For this assignment, I chose Columbus’s third voyage of 1498, which was the first time he actually reached the South American mainland near present-day Venezuela. I picked this voyage because it felt like an interesting moment in history where Columbus still thought he was somewhere near Asia, when in reality he was coming across an entirely new continent. That confusion between what explorers believed and what was actually out there made it a really interesting voyage to dig into for this project. I also loved how the voyage crossed the entire Atlantic Ocean.

Working with the historical map made that disconnect even more obvious. The map showed Europe, Africa, and South America, but the way they were laid out looked nothing like what we know today. The shapes and distances were way off, which makes sense considering that mapmakers at the time were working from rough estimates and a lot of guesswork rather than any kind of precise measurement. You can tell they had some skill and knowledge (it’s probably very hard to determine where an entire continent is), but there were clearly massive gaps in their understanding of the world around them.

That gap became really apparent when I tried to georeference the map. Every time I plotted points to try and warp one continent into the right position, it would pull the other continents out of place. Fixing Europe would throw off South America, and adjusting South America would mess everything else up. It was honestly frustrating, but it also made me realize that the distortion wasn’t just a flaw in the map, it was actually showing how little these mapmakers understood about where these continents were in relation to each other. Georeferencing helps modern audiences understand the scale and geography of these voyages, but it also kind of hides the reality that Columbus had none of that accuracy. He was navigating with incomplete charts and a lot of guesswork, which is easy to forget when you’re looking at a clean, modern map.

When thinking about Sara Caputo’s idea of “tracks on the ocean,” I think GIS tools have done something similar to what she describes, which is making possible to visualize human movement and exploration in ways that reveal patterns we couldn’t easily see before. But at the same time, the precision of digital mapping can make it seem like the world was always this well understood, which wasn’t the case at all. Columbus’s third voyage is a good reminder that exploration was messy and uncertain, and sometimes I think digital tools make it look a lot cleaner than it actually was.