[QUOTE=treis]
I guess I don’t see what these guys see in this map. North America is non-existant, and the only thing correct about South America is where explorers had already been. In the article they wonder about how he knew about the Pacific ocean, but the obvious answer is that they knew about it from Asia. Many Europeans had been to Asia and back, and it takes no leap of logic to assume that they had heard or even saw the Pacific ocean. The Asians would have known if they were connected to another big land mass to the east. Besides, the Pacific ocean is much smaller than it should be, and there is no clear connection between the Atlantic and Pacific shown south of South America.
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I’m a grad student in Geographic and Cartographic Sciences, and John Hebert came to talk to one of my classes this semester about historical cartography. The article basically covers the same stuff he said (he was a fascinating speaker).
You’re right, Europeans knew about the existence of the “western ocean” now called the Pacific (and they also had known for a LONG time that the world was round, even though Magellan didn’t circumnavigate it until 1520 – it was only the occasional raving nutjob who still insisted on a flat earth, which is a really interesting topic of discussion in its own right). So the depiction of an ocean west of the Americas is no surprise at all. As for the size of the Pacific, most geographers at the time were going off of Ptolemy’s measurements of the size of the world, and he had underestimated the circumference of the globe by quite a bit (one reason why Columbus remained convinced for so long that he had found Asia, long after the rest of the folks in Europe realized that there was something else altogether going on. Columbus was a bit of a raving nutjob himself…). “Squishing” North America and the Pacific comes from this-- they didn’t yet know how big North America was, and had to recalculate things that had been taken for granted for centuries. It took a long time for North America to “fill out” on the maps (for example, California was being depicted as an island for another hundred years or so, I believe).
The really revolutionary thing here is how accurate the shape of South America is. I think one of the main things that throws modern folks off when they look at the Waldseemuller map is the map projection: this is one of Ptolemy’s projections (he basically invented the concept IIRC) and was one of the ones in wide use at the time. (In review, what garygnu said.) Take a look at the intersection of the grid lines over South America-- see how skewed they are? If you were to stretch them out so that they became rectangular, you would see something almost identical to the South America you see on modern world maps.
That is what’s so incredibly, jaw-droppingly revolutionary here. The width of SA is accurate to within 70 miles? Holy crap! Columbus only discovered that there WAS an America 15 years ago, and he was convinced he was in Asia! To do mapping that accurate, they must have had a lot more information, and be working a lot more quickly, than we gave the early explorers credit for-- because the only documentation we have of European folks reaching those areas is several years later (hence the mention of Balboa, and of Magellan “reaching the Pacific” by rounding the tip of South America).
So, the reasons this map is so amazing:
- It named America. Really-- this was it, the first use of that term.
- It is the first map to show the entire layout of the world in the same way that we think about it today-- the Americas on the left, Europe in the center, Asia on the right. This formed the pattern.
- It is a dramatic indication of the advanced state of exploration and cartography at the time.
- It points out that there is still a lot we don’t know about the discovery of the Americas by Europeans.
(Can you tell I’m a map geek? I’ll shut up now…)
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