*Wright had been first a student and then a lecturer at Cambridge University, and was considered one of the leading mathematicians of his age. He made several trips to sea and became navigational adviser to the East India Company, the challenge and profit of exploration tempting another mathematician to put his skills to profitable use. He was, according to one contemporary, Mark Ridley (in his book, A short treatise of magnetical bodies and motions, 1613, cited in Taylor, Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography [London: Methuen, 1934D, "a very skilful and painful man in the Mathematics, a worthy reader of the art of Navigation for the East India Company."
Chpater Twenty-one
The Geography
of the World
THE COPY OF THE "great mappe universal" of 1569 that accompanied the Yorkshire-born explorer Sir Martin Frobisher on his 1576 expedition to the Far North was not Mercator's only contribution to the search for a northern route to the Spice Islands; his name, adroitly manipulated by John Dee at Queen Elizabeth's court, was largely responsible for the official backing Frobisher received for two further expeditions.
From that first expedition, Frobisher brought back to England a captured Inuit fisherman, whose "oriental" appearance seemed to offer exciting new evidence for the existence of a northwest passage. Frobisher's pilot, Christopher Hall, declared excitedly that the people of the northern Americas were "like to Tartars, with long black hair, broad faces, and flat noses."1To add to the excitement, Frobisher also brought back samples of a black rock that seemed to be threaded with veins of gold.
In England, John Dee put not just his arguments but also twenty-five pounds of his own money behind Frobisher's efforts to raise funds for a second expedition in 1577. Apart from the lure of gold in the frozen soil, Dee and other investors were tempted by the potential for profitable new trade routes, while Elizabeth herself saw the possibility of new foreign possessions, which, scholars declared, would bring not only international esteem but also great riches. "Without sword drawn, we shall cut the comb of the French, of the Spanish, of the Portingal, and of enemies, and of doubtful friends, to the abating of their wealth and force, and to the great saving of the wealth of the realm," she was told by the clergyman and geographer Richard Hakluyt.2
To support the case for another expedition, Dee turned to Mercator. Just as the Portuguese had established their dominance by building coastal settlements on the way to the Indies, so the English could set up way stations in the Far North, ran the argument Dee and others put forward before Queen Elizabeth at Windsor Castle in 1577. Pope Alexander's decree and the Treaty of Tordesillas meant that such settlements west of his line would infringe on the rights of the king of Spain—except, Dee declared triumphantly, that the English had established their right of occupation hundreds of years before. That was the considered opinion of his esteemed friend, the famous Gerard Mercator.
In 1577, he produced a letter from Duisburg in which Mercator repeated stories of an ancient expedition led by the great King Arthur himself, which had set out into the northern seas during the sixth century.3 Four thousand men had traveled with King Arthur, the letter said, though none returned. Mercator's letter maintained that Arthur had "conquered the Northern Islands and made them subject to him."4 Dee told the queen excitedly that these English colonists had established a prior claim to several territories that the pope had awarded to the Spanish and Portuguese. Inconveniently, he admitted, no trace had ever been found of their settlements on the islands in the Far Northwest; but according to ancient sources that Mercator had consulted, their descendants had visited the court of the king of Norway more than eight centuries later.
As history, Mercator's letter is less than convincing, but it allowed Dee to use his name as evidence to persuade a willing queen of the justice of British claims to establish an empire of their own. Mercator was interested in what the accounts of Arthur's expedition told him about the geography of the northern seas and the people who had sailed them, but Dee had a clear political motive, and on the basis of these accounts and similar stories he constructed a series of proposals for a new and adventurous English foreign policy. Even though England was overshadowed by the great military and mercantile strength of Spain, Portugal, and France, Elizabeth could build a navy, which would enable her mariners and explorers to create a "Brytish Impire"abroad, he said.5It seemed a far-fetched idea, but with Francis Drake already preparing his flotilla of five ships for their voyage to America and around the world, Dee's impassioned optimism and Mercator's more measured encouragement were exactly what the queen wanted to hear.
