World of confusion
Exploration in the Middle Ages and Renaissance was a tricky business – something that’s easy to forget and perhaps hard to grasp for a society used to the conveniences of satellite images and GPS. Christopher Columbus, for example, spent six weeks in 1493 sailing along the southern coast of Cuba, trying to determine whether it was an island or a peninsula.
And interpreting the results of geographic exploration could also be a fraught and confusing process. The problems involved in converting reports from navigators or sailors into maps is clearly illustrated by the various conceptions of the New World that existed for some years following Columbus’s remarkable voyages. A previously unstudied world map from about 1530 in the Vatican Library sheds important light on these early ideas about the New World and, in particular, about Columbus’s fourth voyage to the Caribbean and Central America in 1502–04.
The map, which appears in a manuscript of a Latin translation of Ptolemy’s Geography, features a hypothetical southern continent that forms an extravagant ring of land around the South Pole and is replete with toponyms – place names – despite its designation as ‘Terra Incognita’. Many of these toponyms are simply inventions, but some of them, in the large peninsula that juts northwards towards South Asia, are not; surprisingly, they are names given by Columbus to locations he visited during his fourth voyage. This raises the question: why did the cartographer place toponyms from Columbus’s voyage to Central America in a peninsula south of Asia, particularly when the map gives a reasonably accurate depiction of the New World?
Exploring ‘Asia’
Columbus firmly believed that during his voyages west, he was exploring outlying regions of Asia, rather than a new continent, and there are other maps that reflect this belief by locating Columbian toponyms in Asia. For example, on two sketch maps from about 1506 – which were once attributed to Columbus’s brother Bartholomew but are now believed to be by Venetian scholar Alessandro Zorzi – several locations from the fourth voyage are situated in eastern Asia. Toponyms from Columbus’s voyage also appear in eastern Asia on a world map drawn by the Florentine cartographer Francesco Rosselli in around 1508.
On the Vatican map, the peninsula features the bay ‘Coribaro’ with islands in it; this represents a bay in Panama that Columbus entered on 5 October 1502. This bay is represented with islands on Zorzi’s sketch map, and it’s so described by the Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas in his Historia de las Indias and by Columbus’s son Fernando Colón in his biography of his father. The name ‘Belem’, which is beside a river on the peninsula, refers to the Río Belén in what is now Panama, which was named by Columbus during his fourth voyage and where his ships remained from 6 January to 16 April, 1503. This peninsula also contains another name and legend connected with Columbus’s fourth voyage: north of the Río Belem and Coribaro is a mountain labelled ‘Monte de S. Chrobam’ – the Mountain of St Christobam (St Christopher).
Nearby, a legend reads ‘jn hoc cholfo corabaru nascu[ntur] cierti [?] vermes que perforant navigie’, which translates as ‘in this gulf Corabaru worms are born which bore through ships’ – a reference to the shipworm Teredo navalis. Columbus did, indeed, have problems with shipworms on his fourth voyage. It was probably while Columbus’s ships were in the Río Belén (rather than in Corabaru) that they did their greatest damage – so severe was it that the Gallega and the Vizcaína were abandoned at Río Belén and Puerto Bello respectively.
As Columbus mistakenly believed that he was exploring the eastern coasts of Asia, it’s reasonable that contemporary maps should locate toponyms from his fourth voyage in the continent. On the Zorzi and Rosselli maps, the Columbian toponyms are located on or north of the equator, which corresponds to the actual latitude of the region that Columbus was exploring. On the Vatican map, however, these place names are located well south of the equator, and south even of the Tropic of Capricorn. It’s difficult to imagine why, almost 30 years after Columbus’s last voyage, a cartographer would misplace these toponyms in this way: not only displacing them from the New World, which is reasonably well depicted on the Vatican map, but also locating them so far to the south.
Global reach
There is another cartographic object on which New World discoveries are located in precisely the same positions as on the Vatican map: the Jagiellonian globe in the Jagiellonian University Museum in Krakow, Poland. This copper globe, fashioned in around 1510, shows the New World as a large island in exactly the same location as the large northward-jutting peninsula in the Vatican map: it’s in the southern Indian Ocean, aligned diagonally from southwest to northeast and almost touching southern Asia. The northwestern coasts of both the island on the Jagiellonian globe and the peninsula on the Vatican map are plain and have little topographical detail, while the southern coasts have bays, capes and rivers. Furthermore, both the island and the peninsula feature a prominent central mountain chain.
On the Vatican map, the Columbian toponyms are located on the peninsula, while on the Jagiellonian globe, the island is labelled America noviter reperta: ‘America newly discovered.’ The use of the name America on the globe indicates its maker’s familiarity with the 1507 Cosmographiae introductio by Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, which is widely believed to be the source of this name for the newly discovered lands.
The maker of the globe probably placed America in this strange location through the influence of a passage in Chapter 7 of the Cosmographiae introductio, where Waldseemüller and Ringmann write: ‘In the sixth climate toward the Antarctic are located the farthest part of Africa, recently discovered, the islands of Zanzibar, the lesser Java, and Seula, and the fourth part of the Earth, which, because Amerigo [Vespucci] discovered it, we may call it Amerige, the land of Amerigo, so to speak, or America.’
My theory is that the maker of the Vatican map was copying the toponyms in the peninsula from an unknown earlier map that no longer exists, without realising that they represented places discovered by Columbus, and that this lost map was also the source of the island labelled America noviter reperta on the Jagiellonian globe. This would suggest that whoever made the lost map placed the Columbian toponyms on a large island – the maker of the Vatican map then joined this island to his hypothetical southern continent, while the Jagiellonian globe’s maker copied the island and the legend America noviter reperta but omitted the toponyms.
