polo identified him as a prince of a Mongolian tribe, and two centuries later, Vasco da Gama carried letters of introduction to Prester John with him on his voyages up the eastern African coastline.
8. Mercator, legend to world map of 1569.
9. Diego Gutierrez, a cartographer from Spain's Casa de la Contratacion, the government ministry dealing with the possessions in the Americas, cooperated with the Antwerp engraver Hieronymus Cock in producing the map, which comprised six sheets pasted together to form a map of about thirty-six inches by thirty-four inches. Despite its limitations, it was the largest and most authoritative map of America of its time.
10. This was an exaggeration; modern maps show the continent to be some no degrees at its widest point.
11. This argument continued to carry weight until Captain Cook's voyages in the eighteenth century established the true empty vastness of the southern seas.
12. He took this image almost entirely from Jacob Cnoyen, a fourteenth-century traveler from 's Hertogenbosch who claimed to have visited Asia and Africa as well as the Far North. Cnoyen also described four strong currents running north before disappearing into the Earth at the North Pole.
13. Several of the rivers in South America were clearly borrowed from Gutierrez's map.
CHAPTER NINETEEN. Presenting Ptolemy to the World
1. J. L. Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic (London: Dean and Son, 1906), pp. 555-56.
2. Mercator, preface to first volume of Atlas (1589).
3. Mercator to Abraham Ortelius, March 26,1575.
4. Mercator to Abraham Ortelius, November 22, 1570.
5. Ortelius produced a world map in 1564 and a map of Egypt in 1565. Maps of Asia and Spain followed in 1567 and 1570.
6. Van Durme's edition of Mercator's letters shows the two men writing to each other between 1570 and 1580, but they were clearly in touch before and after those dates. The first surviving letter from Mercator refers to earlier correspondence, and Ortelius was in touch with Mercator's son Rumold in 1596.
7. Mercator to Abraham Ortelius, November 22, 1570. This was good advice, well taken—Lazius's map of Hungary appears in later editions of the book.
8. Abraham Ortelius, "To the Courteous Reader," in Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.
9. Ibid.
10. There was little formal copyright protection for authors or artists in the sixteenth century, although Mercator was always at pains to obtain licenses for his maps from the emperor.
11. Apart from maps at Brabant, Holland, Zeeland, Geldria, and Friesland, Van Deventer completed more than two hundred hand-drawn plans of various towns in the Netherlands, which are preserved in atlases in Brussels and Madrid.
12. Mercator made clear in his letter of November 22, 1570, that his criticisms did not refer to the maps in
cluded in the Theatrum for which, he said, Ortelius had "selected the best descriptions of each region." Ortelius, in turn, declared in the book that he believed Mercator was preeminent among the geographers of the time.
13. Mercator to Abraham Ortelius, November 22,1570.
14. Ghim, Vita Mercatoris, p. 188.
15. Mercator to Abraham Ortelius, March 26, 1575.
16. Mercator to Camerarius, August 20, 1575.
17. Mercator to Abraham Ortelius, May 9,1572.
18. Mercator to Johannes Crato von Krafftheim, October 23, 1578.
19. Molanus to Mercator, February 8,1575.
20. Mercator to Johannes Crato von Krafftheim, October 23,1578.
CHAPTER TWENTY. A "ThickMyste of Ignorance" Dispelled
1. Approximately £1.33.
2. William Burrough, Instructions to Arthur Pet and Charles Jack/nan, in Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, Voyages, Trajfiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589 edition).
3. William Burrough, A Dedicatory Epistle... unto his exact and notable mappe of Russia, published in Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations.
4. Mercator to Emperor Maximilian II, February 1569.
5. Ghim, Vita Mercatoris, p. 187.
6. King James would succeed Elizabeth I as James I of England in 1603.
7. William Barlowe, The Navigator's Supply (1597).
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE. The Geography of the World
1. Christopher Hall, in Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations.
2. Hakluyt's advice was later published in his book A Discourse Concerning Western Planting (1584).
3. The story Mercator told came originally from Jacob Cnoyen, the fourteenth-century traveler whose description of the North Pole he had incorporated into his world map of 1569. Cnoyen claimed to have heard about Arthur's expedition from a priest who had served in the court of the king of Norway.
4. Mercator to John Dee, April 1577. Quoted in E. G. R. Taylor, A Letter Dated i$yy from Mercator to John Dee, in Imago Mundi, vol. 13,1955, pp. 55—68.
5. John Dee, General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (London, 1577).
6. A glance at a modern atlas shows why: The only possible way through the great islands north of Canada goes as far north as seventy-four degrees, the fringes of the permanent ice cap, while Russia's Taymyr Peninsula, known to Mercator as Cape Tabin, reaches almost to seventy-eight degrees. Not until the end of the nineteenth century did a Swedish vessel, Baron Nils Nordenskold's Vega, fight a way around it, and a few years after that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen spent three years struggling through the winding passage to the northwest.
