Much of the map’s geographical detail of America relies on what it knows of Vespucci’s voyages, but its frame remains Ptolemaic in ways that satisfied the Gymnasium’s beliefs. The map’s peculiar, bulb-like appearance and its pronounced graticule is the outcome of an attempt here to map the world by modifying the second projection described by Ptolemy in his Geography. Waldseemüller’s decision to adopt Ptolemy’s projection shows a mapmaker returning to classical models of representation to understand and then describe the contours of a newly emerging world. Prior to the geographical expansion of the known world in the fifteenth century, mapmakers were able simply to depict the particular hemisphere which they inhabited without seriously addressing the problems of projecting the circular globe upon a plane surface. Columbus’s and Vespucci’s voyages to the Americas presented mapmakers with precisely this problem of depicting both eastern and western hemispheres on a flat map, and their contemporaries quickly grasped the conundrum. Writing in 1512, the Nuremberg scholar Johannes Cochlaeus admitted that ‘truly the dimension of the earth as now inhabited is much greater than these ancient geographers described it’. He could have been describing the Universalis cosmographia when he continued:
For beyond the Ganges the immense countries of the Indies stretch out, with the largest island of the East: Japan. Africa is also said to extend far beyond the Tropic of Capricorn. Beyond the mouth of the river Don there is also a good deal of inhabited land as far as the Arctic Sea. And what about the new land of Americus, quite recently discovered, which is said to be bigger than the whole of Europe? Hence we must conclude that we must now allow for wider limits, both in longitude and latitude, to the habitable earth.31
There were three possible geographical responses to this problem, each of them represented in the book, map and globe gores published by Waldseemüller and his colleagues. The first possibility was to depict both hemispheres, which is what we see at the top of the Universalis cosmographia. The second was to split the world into discrete parts, rather like the globe gores printed to accompany the map and its introductory textbook. The final possibility was to create a projection that tried to represent as much of the globe as possible on a flat map, while minimizing the distortion of land at its edges. On the Universalis cosmographia this is achieved by once again turning to Ptolemy, and reproducing a version of his second projection.
Ptolemy pointed out in the Geography that the second projection was more ambitious than his first because it ‘was more like the shape on the globe than the former map’, and therefore ‘superior’, although harder to draw than his first projection.32 This second projection retained the illusion of the sphericity of the terrestrial globe by drawing the horizontal parallels as circular arcs, and the vertical meridians as curved. This created the impression of viewing the earth from space, where the eye in effect ‘sees’ a globular hemisphere. Looking straight on, the viewer perceives the great circle of the central meridian as a straight line, with the other meridians appearing on either sides of this meridian as equally balanced arcs, growing increasingly curved the further east and west they stretch. Similarly, the vertical parallels, which are in effect circles running right round the globe, are shown as concentric circular arcs.33
Waldseemüller and his colleagues adopted Ptolemy’s second projection as the best model they knew to represent the world as a globe, but this required substantial modification of the projection and its global surface area. The Waldseemüller map extended Ptolemy’s latitudinal parallels to 90° N and 40° S, allowing another 50° in which to represent the recent voyages of exploration from north to south, particularly those down the coast of Africa and into the Indian Ocean. This was significant enough, but along its east–west longitudinal axis Waldseemüller’s departure from Ptolemy was even more innovative. Although the map retained Ptolemy’s prime meridian running through the Canary Islands, it doubled Ptolemy’s breadth of the known world, increasing it to 270° E and 90° W. This allowed for the portrayal of North and South America in the west and Japan in the east, but it also led to serious distortion at its furthest longitudinal limits.
