[MR] 16th-Century Mapmaker Martin Waldseemueller's Intriguing Knowledge - washingtonpost.com

[David Chessler]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/16/AR2008111601753.html


16th-Century Mapmaker's Intriguing Knowledge


By <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/staff/email/david+brown/>David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 17, 2008; Page A07

How was it that a German priest writing in Latin 
and living in a French city far from the coast 
became the first person to tell the world that a 
vast ocean lay to the west of the American continents?

<<<snip>>>

In a new book called "The Naming of America," 
Hessler provides the first published translation 
of the map's text blocks. He has also done a 
modern translation of Waldseemueller's book, 
"Cosmographiae Introductio," printed in 1507 in 
St. Die, France, where the cartographer was canon 
of the cathedral. Although Waldseemueller gets 
most of the credit for the map and the book, he 
had a collaborator, an Alsatian named Matthias Ringmann, who died in 1511.

<<<snip>>>


Inscribed along the western edge of that land 
mass in the 1507 map are the words "terra ultra 
incognita" -- land most unknown. But the border 
is not drawn as one long, ignorantly straight 
line. Instead, it is a series of straight lines 
meeting at shallow angles, implying a mixture of knowledge and uncertainty.

Using a technique called "polynomial warping," 
Hessler re-projected the image and compared 
Waldseemueller's continent with the real one.

There are many differences, of course. But the 
correlation is about 75 percent, and at two 
important places -- near the equator and near the 
place in northern Chile where the coast veers 
sharply to the northwest -- the width of 
Waldseemueller's South America and the actual one are almost the same.

<<<snip>>>

© 2008 The Washington Post Company

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    * 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/11/16/ST2008111602230.html>16th-Century 
Mapmaker's Intriguing Knowledge
    * 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2008/11/14/DI2008111402622.html>Tusday, 
Nov. 18, 11 a.m. ET: Science: Map Mystery


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