Amerigo Vespucci’s Third Voyage

For this project, I decided to focus on Amerigo Vespucci’s third voyage, which was an expedition funded by the Portugese to South America. He initially departs from Lisbon, Portugal and travels all the way to modern-day Uraguay. Unlike his expeditions prior, this journey is uniquely significant to Vespucci because it leads him to understand the scale of South America, rather than treating it as an extension of Asia. The historical map that I chose acts as a representative for what the Portugese understood as the parameters of South America. While I do believe that they accurately mapped most of the country’s east coast, the Rio Grande and various mountain ranges likely made journey to the west side of the continent more difficult. For this reason, I found it more troubling to warp the west side of the map rather than the east. I specifically chose a Portugese map to reflect how Amerigo Vespucci would have navigated and understood traveling at the time, especially due to Portugal’s skill in map making. Regardless, even the masters of this trade were still unable to accurately reflect what the continent truly looked like.

After having to use GIS to georeference a historical map and plot coordinates, I believe that this process solves a gap between past and current contexts. Historical maps can often feel foreign and confusing, so overlaying them with their modern location can make them more approachable to viewers. It acts as a translation for viewers so they can conceptualize the modern physical location. This, however, does not come without risk. The maps of the past, due to limited perspectives or a lack of complete understanding, are often subject to warping when overlayed with our modern understanding. It sterilizes the historical perspective of the journey by translating a place into a data point, instead of telling its story.

In her work, Caputo debates and discusses how maritime journeys are not simply paths, rather they are evidence of human presence at the sea. Due to our modern use of digital toola, we have been able to change our understanding of the journeys. What once was a journey to be simply mapped, the addition of GIS allows for human interaction to be tangibly translated. Digtial humanists no longer view the world as a map, but as a complex combination of sea life, environmental risks, trade routes, and ocean currents. The use of GIS also allows for the modern reader to understand what Vespucci’s voyage would have looked like. By tracking this imperial expansion with digital tools, viewers can get an understanding of who Vespucci interacted with on his journey and the environment he interacted with, which provides a perspective that a paper map is unable to convey. When comparing the grid system that explorers used to navigate the globe, I believe that it provides an interesting perspective when compared to modern understanding of our physical world. In the same way that we use a GPS, both historical and modern navigation rely on external resources to maintain a seeemingly accurate perception of distance and importance of the routes we travel. This would make the GIS system the modern equivalent to the grid lines that imperial explorers utilized. By providing a more accurate representation of navigation, the GIS system is the modern successor to the tradition of providing structure and understanding the world around us.