Her hopes, and Dee's, were doomed to disappointment. Three expeditions in successive years headed by Frobisher ended in disappointment and financial scandal; in the end, there was no northwest passage to be found,6and no easily won empire either. Not until the seventeenth century was a sustained effort made to establish English settlements on the American mainland.
Amid the disillusionment that followed Frobisher's failure, attention shifted once again to the Northeast and the possibility of battling through the ice floes north of Russia. An expedition was prepared in London under the leadership of Arthur Pet, an experienced captain on the Muscovy trading routes that had been established after the early expeditions of the 1550s. Mercator was almost certainly aware of the plans from an early stage. His son Rumold, still in England, had struck up a friendship with the geographer Richard Hakluyt. Investors had asked Hakluyt for any information he could gather to improve the expedition's chances of success, and he eventually wrote to his friend's father in Duisburg.
The letter, though, was almost certainly written, and certainly received, after the expedition sailed in May 1580.7 It was hardly a genuine request for information; perhaps Hakluyt simply wanted to show the investors that he had left no stone unturned in his inquiries, and was writing to Mercator to reassure the investors rather than to guide the sailors; or perhaps his letter was simply an afterthought.
Whatever the reason, there is no mistaking the tartness of Mercator's reply. "Sir," he wrote, with unaccustomed directness, "I felt great displeasure. . . . I would greatly have wished that your Arthur Pet should have been warned of many important matters before his departure." He went on to demonstrate exactly what firm information he could have provided, describing in detail the island of Nova Zembla,* which earlier expeditions had sighted, and the promontory of Cape Tabin beyond, which ancient accounts described as jutting far out into the frozen sea. Around the cape, he warned, lay "many rocks, which make navigation very difficult and dangerous." Even so, he declared, "The voyage to Cathaio by the east is doubtless very easy and short." In return for his advice, Mercator said, as he always did, that he would welcome information about the coastlines and tides in that region; perhaps Frobisher could give him information also about his voyages in the Northwest, he added hopefully.8
What little hope of cooperation he had would vanish over the following weeks, and not only because of the lateness of the letter he had been sent. He was convinced that important new discoveries were being kept from him. News of Pet's expedition had thrown him into a frenzy of frustrated suspicion, and in December he wrote to Ortelius, who was in London, that he believed its secret aim had been to meet Drake's flotilla as it returned from the East by a secret northern route. There had been many rumors about Drake, who had been away for three years, and it was widely believed that his expedition must have been lost, but Mercator believed a journey around Russia's northern coastline was perfectly possible, despite the savage, icy conditions previous explorers had faced.
He said he had received a secret tip-off months before about Drake's returning fleet, which was indeed making its way back toward Plymouth, completing the first circumnavigation of the world since Magellan's ill-fated voyage fifty-five years before, as Pet's ships set sail on their speculative trip north. Perhaps Hakluyt or John Dee had given him this information, or one of Rumold's acquaintances—Mercator's youngest son was assiduous in maintaining his contacts in the geographi
c world of London. With the same discretion that had marked his dealings with the mysterious figure who had commissioned the map of Britain sixteen years before, Mercator told Ortelius simply that "someone wrote to me from England." The information had come, he said, under an oath of secrecy, but this time it was an oath he was prepared to break if doing so might bring him new information.9
Pet had left in May, and Drake arrived in September, his ships groaning with plundered Spanish bullion. Mercator urged Ortelius to do all he could to ferret out the truth. "Hide that you know anything, but meanwhile, fish around among your friends to see what you can find out," he told him. "If there are many people asking questions, they cannot lie so splendidly that the truth won't leak out." The English, he added with some justification, had always concealed the routes of their expeditions for as long as they could because they made such huge profits from them. The vast amounts of gold and silver that Drake had brought back seemed to Mercator to put the matter beyond question: "They have concealed the route of this voyage with such zeal, and they have talked about the expedition in such different ways, that I believe they have found the greatest riches that have ever been discovered by Europeans, not to mention the Indians who have sailed the oceans. A great proof to me of this point is that huge treasure of silver and precious stones, which they pretend, as I suspect, to have seized as booty."10
His suspicions were unfounded; in fact, Drake had taken the traditional route home around the southern tip of Africa. But though Mercator was mistaken to suggest that the journey would be easy and short—such words would not have been recognized by the explorers in the northern seas and hardly fitted with his own warnings about Cape Tabin—his information about Pet's expedition and its objectives had been startlingly close to the truth. Pet had indeed been given details of what was known of Drake's position in the hope he might meet the flotilla somewhere in the Pacific Ocean."11
It was a disappointing outcome for everyone. Of the two ships of Pet's expedition, one went down with all hands off the coast of Norway, while the other limped back to England with its crew almost dead from exposure and exhaustion. The expedition marked the end of English interest in the search for a northern passage and dashed Mercator's hopes for obtaining exciting information to be incorporated into his new geography of the world.
