The World of Gerard Mercator

by Andrew Taylor

  Mercator's writings on the Creation, at least, were finished. It was his final intellectual testament, in which he expressed the belief that had been unshaken since his days as an earnest young student in Leuven: that the study of cosmography, of the heavens and Earth, was directed solely toward the understanding of God's wisdom and goodness. The work in which he had planned to demonstrate the extent of the "marvellous harmony of all things towards God's sole purpose," however, was still incomplete. The Atlas in which he had invested all the hopes of his last years lay unfinished on his desk.

  The church bell tolled, and word began to spread across Duisburg and across Europe that the great man was dead. For his contemporaries, it was a somber but fitting end to a life of scholarly achievement, religious devotion, and civic probity. In his eighty-third year, he had lived to see his children grow and make successes of their lives; he had seen his grandchildren establish themselves as geographers and scholars in the tradition he had started, and even lived to see the birth of his great­grandchildren. Despite his part in the new age of learning that was dawning, he was revered at his death as a scholar in the most ancient traditions. Ironically, the man Ortelius called the Ptolemy of his age had practically forgotten his projection, his great achievement, as a thing of no importance.

  *Edward Grierson, in The Fatal Inheritance—Philip II and the Spanish Netherlands (London: Victor Gollancz, 1969), estimates that by the 1570s, the wars in the Netherlands were eating up some 2 million ducats a year, or nearly twice the revenue from Spain's South American possessions.

  *This region of central Europe stretched east from the Vistula and the Danube.

  Afterword

  WITHIN A FEW MONTHS of his funeral, Mercator's sole surviving son, Rumold, had brought out the final part of his father's three-volume atlas, with its twenty-eight separate maps of England and the Far North. A complete version came out the same year, incorporating the seventy-three maps of the previous two volumes, along with additional ones prepared by Rumold and by Mercator's grandsons Gerard and Michael.1Jean, the third of the grandsons who had worked in Mercator's studio, wrote a personal dedication to his "aged and saintly grandfather." Spain and Portugal were still unmapped, but the book also contained Walter Ghim's reverential biography and the thirty-six-thousand-word commentary on the Creation on which Mercator had been working in his last days.2

  Rumold died before the second edition appeared in 1602, but when the Flemish engraver Jodocus Hondius bought the plates and started to publish his own editions of the atlas with new and updated maps added to the original ones, Mercator's lasting reputation was ensured. Twenty years after he died, the Mercator atlas was still selling across Europe, completely overshadowing the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.*3

  The first edition had also contained a eulogy to Mercator by the Flemish humanist and cartographer Bernardus Furmerius, in which he demonstrated in passing that the achievement of 1569 had not been forgotten. Mercator, he noted, had "gathered together the wide globe of the earth into a map." By the time the second edition was printed, Edward Wright's Certaine Errors had provided the mathematical tables that simplified the use of Mercator's projection for navigators, and it gradually became the most popular projection for marine charts. Contemporary records in Dieppe, the busiest market of the time for charts and navigational equipment, show that by 1630, most of the marine maps on sale there were drawn on the Mercator projection.

  This was what Mercator had wanted; he had designed the projection specifically with the needs of navigation in mind. It has remained the standard for marine navigators for more than four hundred years, and when the spaceship Mariner 9 mapped the surface of Mars in the early 1970s, a Mercator projection was used.4The Ordnance Survey issues maps of the British Isles constructed on the Mercator projection; a version of it was used in the first satellite map of the United States in 1974.

  There was scholarly recognition, too, in the years following Mercator's death. When Oxford University's newly established Bodleian Library was decorated with a frieze of portraits of learned men early in the seventeenth century, reflecting Protestant England's view of the whole field of learning and literature down the ages, Mercator was there among them. A later, less deferential age covered the paintings in plaster and whitewash, but when they were rediscovered by chance in 1949, his face emerged from behind its covering, gazing rather mournfully out into the room. His academic cap, his high lace collar, and his long flowing beard all spoke of intellectual distinction—the archetype of the scholar and wise philosopher. The portrait is still there, high on a wall in one of the world's great libraries. It is the memorial and the place he might have chosen for himself.

  In the years that followed its painting, though, Mercator's face was not an uncontroversial choice. He was known as a scholar and as the author of the great world atlas, but during the next two centuries some claimed that he had stolen the idea for his projection. Writers of the Enlightenment were unwilling to believe that the projection could have been constructed without the supporting mathematical calculations, and they said that the real credit should go to Wright, the English mathematician who refined and explained it. Edmond Halley, the discoverer of the famous comet and a mathematician and cosmographer himself, declared that the projection, "though it generally be called Mercator's[,] was yet undoubtedly Mr Wright's invention."5In 1717, the writer, geographer, and cartographer Bradock Mead said that Mercator, having heard from a too-talkative Wright about the new projection, "Batillus-like, took the invention of it to himself." Batillus was a mediocre Roman versifier who claimed to have written much of Virgil's poetry, until exposed before the emperor Augustus; Mead was accusing Mercator of theft and deceit.6Unjust as they were, there were good nationalistic reasons for such claims; how much more satisfactory it would have been for Halley, Mead, and the London intellectuals of the eighteenth century that the honor should go to a good English mathematician, rather than to a Flemish engraver working in Germany.

