Free The Map Thief by Michael Blanding Page A

engraving techniques, which allowed for more precise detail than the clunky woodblock method. Other editions followed, in Rome in 1478 and 1490; Florence in 1482; and Ulm, Germany, in 1482 and 1486. Beginning with the Florence edition, mapmakers began doing something revolutionary: using the latest information from portolan charts to produce modern maps along with reproducing the ancient ones. The Ulm edition went further,altering Ptolemy’s maps themselves with new discoveries in Scandinavia. First timidly, then boldy, other mapmakers began redrawing Ptolemy’s maps to reflect current learning.
    The enormous map on the wall of the Beinecke Library byHenricus Martellus is a good example ( Figure C ). Dating from 1489 or 1490, it re-creates much of Ptolemy’s speculative geography, including a giant island of Ceylon larger than the Indian subcontinent from which it dangles. But it also updates Ptolemy’s coastlines in Europe to create a more accurate picture of the known world at the time. Most striking, however, is its depiction of Africa, which incorporates Dias’s discoveries to extend the southern coast of the continent through the bottom border of the map, surrounding it with water for the first time. Martellus also added a few speculations of his own, increasing the length of Asia by seven thousand miles and including a sweeping promontory known as the “dragon’s tail” that made the trip east to the Indies seem even longer than it was. At the same time, he shrunk the distance between Portugal and Zipangu to less than half its actual eleven thousand miles, making the trip west across the Atlantic seem easy by comparison.
    This is the world as it was known on the eve of Columbus’s first voyage, in 1492. At the time, no learned person actually believed the world was flat. Nearly a hundred years of Ptolemy had put an end to that misconception. But now as these maps showed the distance around the world growing shorter, a group of Renaissance scholars began speculating that it might be possible to sail west from Europe to all the riches of the Indies, the lost kingdom of Prester John, and even the Garden of Eden itself. If not for these maps,Christopher Columbus never would have set sail with the confidence that he could cross the ocean. His voyage, in turn, forever changed mapmaking in the process.
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    IN THE SUMMER OF 1901, a Jesuit professor poking around the garret of Wolfegg Castle in the German Alps came across a heavy book with a red beechwood cover and hogskin backing. Looking inside, he made one of the greatest cartographic rediscoveries of all time—the lost map of the world made by Martin Waldseemüller in 1507. Printed on twelve sheets, the map was one of the first to incorporate the new discoveries of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, and the first one to show the New World as its own continent, separate from Asia ( Figure 4 ). But what made it so important to history was a single word printed on the southern continent of the Western Hemisphere: “America” ( Figure 5 ).
    FIGURE 5 MARTIN WALDSEEMÜLLER. “UNIVERSALIS COSMOGRAPHIA” (DETAIL). ST. DIE, 1507.
    Waldseemüller’s map was the first map to use the word, and it was more than a decade before it next appeared. The map stayed at Wolfegg for more than a century before the US government purchased it for $10 million—the highest price ever paid for a map. Now it is permanently displayed at the Library of Congress as the “birth certificate of America,” an accurate name since Waldseemüller’s map is responsible more than any other document for the name of the continent today. And the fact that it is not called Columbia can be summed up in one idea: Sex sells better than God.
    Before he made history, Columbus was a Genoan merchant captain based in Portugal, carrying cargo up and down the Atlantic coast. When the printing press took off in Europe, however, he began reading Marco Polo’s accounts of gold mines, perfumes, and ivory