Free The Map Thief by Michael Blanding Page B

to be found in the Cathay and made it his mission to see them. He pushed Ptolemy and Martellus to the extremes to estimate a distance of twenty-four hundredmiles between the Canary Islands and Japan—a quarter of the actual distance. Much of the history is well-known. When his appeals to John II of Portugal were unsuccessful, he turned to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, who agreed to finance his expedition in exchange for sovereignty over any lands he discovered.
    A month out to sea, a crewman on the Niña sighted an island, which Columbus naturally assumed must be part of the Indies, a group of islands Marco Polo had described as being in the Sea of Cathay. For the next six months, he traipsed around one island after another, asking every native he met about the location of the gold mines of the Great Khan. Of course, what he’d really found were the Caribbean islands of Cuba and Hispaniola. On three later expeditions, he explored southward to reach the northern coast of Venezuela by 1498, the same year Vasco da Gama reached India.
    Eventually, frustrated by his failure to find gold and riches, Columbus began conceiving a more and more grandiose view of himself and his expeditions in order to justify his voyages—eventually believing he had found nothing less than the mythical Garden of Eden. He spread his theories upon his return to Europe in a work called the
Book of Prophecies
, adopting the name “Christ-bearer” and drawing upon biblical passages to prove his voyage had been foretold as a signal for the end of history. All along, he vehemently disputed any hint that he had failed to reach the Orient, making his crew members sign a document attesting that Cuba was part of mainland Asia.
    At the same time Columbus was captaining vessels in Portugal, an Italian namedAmerigo Vespucci was working as a merchant in Seville, Spain, speculating on goods throughout Europe. He set sail with one of the later expeditions financed by Ferdinand and Isabella—or rather said he set sail, since historians debate whether he actually left land, much less commanded two ships. What seems beyond dispute is that he wrote several letters about his expeditions detailing these new lands. Originally, hitting the coast of South America, he claimed to have discovered the “dragon’s tail” on the edge of Asia, but in later letters he wrote that he sailed much farther south than any land existing on current maps—pointing to the existence of a new southern continent.
    Much more astonishing, however, were Vespucci’s descriptions of the natives of these lands, which are particularly explicit: “Everyone of both sexes goes about naked, covering no part of their bodies, and just as they issued from their mothers’ wombs,” he said. “The women,” he continues, “although they go naked and are exceedingly lustful, still have rather shapely and clean bodies, and are not as revolting as one might think.” He adds tantalizingly: “I have deemed it best (in the name of decency) to pass over in silence their many arts to gratify their insatiable lust.”
    Such details and intimations ensured a hearty reception for the letters back in Europe, where an anonymous printer turned them into a pamphlet distributed throughout the continent. One who read them was a young German humanist named Martin Waldseemüller, who was embarking upon a new edition of Ptolemy’s
Geographia
along with a Greek and Latin scholar named Matthias Ringmann. Obtaining an early copy of Vespucci’s letters, they realized excitedly that here was “a fourth partof the world” to join the traditional medieval triumvirate of Africa, Europe, and Asia. At the same time, they acquired charts smuggled out of Portugal that showed what the new continent might look like. With this new information, Waldseemüller and Ringmann scrapped their Ptolemy project in favor of a new publication,
Introduction to Cosmology,
which included a map detailing these newly discovered