  Just as Filippo Brunelleschi had ignored the theoretical explanation of his technique of perspective in the early fifteenth century, so Mercator had turned his back on his projection by failing to provide any theoretical background for it. In explaining it, Wright had performed for him the same service that Leon Battista Alberti had done for the Florentine artist—and in doing so, had nearly cost him the immortality of which he had dreamed.Detail of Mercator from the portraits of The Frieze at the Bodleian Library, Oxford

  One may question whether Mercator's or any map projection can be truly "objective," but there can be no doubting the change of philosophy between the maps Mercator drew and the subjective, impressionistic efforts of the Middle Ages. Only in the mid-nineteenth century did the word scientist begin to have any meaning—more than 250 years after Mercator began concentrating on a cartography based on precise measurement that could be reproduced and relied upon.* He was a scientist before he or anyone else had heard of such a calling; for all the short-comings caused by a lack of knowledge, his maps sought to represent what was, not what might have been.

  Whether the projection succeeds in doing that is a question about which experts still argue. The supporters of different map projections can be blindly partisan, yet no projection can be ideal for every type of map; it is a compromise, not a solution to a problem. Mercator's world map distorts distances and sizes to the north and south, so that, for example, the polar regions appear out of all proportion, and Europe, too, is much bigger than it should be compared with the equatorial regions. Cartographers and mathematicians periodically demand that its use should be abandoned, or at least restricted, in much the same way that linguistic scholars want spelling to be modified and made more logical. It is not only specialists who launch these campaigns; the New York Times on February 21,1943 even declared grandly, "We cannot forever mislead children and even college students with grossly inaccurate pictures of the world."

  Such criticisms were partly a reaction to maps of the British Empire, which were produced al
most exclusively according to the Mercator projection, and on which the distortions of size in the higher latitudes produced gratifyingly large expanses of imperial pink. Objectors also point to the layout of the map, which they say enshrines Pope Alexander's high-handed division of the world into two spheres of influence by presenting a clear split between the Americas in the West and Asia in the East. It has even been argued7 that the map of 1569 was influential in marginalizing Asia in contrast to the overwhelming power of the West—and Mercator was certainly happy to please Philip of Spain by demonstrating the immensity of his domain in the Americas.

  Such a layout, with Europe as the focus of the map, was probably inevitable. Mercator was working within a tradition of European mapmaking that had started when the known world was centered on the Mediterranean. In his day, there was little certainty about the areas most distant from Europe, and even today, the vast spread of the Pacific Ocean is a natural place for cartographers to make the cut that is necessary to lay the world out flat. Other cartographers, from Ptolemy through Martin Wald­seemiiller, had depicted the world as they knew it from a similar viewpoint. It would have been perverse for Mercator to have done differently.

  In any case, the other projections that have been suggested in place of his have their own failings and their own distortions. They, too, can be no more than compromises. In the eighteenth century, for instance, a French hydrographic engineer named Rigobert Bonne developed a projection based on concentric, equally spaced arcs as parallel lines of latitude. There was one central perpendicular meridian, with other lines of longitude becoming increasingly curved to the west and east. All areas on the map were in the correct proportion, but the distortion of shape and direction increased with the distance from the central meridian and central parallel.

  In 1963, an academic geographer from the University of Wisconsin, Arthur Robinson, was asked to solve the crucial problem of Mercator's projection by creating a system of mapping the world that kept the distortion of the size of continents to a minimum. His design, known as the or-thophanic* projection, had curved meridians and straight parallels that were equally spaced between the latitudes of thirty-eight degrees north and thirty-eight degrees south, after which spacing was gradually reduced. It was used in various atlases and a wall map in the United States and elsewhere. The relative sizes of landmasses were accurately portrayed, but their shapes were seriously distorted in the North and South, and as a result the wall map was withdrawn from popular distribution.

  Ten years later, a German historian named Arno Peters offered his own solution, which he claimed produced a more balanced image of the world than the "Euro-centered" Mercator projection, showing the sizes of the continents in the correct proportion to one another. It was not original,8and the claims made on its behalf were hugely inflated, but it won the backing of the Vatican, the World Council of Churches, and the United Nations. They saw it as a representation of the world that was somehow fairer to developing countries—even though it distorted the shape of all the equatorial regions, stretching them along a north-south axis. Far from being more accurately depicted, many of the developing countries were among the most seriously affected.

  Even so, such an alliance of the great and the good, coupled with the natural enthusiasm of the specialists for change, might have seemed irresistible— and yet, in the twenty-first century, the Mercator projection remains the accepted image of the world. Other projections of the past one hundred years have been based on circles, triangles, torus ring segments that have the appearance of a piece cut from a doughnut, and flattened icosahedrons.* None, perhaps, had the bizarre appeal of the Cahill butterfly map of the world patented in 1913 by a California architect,'9 and none challenged the popularity of Mercator's original proposals. Any map projection depends on a suspension of disbelief: Everyone knows that the world is round, not flat, and that it does not really look like the map, and yet Mercator's rectangular image remains in the mind. His map of the world has caught the imagination of the world. Over map projections, as over proposals for spelling reform, argument is futile; the experts may say what they like, but people hold on to what they find attractive, convincing, and familiar. It is Mercator's map that appears on schoolroom walls, in diaries and magazines, and, most important of all, in people's minds. Their approval is the ultimate democracy.

