Waldseemüller map
The full title of the map is Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorumque lustrationes (The Universal Cosmography according to the Tradition of Ptolemy and the Discoveries of Amerigo Vespucci and others[3]).
The title signalled his intention to combine or harmonize in a unified cosmographic depiction the traditional Ptolemaic geography of Europe, Asia and Africa with the new geographical information provided by Amerigo Vespucci and his fellow discoverers of lands in the western hemisphere.
"[4] Several earlier maps are believed to be sources, chiefly those based on the Geography (Ptolemy) and the Caveri planisphere and others similar to those of Henricus Martellus or Martin Behaim.
[6] Apparently most map-makers at the time still erroneously believed that the lands discovered by Christopher Columbus, Vespucci, and others formed part of the Indies of Asia.
He discovered it as commander of a fleet of 14 ships that that King sent to Calicut, and on the way to India, he came across this land here, which he took to be terra firma [mainland] in which there are many people, described as going about, men and women, as naked as their mothers bore them; they are lighter-skinned.
"[9] This came from the account of the discovery by Pedro Álvares Cabral of the Nova tellus psitacorum (new land of Parrots) during his voyage to India of 1500–1501, as reported by Giovanni Matteo da Camerino, "il Cretico", secretary of the Venetian Ambassador to Spain and Portugal, published in the Paesi Novamente Retrovati of Fracanzano da Montalboddo, where the relevant passage read: "They were borne by a west wind beyond the Cape of Good Hope, and discovered a new land, which they called that of Parrots, for there they found birds of this kind of incredible size...
[10] Caverio's inscription was copied by Waldseemüller and placed in the same location on his map, with the significant difference that, although Cabral and his companions believed that they had reached "the mainland", i.e. part of Asia, Waldseemüller, for unexplained reasons, asserted in the inscription on his map concerning America that it was "an enormous sea-girt island of yet unknown size", i.e. not part of Asia.
The historian Peter Whitfield has theorized that Waldseemüller incorporated the ocean into his map because Vespucci's accounts of the Americas, with their savage peoples, could not be reconciled with contemporary knowledge of India, China, and the islands of the Indies.
Thus, in the view of Whitfield, Waldseemüller reasoned that the newly discovered lands could not be part of Asia, but must be separate from it, a leap of intuition that was later proven uncannily accurate.
[13] Mundus Novus, a book attributed to Vespucci (who had himself explored the extensive eastern coast of South America), was widely published throughout Europe after 1504, including a version by Waldseemüller's group in 1507 under the title, Quatuor Americi Vespucii Navigationes.
[14] It expressed the belief of Vespucci and his companions that: "We knew that land to be not an island but continent, both from its long extending coasts which do not enclose it and from the infinite number of inhabitants which it contains".
[3] An explanatory text, the Cosmographiae Introductio, widely believed to have been written by Waldseemüller's colleague Matthias Ringmann, accompanied the map.
[20] The inscription on the top left corner of the map proclaims that the discovery of America by Columbus and Vespucci fulfilled a prophecy of the Roman poet, Virgil, made in the Aeneid (VI.
It is, in fact, the land discovered by the King of Castile's captain, Columbus, and by Americus Vesputius, men of great and excellent talent, of which the greater part lies under the path of the year and sun, and between the tropics but extending nonetheless to about nineteen degrees beyond Capricorn toward the Antarctic pole beyond the paths of the year and the sun.
The name for the northern land mass, Parias, is derived from a passage in the Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, in which, after several stops, the expedition arrives at a region that was "situated in the torrid zone directly under the parallel which describes the Tropic of Cancer.
[28][29] Amerigo Vespucci, writing of his 1499 voyage, said he had hoped to sail westward from Spain across the Western Ocean (the Atlantic) around the Cape of Cattigara mentioned by Ptolemy into the Sinus Magnus.
[30] Ptolemy understood Cattigara, or Kattigara, to be the most eastern port reached by shipping trading from the Graeco-Roman world to the lands of the Far East.
Vespucci failed to find the Cape of Cattigara on his 1499 voyage: he sailed along the coast of Venezuela but not far enough to resolve the question of whether there was a sea passage beyond leading to Ptolemy's Sinus Magnus.
The object of his voyage of 1503–1504 was to reach the fabulous spice emporium of "Melaccha in India" (that is, Malacca, or Melaka, on the Malay Peninsula).
[36][37] The map therefore shows the two cities that were the initial destinations of Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus in their voyages that led to the unexpected discovery of a New World.
[39][26] The contemporary understanding of the nature of Columbus' discoveries is demonstrated in the letter written to him by the Aragonese cosmographer and Royal counsellor, Jaume Ferrer, dated 5 August 1495, saying: "Divine and infallible Providence sent the great Thomas from the Occident into the Orient in order to declare in India our Holy and Catholic Law; and you, Sir, it has sent to this opposite part of the Orient by way of the Ponient [West] so that by the Divine Will you might arrive in the Orient, and in the farthest parts of India Superior in order that the descendants might hear that which their ancestors neglected concerning the teaching of Thomas ... and very soon you will be by the Divine Grace in the Sinus Magnus, near which the glorious Thomas left his sacred body".
Its existence was unknown for a long time until its rediscovery in 1901 in the library of Prince Johannes zu Waldburg-Wolfegg in Schloss Wolfegg in Württemberg, Germany by the Jesuit historian and cartographer Joseph Fischer.
[45][46] Chancellor Angela Merkel of the Federal Republic of Germany symbolically turned over the Waldseemüller map on April 30, 2007, within the context of a formal ceremony at the Library of Congress, in Washington, DC.
In her remarks, the chancellor stressed that the US contributions to the development of Germany in the postwar period tipped the scales in the decision to turn over the Waldseemüller map to the Library of Congress as a sign of transatlantic affinity and as an indication of the numerous German roots to the United States.
Since 2007, to the celebration of the 500 year jubilee of the first edition, the original map has been permanently displayed in the Library of Congress, within a specially-designed microclimate case.
[51]: 5–7, 12–13, 49–51 The second century Alexandrian geographer Claudius Ptolemy had believed that the known world extended over 180 degrees of longitude from the prime meridian of the Fortunate Isles (possibly the Canary Islands) to the city of Cattigara in southeastern Asia.
According to one theory, that continent was identified with the southeastern promontory of Asia that figures on Behaim's globe, India Superior or the Cape of Cattigara.
On the right hand side of the Waldseemüller 1507 map is shown the Ptolemy-Behaim concept with the Ptolemy longitudes: this shows the huge peninsula of India Superior extending to the south of the Tropic of Capricorn.
The gores, also containing the inscription America, are believed to have been printed in the same year as the wall map, since Waldseemüller mentions them in the introduction to his Cosmographiæ Introductio.
