Cartography and the Real World

It’s no secret that the original cartographers and other mapmakers weree flying by the seat of their pants. More often than not, they were going off of what other explorers had mentioned, or if they did go along with the voyage, they could still be flat out wrong. Because of these discrepancies, it is fun to try to realize a voyage onto a map of the time, to show how close (or far) they were from our understandings today.

For this investigation, I chose Amerigo Vespucci’s third voyage, where he visited around a few places in South America and Africa. I picked this specific voyage because of the short length of time that the voyage actually took (only compared to other voyages of the time, it still took over a year) in addition to the lack of information that would have been available about the areas that were being visited. South America was still the New World, though there had been some established routes between Portugal and Brazil by that time period.

The map itself that I chose, from the David Rumsey Collection, focused on Africa, with only a small part visible of South America. However, I chose this map because I was intrigued by the accuracy that appeared to be as close as I had seen in a while from the African side of the map. In addition, there was some portions of Spain visible, and while not Portugal, it is in the same general area that would lend itself to the stretching required for this visualization.

As mentioned in the introduction, there was not a great understanding of what exactly was the scope of the area and ownership of the areas that had not been explored. These maps that were created, in spite of their potential inaccuracies, were still closely guarded state secrets. Knowledge was power, and knowledge of the unexplored world was even more valuable because it would lead to the claim that the Europeans believed they had over the riches of the land yet to be discovered.

When we look at these older maps, we get a very interesting understanding of the biases that were held by the cartographers. As described by Sarah Caputo, there is an almost inflated sense of self importance that stems from being the first “learned” people to discover something and take their piece first. The cartographers are more attached to their homeland, so they tend to put it first or center. There’s a fundamental difference as well in trying to draw a mass from a curved surface onto a flat area, which is why the perception is that Greenland is enormous. When longitude and latitude lines were introduced, based on calculations from the Prime Meridian and the positions based on the stars and time of year, it was a huge leap forward in using these maps for navigation and not just for showing special relationships, as we looked at briefly in the maps of Tenochtitlan that were drawn in the 14th century.

As with most secrets, they soon became more widely used once they began being stolen and knowledge began expanding rapidly with continued exploration. As far as we have come since the first maps, the understanding of what was being seen was further along than we tend to give credit for. I think part of this is because the average person tends to look back on the past with the rose-colored glasses of the present, where there is the assumption that everything that we used to do and used to see was so much more behind simply because of the advancements made since then. When we plot the points on the maps which we know and can interact with, when the maps of the time are laid on top of the map we know from today, there might be a little bit of stretching and shifting, but I think more credit needs to be given to the early cartographers and mapmakers who were going off of secondhand accounts and their own limited knowledge of the subjects.

Using the digital tools that we have today to shape the understanding of what we knew to be true is incredibly useful and helps drive further historical understanding to the degree that the historian wants to be involved.