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.
I see North America on the map, it’s not accurate, but it’s there. The biggest thing is that North and South America are, for the first time, depicted as separate land masses not attached to Asia. Before this, any ocean described by inhabitants or visitors to East Asia would have been assumed to be the other end of the Atlantic. That these lands were not Asia took a while for Europeans to realize.
The Americas look wrong, party because of the limited information, but part of it is the projection method. Look at this conic projection, centered in the same general area as the Waldseemüller map, and see how the Americas are similarly warped.
Nobody had sailed the Pacific at the time, and the Straights of Magellan had not been discovered. The existance of an ocean on the opposite side of the new continents had not been confirmed by Europeans when the map was made.
I can’t help but think that the explorers of the day knew as much as the Waldseemuller map showed, but just kept selling the “western route to Asian Trading” to the royalty they were porking for expedition funding. Plus, since they thought there were mountains of gold over here, I can imagine an honest map would be hard to come by.
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.
I heard that one of the reasons chiles are called “chile peppers” was that pepper (a valuable commodity, from the Spice Islands) was expected, so pepper was brought back (what do you mean, these are not the peppercorns we’re looking for?)
Wikipedia claims (but does not cite) that it was Columbus who did the naming.
(Turkeys were also brought back to Europe by early explorers, who called them “Indian hens”. A friend of mine has translated a late-1500’s German cookbook which includes recipes for them. So that stereotypical portrait of a Henry VIII-ish king gnawing on a turkey leg might not be so anachronistic as we assume it is!)
I saw Hebert recently too, and I’d like to add to Flying Rat’s points that it is the accuracy of the WEST coast of South America that is so remarkable. We know the east coast had been surveyed earlier…but where did they get the information about the WEST coast. Since no one we know about had yet gone over there (or no one who would be reporting back to Europe) where did that information come from? Some secret expedition of the Europeans that has been lost to history? Information from Asian explorers that made its way west to Europe? We just don’t know. We knew there was an ocean over there because we’d been to Asia…but we didn’t know what the WEST coast of South America looked like, or even where it was, which makes the accuracy of the map (based on the graticule) so remarkable.
The map is also extraordinarily valuable because there is only one copy (I think).
See I don’t see this at all. I understand the weird projection, but look at the globe thing in the top middle of the map. It’s obvious that the person who drew it had no clue about what the western coast of South America looked like. It is drawn with straight lines, which is obviously nothing like a coast line. The drawer of this map looks like he knew generally about the North Eastern coast of South America and the islands of the Caribbean, and that the land narrowed greatly in Central America. The rest appears to be nothing more than a guess that looks vaguely like South America. The Human brain is very good at seeing patterns and similarities that just aren’t there.
I understand the historical significance of the map, but I don’t think it requires any reevaluation of what we know about early exploration of America. I mean look at the island in the middle of the Pacific. What I assume is Japan. It’s totally out of place, and if the map drawers knew anything of the west of the Americas they would have realized how wrong the drawing is.
I don’t know how you can say that. South America is amazingly accurate for the time. Of course the west coast is a straight line—nobody had charted every alcove and harbor. But it’s a nearly vertical line north from Patagonia, and then bulges westward toward the equator.
How did the mapmaker know this? No European (that we know of) had been there, and there is no record of anybody learning the Indian languages well enough for such detailed communication. South America could have had any of a million different shapes. It could have bulged in Patagonia and narrowed at the top. It could have been a giant square five thousand miles wide everywhere. How did the cartographer eliminate these other possibilities? Was it a lucky guess?
Granted, North America is a joke. Europeans were in ignorance and self-denial about the width and height of North America for centuries, and kept expecting clear sailing to Asia over the next hill. There is a town called Lachine near Montreal that the French thought would be a hub for the China trade (!). As late as the Lewis and Clark expedition, Thomas Jefferson thought that a single day’s portage might connect Atlantic drainage and Pacific drainage.
The ignorance about North America only underscores the accuracy with respect to South America. Why the difference?
That’s what I was going to say. I think the resemblance between the western coast of South America on the map and the actual coast of South America is a lucky guess. Fully half the coastline is a more or less straight line marked “incognita.” And the bottom half doesn’t really correspond to reality.
If it’s to be asserted that the Europeans had no way to know the Pacific was on the other side of South America, the alternative would have been to have a giant land mass that stretched all the way from Tierra del Fuego to southeast Asia. And even with much of their geographic knowledge coming at third or fourth hand, they had to have known that couldn’t be right.
I’m prepared to admit the map was revolutionary in other aspects, though, as mentioned above.
Is there an interpretation available online of the Waldseemuller map projected “flat”, so we could see the undistorted view of South America? I can’t quite visualize what SA looks like undistorted by staring at that map. This is similar to the projection problem with Antarctica and northern Canada, but it is even more jarring to see it at the ends of the map rather than the top and bottom.
I just found this blog post on the topic of the projection. It doesn’t have a “flat” reprojection, but it does (at the bottom) contain a modified Bonne projection with parameters similar to what Waldseemuller was using. Since Ptolemy’s original projections were based on his too-small size estimate, distortion at the east and west extremes is to be expected - they were trying to shoehorn new continents into a projection that didn’t really have space for them.
Just wanted to mention that this is why I love the Dope. Where else can you post about maps and have a grad student expert in that particular subject reply within 4 hours.
The other thing that’s interesting to me is how wrong Waldseemuller was on parts of the world that should have been well known – for example, the African coast of the Mediterranean. Look at that giant horn where Morocco is – it’s as big as Spain!
You see that on a lot of maps of the period because it was “common knowledge” that that’s what Europe and Africa looked like: that was how the shape of the “known world” was drawn because of the coordinates from the gazetteer in Ptolemy’s Geographia. (I don’t think we know if Ptolemy ever actually included maps of his own in his books; no one has found them, but the coordinates enabled some reconstructions.) Waldseemuller and his cronies didn’t see the need to reevaluate the shape of that part of the world. It was only later that folks realized that that area of Morocco wasn’t that pointy.
See the Wikipedia article for an image of Ptolemy’s world map, and you’ll see the similarities.
(I have a map sheet from an 1800’s encyclopedia at home that superimposes the Ptolemaic and modern maps of Europe, Africa and Asia. It’s pretty interesting to see the distortions, which in many cases are pretty systematic, going back again to Ptolemy having the wrong size of the world. Plus there are all sorts of random goodies like mythical mountain ranges and such.)
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