What he saw as duplicity on the part of the "lying" English must have been frustrating for him as he continued to gather material for the atlas. The work was all-consuming. The same letter that urged Ortelius to spy out details of Pet's expedition included a description of Mercator's efforts to acquire a newly printed map of France and also his account of a world map he had managed to borrow. It was, he said, "big, but crudely drawn,"yet included parts of the Far East that had clearly been "described from information from merchants."
ARNOLD HAD TAKEN OVER many of the responsibilities of overseeing his father's workshop, producing and packing up the globes that remained the mainstay of the business—Christopher Plantin, in Antwerp, was paying some thirty-six florins for a pair—but Mercator had little time on his hands. The correspondence with Dee, the researches described in his letter to Ortelius, and the daunting timetable he had set himself—only one of the five books of the planned Cosmographia was complete, and he was nearly seventy years old—all suggest a man desperately concentrating on his studies. Little wonder, then, that Mercator should apologize to an English correspondent for his delay in writing to him: "I have had so many different matters to deal with."12
With Ptolemy's maps finally off his desk, he turned his attention to his ultimate priority, the new geography of the world, which would bring together the current state of geographic knowledge in a collection of maps drawn by his own hand, designed to fit together as a coherent image of the entire world. In a letter written in 1578, around the time of the publication of Ptolemy's maps, he estimated that such a project would comprise a total of around a hundred maps—nearly four times as many as had appeared in the edition of Ptolemy.13
The engraving was beyond him, because of his weakening hands and eyes—he told a friend in a letter of 1583 that he was unable to make out individual characters even in broad daylight14—but the researching, designing, and drawing of the maps themselves were all his own work. They were the product of years of checking and crosschecking, reconciling the different regional maps from various hands that Mercator had collected in his study.
As he worked, the task grew bigger, not smaller. All his life, in his promises to clients and sponsors, he had underestimated how long his various projects would take him to complete, and in this one, each new map he consulted brought more details to be incorporated into his finished collection. By 1583, he was estimating that covering Germany alone would require about twenty separate maps; after those were completed, he would turn to "Italy, Spain, England, and other lands."15
By this time, he had decided that the collection would have to be brought out piecemeal. Money may have been a factor in his decision, but there was also the implicit realization that he was getting older, and his time was limited. When the first set of maps appeared, in 1585, covering France, Germany, and Mercator's own homeland in the Low Countries, a note in the introduction left no doubt how the work was weighing down the aging cartographer: "The entire work is upon my shoulders alone, and there is no one to help me, except for the engravers of the plates."16
The whole appearance of the collection was different from the edition of Ptolemy he had published seven years before. The dragons and monsters that had decorated Ptolemy's maps were gone, replaced by a sober, realistic view of the Earth. France, in particular, covered by seven separate maps, had a thriving tradition of its own regional cartography, but it had never been so thoroughly represented. In the Theatrum, Ortelius had provided a collection of maps by different hands and without a single theme, but Mercator's were drawn in a consistent style, in such a way that readers could move easily from one to another. "All those places that lie closest to the edges of each map are found again in the next map . . . so that the voyages and journeys from one to another can be easily seen as if there were a single map with both places," he explained in the dedication. Just as his world map had been intended for navigators as well as scholars, so this collection was practical as well as decorative.