  A modern age may be unwilling to follow Walter Ghim and see Mercator as a saintly figure of scholastic probity. There are questions to be asked today about the genuine objectivity of his vision, and there is no doubt that his desire to please his patrons and to make money for himself sometimes affected his judgment. He might comment tartly on the "saleability" of Ortelius's Theatrum, but he himself deliberately chose the Holy Land as the subject for his first map because it would sell well. He was eager to secure the favor of those who were butchering his coreligionists without mercy, and more than ready to join in the flattery of Charles V, with his map of Flanders, his surveying instruments, and his tiny crystal globe. Throughout his life, Mercator had a keen eye for profit and personal advantage, and he was shameless in seeking out and pleasing the rich and mighty. "Golden gifts" were the currency of his life—some of them from people like Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, whose hands dripped with innocent blood.

  Such criticisms, though, would have been barely understood in the times in which he lived. The astonishing achievement of Gerard Mercator is that, living in the sixteenth century, he defined the world for ordinary people in a way that remains current in the twenty-first. His projection was a triumph of modern thought in a world still concentrating on the wisdom of ancient times—and it survived. Modern mapmaking began with Mercator of Rupelmonde; today, more than four centuries later, his vision remains the prevailing worldview. It has its limitations, but if any moderately educated person at the start of the third millennium is asked to imagine a world map, the picture in his or her mind, allowing for the geographic discoveries of four hundred years, will be that of Mercator's projection.

  Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and scores of other daring mariners of spirit and imagination pushed back the shadows and found new lands for their countrymen to conquer. Gerard Mercator, hunched over his desk in Duisburg, redrew the world and hung it on the wall.

  *The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first use of scientist in 1840.

  *Orthophamc means "correct-appearing."

  *An icosahedron is a twenty-faced three-dimensional figure.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER ONE. Pushing Back Shadows

  1. The Saga of Erik the Red records an expedition led by Leif Eriksson around the year AD iooo that landed on a warm, wooded coast far to the west, which he called Vin-land. It is now believed to have been somewhere along the Atlantic coast of eastern or northeastern Canada.

  2. Alexandrian merchants traded with the people of Taprobane, and although Ptolemy believed the island was several times larger than it really is, and mistakenly positioned it on the equator, he was able to include the positions of five rivers and nineteen towns in his detailed description.

  3. Ezekiel 27: 12-14.

  4. Claudius Ptolemy, Geographia, book 1, chapter 5.

  5. Ibid., book 2, chapter i.

  6. Abu al-Qasim Muhammad ibn Haukal, The Boo of Roads and Kingdoms, cited in The Oriental Geography of Ibn Haukal, ed. Sir William Ousley (London, 1800), p. 4.

  7. Al Idrisi, Opus Geographicum, cited in Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1982), pp. 147—48.

  8. "Thus saith the Lord God; This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the midst of the nations and countries that are round about her." (Ezekiel, 5.5)

  9. The map was probably drawn by an obscure churchman, Richard of Halding-ham, sometime around 1280. It is on permanent display now on the wall of a specially built exhibition room at the cathedral, protected, as befits an irreplaceable treasure, behind the glass front of a stone cabinet and under subdued lighting.

  CHAPTER TWO. Forgotten Wisdom

&nb
sp; I, Eratosthenes noted that in Syene, or Aswan, the Sun was directly overhead at the summer solstice. At Alexandria, which he assumed to be five hundred miles due north, a vertical stake in the ground cast a shadow at an angle of 7.2 degrees, or one-fiftieth of a circle. From that, he deduced that the distance between the two cities—which he knew to be five hundred miles—was one-fiftieth of the circumference of the world. That gave him an answer of twenty-five thousand miles. He mistakenly took the Earth to be a perfect sphere, and his other assumptions were slightly inaccurate—Alexandria is not due north of Aswan, and the distance between the two is slightly less than five hundred miles—but his answer was remarkably close to the accepted figure of 24,899 miles.

  2. Ptolemy, Geographia, book 1, chapter 22.

  3. Recent historical study suggests that the Royal Observatory could actually have been based in the nearby port of Lagos.

  4. The globe has never left the town, although in the 1930s Behaim's descendants were about to sell it to a private buyer in America—until Adolf Hitler intervened. Hitler ordered that it should be sold instead to the museum as a monument to German skill, artistry, and ingenuity. Cruella de Ville has a replica of it in Walt Disney's version of The Hundred and One Dalmatians, and another appears in the 2001 film Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone.

  5. Christopher Columbus, Prologue lo Journal of the First Voyage, cited in S. E. Mori-son, Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (New York: Heritage, 1963), pp. 47—48.