The results of this turn to Ptolemy were not always successful, but even their limitations suggest some intriguing puzzles. As Waldseemüller and his team were unable to use modern mathematical equations to plot their graticule, their solutions were uneven and discontinuous, which is perhaps why the meridians on the map seem to be segmented rather than smooth arcs running south from the equator, especially at their eastern and westernmost extents (although another more prosaic possibility is that the bottom left- and right-hand woodblocks were simply too small to retain the smooth curvature of the meridians, leading to the abrupt change in angle). Similar problems are also visible in the depiction of North and South America, with their unrealistic, angular coastlines. Until recently, scholars have assumed that they simply represent an inability to project land any further. Recent ‘cartometric’ analysis by John Hessler in the Geography and Map Division at the Library of Congress, uses methods of computation to assess the map’s depiction of terrain, and claims that these regions of the map look as they do, not because of lack of geographical information, but because of the serious distortion caused by the partial adaptation and elongation of Ptolemy’s second projection.34 Hessler shows that if we take into account the distortion caused by Ptolemy’s projection, the map’s representation of America and in particular its western Pacific coast is startlingly accurate. This is all the more perplexing given that the map predates Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s first European sighting of the Pacific in 1513, and Magellan’s crossing of the Pacific in 1520. Hessler can only conclude that the Gymnasium had access to maps and geographical information that have since been lost, although why they would wish to remain silent about their sources for describing a whole new continent and ocean remains a mystery.
In its written descriptions, its accompanying introductory textbook and its incorporation of Ptolemy’s second projection, the Gymnasium’s publications accommodated the slow and contradictory information about the ‘discovery’ of new lands within the prevailing classical theories of the known world. The result was an impressive publication, but one which implicitly conceded that it was only offering a snapshot of how the rapidly evolving world of 1507 looked. Its various facets – world map, globe gores, textbook – offered different perspectives on how to look at and understand this changing world. Waldseemüller boasted that the map was ‘scattered throughout the world not without glory and praise’.35
The map’s subsequent impact was certainly ‘scattered’, but also decidedly mixed. Waldseemüller later claimed that 1,000 copies of the Universalis cosmographia were printed. This was not an unusual figure for the time, but certainly a large one for such a complicated printing job. However, only one allusion to an acquisition of the map survives, and even that cannot be definitely said to refer to the Universalis cosmographia. In August 1507 the Benedictine scholar Johann Trithemius wrote that he had recently ‘purchased cheaply a handsome terrestrial globe of small size lately printed at Strasbourg, and at the same time a large map of the world containing the islands and countries recently discovered by the Spaniard [sic], Americus Vespucius, in the western sea’.36 If this is the Universalis cosmographia, it is hardly celebrated as a revolutionary artefact: Trithemius seemed more pleased with his cheap, novel globe. Other mapmakers copied the map and adopted its naming of America, including Peter Apian’s 1520 world map (which dates the continent’s discovery to 1497), and Sebastian Münster, who called the region ‘America’ and ‘Terra nova’ on his world map of 1532, and then ‘America or the island of Brazil’ in a subsequent 1540 map. It was only in 1538 that Gerard Mercator first applied the term to the entire continent, but he dropped the name when it came to plotting his famous world map in 1569 (see Chapter 7). By the end of the sixteenth century the name finally acquired universal geographical and toponymical status, thanks to German and Dutch mapmakers who needed a name to describe th
e continent and one which avoided ascribing it to a particular empire (some maps referred to it as ‘New Spain’) or religion (other maps labelled it ‘Land of the Holy Cross’). In the end, the name ‘America’ endured, not because of any agreement as to who discovered it, but because it was the most politically acceptable term available.
