By David Alexander,Reuters
Posted: 2007-12-04 07:56:51
Filed Under: Science News
WASHINGTON (Dec. 3) - The only surviving copy of the 500-year-old map
that first used the name America goes on permanent display this month
at the Library of Congress, but even as it prepares for its debut, the
1507 Waldseemuller map remains a puzzle for researchers.


Why did the mapmaker name the territory America and then change his
mind later? How was he able to draw South America so accurately? Why
did he put a huge ocean west of America years before European
explorers discovered the Pacific?

"That's the kind of conundrum, the question, that is still out there,"
said John Hebert, chief of the geography and map division of the
Library of Congress.

The 12 sheets that make up the map, purchased from German Prince
Johannes Waldburg-Wolfegg for $10 million in 2003, were mounted on
Monday in a huge 6-foot by 9.5-foot (1.85 meter by 2.95 meter) display
case machined from a single block of aluminum.

The case will be flooded with inert argon gas to prevent deterioration
when it goes on public display December 13.

Researchers are hopeful that putting the rarely shown map on permanent
display for the first time since it was discovered in the Waldburg-
Wolfegg castle archives in 1901 may stimulate interest in finding out
more about the documents used to produce it.

The map was created by the German monk Martin Waldseemuller. Thirteen
years after Christopher Columbus first landed in the Western
Hemisphere, the Duke of Lorraine brought Waldseemuller and a group of
scholars together at a monastery in Saint-Die in France to create a
new map of the world.

The result, published two years later, is stunningly accurate and
surprisingly modern.

"The actual shape of South America is correct," said Hebert. "The
width of South America at certain key points is correct within 70
miles of accuracy."

Given what Europeans are believed to have known about the world at the
time, it should not have been possible for the mapmakers to produce
it, he said.

The map gives a reasonably correct depiction of the west coast of
South America. But according to history, Vasco Nunez de Balboa did not
reach the Pacific by land until 1513, and Ferdinand Magellan did not
round the southern tip of the continent until 1520.

"So this is a rather compelling map to say, 'How did they come to that
conclusion,"' Hebert said.

The mapmakers say they based it on the 1,300-year-old works of the
Egyptian geographer Ptolemy as well as letters Florentine navigator
Amerigo Vespucci wrote describing his voyages to the new world. But
Hebert said there must have been something more.

"From the writings of Vespucci you couldn't have prepared the map,"
Hebert said. "There had to be something cartographic with it."

Misgivings About America

Waldseemuller made it clear he was naming the new land after Vespucci,
describing how he came up with the name America based on the
navigator's first name.

But he soon had misgivings about what he had done. An atlas
Waldseemuller produced six years later shows only part of the east
coast of the Americas, and refers to it as Terra Incognita -- unknown
land.

"America has gone out of his lexicon," Hebert said. "(No) place in the
atlas -- in the text or in the maps -- does the name America appear."

His 1516 mariner's map, on the same scale as the 1507 map, steps back
even further, showing only parts of the new continents and
reconnecting the north to Asia. South America is labeled Terra Nova --
New World -- and North America is labeled Terra de Cuba -- Land of
Cuba.

"Essentially he's reconnecting North America to the Asian mainland,
suggesting a continual world of land mass rather than separated by
those bodies of water that separate us from Europe and Asia," Hebert
said.

Why the rollback? No one knows.

In writings accompanying the 1516 map, Waldseemuller comes across as
if he "has seen the better of his error and is now correcting it,"
Hebert said.

He speculated that power politics played a role. Spain and Portugal
divided the globe between them in 1494, two years after Columbus, with
territory to the east going to Portugal and land to the west to Spain.

That demarcation line is oddly absent from the 1507 Waldseemuller map,
and flags marking territorial claims in South America suggest Portugal
controls the region's southernmost land, even though it is in Spain's
area of influence. On the later map, the southernmost flag is Spanish,
Hebert said.

"It is possible one could say the 1507 map is influenced strongly by
Portuguese sources and conceivably the 1516 map may be influenced more
by Spanish sources," he said.

Although the map conceals many mysteries, one thing is clear: it
represents a revolutionary shift in the way Europe viewed the world.

"This is ... essentially the beginning or first map of the modern age,
and it's one that everything builds on from that point forward,"
Hebert said. "It becomes a keystone map."


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My theory regarding the *decreasing* detail and accuracy of the maps
between 1507 and 1516: capitulation to Papal pressure. Enormous
impediment to discussion of geography back in the era of the Spanish
Inquisition was a fearful Roman church. As there was no mention of the
Western Hemisphere in the Bible, any proof of a continent to the W of
Europe and to the E of Asia could be interpreted as evidence that the
Bible was not infallible. If entire continents existed that were not
mentioned, then if the Bible was to be considered the literal word of
God it might be no more than an "incomplete" accounting of the same.
When the very fabric of society had been held together through the
Dark Ages by the mystical power of priests capable of communication
with an unseen God, any challenge to the absolute authority of the
Church would have been considered very dangerous.

I think the map additionally supports those who theorize that there
was a long history of European navigation to and from the Americas
that predates the Columbian voyages of the 1490's. Pegging the size of
South America to within 70 miles (in some key locations) would have
been no small feat in an era where calculations of longitude were
notoriously inexact.