This first volume contained fifty-one maps—more than he had drawn in his life until then, but only half of what he had to do. The geography of the world, which had been planned as just one part of the great Cosmographia, was taking on a life of its own. Sixteen years after he had first set out his ideas for a five-part synthesis of knowledge, he had changed his scheme for the work; but far from trimming back his ambitions to a more manageable scale, he had added an extra book. A sixth volume, he said, would deal with the history of humankind on Earth, from the first biblical inhabitants, by studying "the genealogies of princes from the creation of the world."17
Over the next few years, he started his detailed researches for this book alongside the work he was doing in drawing together the maps for the next volume of his modern geography. In his seventies, he was working more frenziedly than ever before. Within days of finishing his first volume of maps, he wrote to Henry of Rantzau, the aristocratic governor of the province of Holstein (some two hundred miles to the northeast of Duisburg),18to ask for help with the next. Henry had promised him advice on the borders of Sweden, presumably from maps in his own extensive collection, and Mercator took the opportunity to spell out his new plan. "Your Illustrious Dignity will see how I propose to describe kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities and dominions not only geographically but also politically, so that the order and power of the ruling nobility, the governance of the dominions, and the civic status should be visible," he wrote. There was also a personal note for Henry: "In the maps of Denmark, I hope that by the help of my work, the glory of your name will soon be celebrated as someone who has had a large part in the governance of the kingdom."19
The egregious flattery did not miss its mark
. A few months later, he wrote again to thank Henry not just for the two maps of Sweden that he had sent, but also for a "golden gift" that had accompanied them: "I give and will give eternal thanks to your generosity and, God willing, I will show this to your honour and will preserve the memory and testimony of your kindness to me."20
The accuracy and precision of the maps he had drawn so far were not in doubt, but in one sense they gave a misleading impression of the lands they represented. Spread out on the page, the Netherlands and Germany had an air of stability and calm; there was no hint of the bloody violence that had swept across Mercator's homeland, and which was soon to threaten to engulf him.
*Nova Zembla, which separates the Barents Sea from the Kara Sea, is now known by its Russian name of Novaya Zemlya (New Land). It is actually an archipelago rather than a single island, with two main islands and a number of smaller ones.
Chpater Twenty-two
The Gathering Dark
THE NEWS FROM the Netherlands, where the duke of Alva's reign of terror had brought no lasting peace, had been bad for years. Over the last two decades, there had been repeated uprisings against the Spanish repression and massacres. King Philip, horrified not just by the bloodshed of Alva's warfare and executions, but also by the staggering cost to his treasury,* had removed the duke from the Netherlands in 1573, and tried to engage the nationalist rebels in negotiation, but it was too late. The Protestant revolt, under the charismatic prince of Orange, swept across the northern and eastern areas of the Low Countries. Towns that had been brutalized and cowed by Alva's soldiers declared their allegiance to the Protestant cause once more, and the bloodletting continued throughout the 1570s, often without any clear strategic pattern. In Antwerp, pillaged by mutinous Spanish troops in November of 1576 in what became known as the Spanish Fury, thousands of citizens were put to the sword in four days.1In a letter to Ortelius, who had managed to avoid the slaughter, John Dee observed from London that the Netherlands were being "torn to pieces" by the fighting,2 and in 1578, a new governor-general was installed—Alexander Farnese, the future duke of Parma,3a man whose brutality would easily match that of Alva or Granvelle. He was about to make Dee's observation come true.
The World of Gerard Mercator Page 24