The Vatican map thus provides a striking illustration of how incomplete information in the early stages of a discovery could result in wildly different conceptions and representations of the land discovered.
November 2008
And interpreting the results of geographic exploration could also be a fraught and confusing process. The problems involved in converting reports from navigators or sailors into maps is clearly illustrated by the various conceptions of the New World that existed for some years following Columbus’s remarkable voyages. A previously unstudied world map from about 1530 in the Vatican Library sheds important light on these early ideas about the New World and, in particular, about Columbus’s fourth voyage to the Caribbean and Central America in 1502–04.
The map, which appears in a manuscript of a Latin translation of Ptolemy’s Geography, features a hypothetical southern continent that forms an extravagant ring of land around the South Pole and is replete with toponyms – place names – despite its designation as ‘Terra Incognita’. Many of these toponyms are simply inventions, but some of them, in the large peninsula that juts northwards towards South Asia, are not; surprisingly, they are names given by Columbus to locations he visited during his fourth voyage. This raises the question: why did the cartographer place toponyms from Columbus’s voyage to Central America in a peninsula south of Asia, particularly when the map gives a reasonably accurate depiction of the New World?
Exploring ‘Asia’
Columbus firmly believed that during his voyages west, he was exploring outlying regions of Asia, rather than a new continent, and there are other maps that reflect this belief by locating Columbian toponyms in Asia. For example, on two sketch maps from about 1506 – which were once attributed to Columbus’s brother Bartholomew but are now believed to be by Venetian scholar Alessandro Zorzi – several locations from the fourth voyage are situated in eastern Asia. Toponyms from Columbus’s voyage also appear in eastern Asia on a world map drawn by the Florentine cartographer Francesco Rosselli in around 1508.
On the Vatican map, the peninsula features the bay ‘Coribaro’ with islands in it; this represents a bay in Panama that Columbus entered on 5 October 1502. This bay is represented with islands on Zorzi’s sketch map, and it’s so described by the Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas in his Historia de las Indias and by Columbus’s son Fernando Colón in his biography of his father. The name ‘Belem’, which is beside a river on the peninsula, refers to the Río Belén in what is now Panama, which was named by Columbus during his fourth voyage and where his ships remained from 6 January to 16 April, 1503. This peninsula also contains another name and legend connected with Columbus’s fourth voyage: north of the Río Belem and Coribaro is a mountain labelled ‘Monte de S. Chrobam’ – the Mountain of St Christobam (St Christopher).
Nearby, a legend reads ‘jn hoc cholfo corabaru nascu[ntur] cierti [?] vermes que perforant navigie’, which translates as ‘in this gulf Corabaru worms are born which bore through ships’ – a reference to the shipworm Teredo navalis. Columbus did, indeed, have problems with shipworms on his fourth voyage. It was probably while Columbus’s ships were in the Río Belén (rather than in Corabaru) that they did their greatest damage – so severe was it that the Gallega and the Vizcaína were abandoned at Río Belén and Puerto Bello respectively.
As Columbus mistakenly believed that he was exploring the eastern coasts of Asia, it’s reasonable that contemporary maps should locate toponyms from his fourth voyage in the continent. On the Zorzi and Rosselli maps, the Columbian toponyms are located on or north of the equator, which corresponds to the actual latitude of the region that Columbus was exploring. On the Vatican map, however, these place names are located well south of the equator, and south even of the Tropic of Capricorn. It’s difficult to imagine why, almost 30 years after Columbus’s last voyage, a cartographer would misplace these toponyms in this way: not only displacing them from the New World, which is reasonably well depicted on the Vatican map, but also locating them so far to the south.
Global reach
There is another cartographic object on which New World discoveries are located in precisely the same positions as on the Vatican map: the Jagiellonian globe in the Jagiellonian University Museum in Krakow, Poland. This copper globe, fashioned in around 1510, shows the New World as a large island in exactly the same location as the large northward-jutting peninsula in the Vatican map: it’s in the southern Indian Ocean, aligned diagonally from southwest to northeast and almost touching southern Asia. The northwestern coasts of both the island on the Jagiellonian globe and the peninsula on the Vatican map are plain and have little topographical detail, while the southern coasts have bays, capes and rivers. Furthermore, both the island and the peninsula feature a prominent central mountain chain.
On the Vatican map, the Columbian toponyms are located on the peninsula, while on the Jagiellonian globe, the island is labelled America noviter reperta: ‘America newly discovered.’ The use of the name America on the globe indicates its maker’s familiarity with the 1507 Cosmographiae introductio by Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, which is widely believed to be the source of this name for the newly discovered lands.
The maker of the globe probably placed America in this strange location through the influence of a passage in Chapter 7 of the Cosmographiae introductio, where Waldseemüller and Ringmann write: ‘In the sixth climate toward the Antarctic are located the farthest part of Africa, recently discovered, the islands of Zanzibar, the lesser Java, and Seula, and the fourth part of the Earth, which, because Amerigo [Vespucci] discovered it, we may call it Amerige, the land of Amerigo, so to speak, or America.’
My theory is that the maker of the Vatican map was copying the toponyms in the peninsula from an unknown earlier map that no longer exists, without realising that they represented places discovered by Columbus, and that this lost map was also the source of the island labelled America noviter reperta on the Jagiellonian globe. This would suggest that whoever made the lost map placed the Columbian toponyms on a large island – the maker of the Vatican map then joined this island to his hypothetical southern continent, while the Jagiellonian globe’s maker copied the island and the legend America noviter reperta but omitted the toponyms.
The Vatican map thus provides a striking illustration of how incomplete information in the early stages of a discovery could result in wildly different conceptions and representations of the land discovered.
November 2008
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