Even Waldseemüller himself had second thoughts about using the term ‘America’. Following the publication of the Cosmographia introductio and the Universalis cosmographia, he and Ringmann continued with the project to complete a new edition of Ptolemy’s Geography. Despite Ringmann’s death in 1511, Waldseemüller carried on with the edition, which was published by the printer Johannes Schott in Strasbourg in 1513. Here, the region previously labelled ‘America’ becomes an enormous ‘Terra incognita’, poised ambiguously between an island and a continent, noticeably denied a western coastline in case subsequent voyages re-established a connection with Asia. Not only is ‘America’ wiped from the map, so is Vespucci: the map’s legend reads, ‘This land with the adjoining islands was discovered through the Genoese Columbus by order of the King of Castile.’37
Perhaps Ringmann was the driving force behind the decision to put ‘America’ on the 1507 Universalis cosmographia all along (he initially edited Vespucci’s Mundus Novus and, it has been argued, took primary responsiblity for writing the Cosmographia introductio). Maybe his death in 1511 liberated Waldseemüller from having to reproduce a region and nomenclature in which he never really believed.38 But it is more likely that Waldseemüller’s decision to drop the term ‘America’ from all his subsequent maps was a response to the publication of another collection of travel narratives which he consulted, entitled Paesi novamenti retrovati (‘Lands Recently Discovered’). This collection was published in Vicenza in 1507, but only reached Germany in 1508, when it was translated as Newe unbekanthe landte (‘New Unknown Lands’). The book arrived too late to change the primacy of Vespucci’s discoveries on the Universalis cosmographia, but it did allow Waldseemüller to adopt its chronology of discovery in all his subsequent maps. The Paesi argued for Columbus’s first voyage of 1492 as the prime moment of discovery, followed by Pedro Cabral and his landing in Brazil in 1500, and then Vespucci, whose first landfall was dated 1501, rather than 1497.39 In his later work Waldseemüller seems to have continued to rely on Ptolemy’s geographical frame while cautiously introducing new information whenever it reached him until his death some time between 1520 and 1522. The irony is that, having originally been involved in putting ‘America’ on the map in 1507, Waldseemüller died having apparently retracted his belief in its name and its status as a separate land mass; and even the 1507 map kept its options open by referring to the continent as an ‘island’.
• • •
There was one further moment of ‘discovery’ left to come. In the summer of 1901 the German Jesuit Father Joseph Fischer was granted permission by Count Waldburg-Wolfegg to examine Wolfegg Castle’s collection of historical documents. As he sifted through the castle’s archive, he came across an early sixteenth-century bound portfolio owned by the Nuremberg scholar Johannes Schöner (1477–1547). It contained a star chart by the German artist Albrecht Dürer, celestial globe gores made by Schöner (both dated 1515), Waldseemüller’s 1516 world map, and the only known surviving copy of all twelve sheets of the 1507 world map. To find any one of these artefacts was exciting: to discover four at the same time made it one of the most important coups in the history of cartography. Fischer knew he had found one of the great lost maps of the Renaissance. He rushed an academic article into print on the subject, claiming that this was the lost map discussed in the Cosmographia introductio, and the very first printed version to come off the press. This was quickly followed by a facsimile edition of the newly discovered 1507 and 1516 maps, published in 1903 as The World Maps of Waldseemüller (Ilacomilus) 1507 & 1516.
Fischer’s recovery of what he described as the first map of the new continent, attributed to Waldseemüller, did not meet with universal approval. By the late nineteenth century the provenance and originality of rare books and antique maps had become a lucrative business, particularly in North America, where wealthy philanthropists began to endow museums and cultural institutions in an attempt to turn the study of American history into an internationally respected discipline. One such figure was John Carter Brown (1797–1874), an avid collector who endowed a library named after him which is now attached to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, dedicated to the study of ‘Americana’. Brown’s most trusted adviser, with responsibility for the library’s book and map acquisitions, was Henry N. Stevens. In 1893 Stevens acquired a copy of Waldseemüller’s 1513 edition of Ptolemy. Although the world map it contained was similar in most respects to those reproduced in all the other copies of the 1513 Ptolemy, this one contained a particularly vital addition: the southern continent in the western hemisphere was inscribed with the word ‘America’. Stevens believed that the map was by Waldseemüller, but made in 1506. He was by implication claiming to have ‘discovered’ the long-lost world map discussed by Waldseemüller and Ringmann in the Cosmographia introductio.
Fig. 17 Detail of America from Waldseemüller, world map dated 1506 by Henry N. Stevens.
