[QUOTE=Freddy the Pig]
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?
[/QUOTE]
The Western coast looks somewhat close because the Eastern coast is fairly accurate. If you cut the map of South America in half, it would be even clearer. See what I mean?. To me that doesn’t look anything like the western coast of South America. The map maker knew about the eastern coast of SA, knew about Central America being narrow, and knew that there was an ocean to the west. It seems like he took those three things and made a bit of a lucky guess. I mean he labeled the Western part as unknown land, so the logical conclusion is that he didn’t know anything about it.