7. Hakluyt's original letter to Mercator is lost and could conceivably have been written during May. In any event, it was too late for any reply to be received in London before the expedition departed.
8. Mercator to Richard Hakluyt, July 28,1580.
9. Mercator to Abraham Ortelius, December 12,1580.
10. Ibid. In fact, Drake paid off investors in his expedition at a rate of £47 for every pound. The English court, anxious to play down reports of his piracy and attacks on Spanish settlements in the Americas, would have been keen to encourage rumors of mysterious new trading routes.
11. Taylor, in Tudor Geography, p. 44, notes that reports about Drake's exploits off the coast of Central America—then the most recent reports about his position—were transcribed in the same document as the instructions for the masters of Pet's fleet.
12. Mercator to William Camden, January 31,1579.
13. Mercator to Werner von Gymnich, July 14,1578.
14. Mercator to Ludgerus Heresbachius, March 24,1583.
15. Ibid.
16. Mercator, "Dedicatory Letter," Atlas.
17. Ibid.
18. Henry of Rantzau was well-known as an openhanded patron of scholars and artists across northern Europe, among them the astronomer Tycho Brahe. He was a noted writer and bibliophile in his own right, whose works on astrology featured in John Dee's famous library.
19. Mercator to Henry of Rantzau, December 12,1585.
20. Mercator to Henry of Rantzau, September 7, 1586.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO. The Gathering Dark
1. Jerome de Roda, one of Philip's Council of State in the Netherlands, estimated in a letter to the king that over eight thousand citizens were killed.
2. John Dee to Abraham Ortelius, January 16,1577.
3. He inherited the dukedom on the death of his father in 1586.
4. J. L. Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic AMS, 1973. (Originally published in 1856.)
5. Mercator to Wolfgang Haller, March 23,1582.
6. Mercator to Ludgerus Heresbachius, March 24, 1583.
7. Barbe's birth date is unknown.
8. Mercator to Henry of Rantzau, September 7,1586.
9. Ibid.
10. Ghim, Vita Mercatoris, p. 191.
11. Mercator, preface to Atlas.
12. Ibid.
13. Vedel was a Danish historian and ballad collector, who had also published a collection of over a hundred Danish folk songs from oral and manuscript sources. The map of Iceland had probably been drawn by Gubrandur Thorlaksson, bishop of Holar.
14. At the Arctic, where there were neither maps nor reliable reports from travelers on which to rely, he was forced to fall back on tradition and mythology. The curiously symmetrical inset from the world map of 1569 was enlarged and amended, with its four islands surrounding the great black rock at the pole. Between the islands, with deltas on the outer coastline, four channels carried the "indrawing seas" to the great whirlpool around the rock in which they were sucked into the earth.
15. Ghim, Vita Mercatoris, p. 194.
16. Ibid., p. 188.
17. John William succeeded to the dukedom in 1592.
18. Reiner Solenander to Mercator, July 1,1954.
19. Arnold Mylius to Ortelius, December 26,1594.
AFTERWORD
1. Michael, Arnold's third son, had been working in London with Rumold.
2. A copy of the 1595 edition of the atlas, measuring just over seventeen inches by eleven inches, is held at the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
3. The commercial success of the atlas was at least partly due to Hondius's business sense. Apart from adding his own text, and maps to cover Spain, Africa, Asia, and America, he supervised the production of editions in Dutch, French, German, English, and Latin, and also produced a small-size version, which he named the Atlas Minor.
4. Venus and Jupiter have also been mapped by Mercator's projection.
5. Mercator's authorship of the projection did not prevent him from employing it on his own chart of the Atlantic in 1701. In a legend to the chart, he observed that "from its particular use in navigation [it] ought rather to be named the Nautical, as being the only true and sufficient chart for the sea." Halley's quote, and Mead's immediately following it, are both cited in John P. Snyder, Flattening the Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 293.
6. There is some irony in such accusations of dishonesty from a man with a record like Mead's of dishonesty, trickery, and deception: As a young man, he spent time in prison following the failure of a plot to cheat a twelve-year-old heiress of her property with a fake marriage, and after that he lived under several aliases as he swindled his way around London. Despite his gambling, womanizing, and chicanery, though, he was responsible for ten or more books, maps, and collections of travels for a variety of publishers. And for all his colorful background, his accusation reflected a widespread feeling at the time that Mercator had been wrongly credited with the discovery.
7. Particularly by Jerry Brotton, in his cogent and incisive book Trading Territories (London: Reaktion Books, 1997). He suggests on p. 169, "It could be viewed as the first map to signify, geographically and politically, the triumph of the west."
8. The projection was strikingly similar to one constructed by James Gall, an
Edinburgh clergyman, in the mid—nineteenth century, although Peters always denied having seen the earlier version.
9. The map, designed by Bernard J. Cahill, was constructed on eight triangles arranged in the shape of a butterfly with its wings spread.
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