Stevens’s claim was prejudiced by the fact he was trying to sell his map to the John Carter Brown Library for £1,000 (on which Stevens also stood to earn a 5 per cent commission from the library). In the spring of 1901 Stevens submitted a report explaining his reasons for dating the map to 1506, based on examination of its paper, watermarks, type and toponymy. He concluded that the map was inserted in a copy of the 1513 Ptolemy, and was an experimental design for the proposed edition on which the Gymnasium Vosagense was working in 1505–6. The library was satisfied that they were buying the first map naming America, and purchased it in May 1901. It still resides there today. Just six months later Fischer announced his discovery at Wolfegg, which he quickly labelled ‘the oldest map with the name America of the year 1507’. Stevens needed to move quickly to avoid professional embarrassment. His response was to launch into correspondence with the John Carter Brown Library, offering to help buy the Wolfegg map, while also still asserting confidently that his map was earlier than Fischer’s. He also persuaded various scholars and curators in the field to write apparently disinterested academic articles claiming that the map he had sold to the Carter Brown collection predated Fischer’s discovery. Privately, Stevens revealed both his scholarly fears and a certain amount of national prejudice when he wrote at one point that ‘I sincerely hope the Germans keep the darned thing. I wish they had never discovered it.’40
Just like his early twenty-first-century descendant, the incumbent prince, Max Waldburg-Wolfegg, initially expressed interest in selling his map, and in 1912 shipped it to London to be insured by Lloyds for £65,000, before offering it to the Library of Congress for $200,000 (worth $4 million in 2003). The library declined the offer. In 1928 Stevens returned to the fray to reassert the primacy of ‘his’ map, in a book reiterating his claims that the Carter Brown map was printed in 1506. It was based on his interpretation of the letters written by Waldseemüller and other members of the Gymnasium Vosagense in 1507 that a world map describing newly discovered regions of the world ‘has been hurriedly prepared’ for publication. Stevens concluded that ‘his’ map was printed in 1506, just before the far grander twelve-sheet Universalis cosmographia.
Subsequent debate was sceptical about Stevens’s conclusions. Several scholars pointed out that the paper and type used in the making of Stevens’s map were also used in books published as late as 1540; it was unlikely that the Gymnasium Vosagense would have produced a map in 1506 more geographically accurate than the supposedly later Universalis cosmographia. Writing in 1966, the distinguished map historian R. A. Skelton conceded that the Stevens map was probably printed in the same year as the Universalis cosmographia, but that no amount of technical analysis of paper, type or other such technica
l specifications would ever definitely resolve the debate over their exact chronology. There was one final intriguing twist in 1985, when the curator Elizabeth Harris conducted a detailed typographic analysis of the Wolfegg map rediscovered by Fischer. Harris analysed the map’s paper, watermarks and woodblocks, which showed splits. This was usually a sign of repeated printing, which displayed noticeable blurring in the lettering. Harris concluded that the Wolfegg map was not the first printed version of 1507, and that it was in fact a later version, using the original woodblocks, but printed no earlier than 1516, and possibly much later.41
If true, Harris’s conclusions reveal that the only known copy of the Universalis cosmographia was actually printed at least nine years later than the date of the original woodblocks. This does not necessarily cast doubt on its original creation in 1507, but it does mean that the Library of Congress possesses a map physically printed around 1516, possibly later than the first printing of Stevens’s map. Such conclusions further complicate any attempts to claim primacy or originality when it comes to printed maps. Rather like the debate over whether Columbus or Vespucci first ‘discovered’ America, the controversy over which map first named America as a continent is ultimately a matter of interpretation. Having lost the original woodblocks and first impression of the Universalis cosmographia, should Stevens’s map in the John Carter Brown Library be given preference as the ‘first’ map to name America, even if scholarship remains unable to definitively date its creation to 1506, or even 1507? Both the John Carter Brown Library and the Library of Congress retain vested institutional and financial interests in the primacy of their maps: the US taxpayer would presumably be unimpressed if it knew that half the cost of a map acquired for $10 million by the national library with public money was predated by another map in a private library in Rhode Island, which cost just $1,000 in 1901.
A History of the World in 12 Maps Page 23
