Famous Maps in the British Museum Author(s): J. A. J. de Villiers Source: The Geographical Journal, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Aug., 1914), pp. 168-184 Published by: geographicalj Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1779085 Accessed: 11-06-2016 22:36 UTC

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This content downloaded from 192.122.237.41 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 22:36:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 168 FAMOUS MAPS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM. such performances. The pages (paies) or medicine men are individuals invested with a reputation of possessing occult powers of divination as well as of healing, and capable of causing disease as well as curing it. In some cases they wield considerable influenee, but at times become victims of the superstitious credulity of the people upon which they trade and thrive. The occurrences of birth, puberty, and death are attended respectively by curious performances as post partum, malingering or indisposition of the male, flagellation of both sexes, and exhumation of the corpse some considerable time after interment, which are only a few of the many extraordinary customs met with. Currents.?It is impossible to state as a definite fact what the current of a river is, as the current of a stream varies according to the conditions prevailing at any particular time. Surface current is in proportion to depth, so that at vasante or ebb, when the stream has subsided 3 or 4 fathoms below refluxo or flood, the current decreases accordingly, further influenced also if rapids or falls exist. At times a subsidiary stream may issue into a main stream with a stronger current than exists at the time in the latter if the former is rising at an earlier date, but its current becomes decreased even though its depth increases, when the rise in the main stream gets under way, as then the waters of the afnuent stream may be held back. Commercial possibilities depend on several factors, as navigability of stream, presence and amenability of natives for work, existence, amount and extent of useful products. For example, caucho negro or black rubber grows on land known as terra firme, land above inundation, but there are thousands of miles of terra firme where no caucho negro is found. It is not unusual for it to occur in places so inaccessible that the hardship, labour, and expense involved in its collecting and transport to a market does not give sufficient return to make it pay. Xeringa or white rubber grows on land known as varzea or vargem, lower lands than terra firme, which is more accessible, and the collecting requires less hard labour though of a more skilful order. Here again, however, the occurrence is sporadic, and even though the valley of a river be " varzea," no xeringa may exist. The apparent obesity of many of the people is due probably to several causes besides idiosyncrasy. Many of the swollen abdomens are due to enlarged spleens, one of the sequelse of malaria, from which an Indian is by no means immune. Much of the dietary of these people consists of coarse, bulky, innutritious food, and this, with the enormous consumption of drinks, both rich and fermented, upon which they subsist, are also contributory causes.

FAMOUS MAPS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM.* By J. A. J. de VILLIERS, Hon. Secretary of the Hakluyt Society.

The object of the paper which I am privileged to read to-night is to draw your attention to the wealth of manuscript and printed maps hoarded up in our national treasure-house, and, owing to the exigencies of space, but seldom seen ; many of these maps have not been publicly exhibited since the Sixth International Geographical Congress heldin 1895, and to geographical

Royal Geographical Society, Aprfl 6, 1914. Maps, pp. 174,177, 180, 181.

This content downloaded from 192.122.237.41 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 22:36:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms FAMOUS MAPS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM. 169 students of a younger generation they will therefore be new. In the time at my disposal I can give you but a brief description of the more important of these cartographical rarities, restricting myself generally to those of which no second copy is known or is easily accessible, and it is perhaps hardly necessary to remind you that the collection of maps in the British Museum, though probably the largest and best in the world, is by no means complete, and that there are many famous maps elsewhere. The earliest maps of any importance that are known to us to-day are those accompanying a geographical work written (in Greek) by Claudius Ptolemaeus, who lived in Alexandria during the first half of the second century of our era?between 100 and 141 a.d., and the earliest copy of that work in the Museum was written about the year 1400,1 * curiously near the date of the invention of printing, when we consider how many successive copies (a few of which are still extant) were made during the thirteen intervening centuries. Now, the manner of delineating a country is in reality the same in the maps of to-day as in those of eighteen centuries ago?in other words, and as Nordenskiold succinctly puts it, the alphabet of map-making, the con- ventional signs used by us, are the same as were used by Ptolemy; it is only the finer finish lent by modern mechanism to our cartography that makes the ancient maps look so crude and primitive by comparison. In spite of that crudeness you will already have discovered that the rough picture before you represents the map of Great Britain as drawn by the great cartographer, though it suffers through having been cut in two by the copyist, possibly owing to the exigencies of his vellum; though the southern portion is excellent geography for the period, Scotland trends away too far to the east; Ireland was not included in the map, but was depicted separately on a preceding page. A Latin translation of Ptolemy's work was begun by Emanuel Chry- soloras and finished by Jacobus Angelus in 1410; the first copy we have of this was written about 1450.2 Here again we have Great Britain alone, and judging by the more, though not absolutely, correct delineation of Scotia and its proportions as compared with Anglia, one would imagine the draughtsman to have been born north of the Tweed. As in the earlier copy, Ireland has a page to herself, but the magnified conception of Galway Bay that is seen here I have not met with again except in a Venetian portolano of 1489, which will be shown you in its order. The next copy we have of Ptolemy was written, it is believed, about 1470,3 and though it follows closely, and may indeed have been copied directly from, that of 1400, the improvement in the delineation is striking. In many instances of this nature we have, I think, to thank the unknown copyist. I take again the British Isles as the most interesting to us of the twenty-seven maps contained in the work, and this is the first Ptolemy

* The numbers refer to the notes at the end of the paper. No. IL?August, 1914.]

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known to me in which Ireland is included in the picture ; it is also interesting to see the cartographer's conception of the world in the second century? this is the map with which he prefaced his collection. During the thirteen centuries that separate the actual drafting of these Ptolemsean maps and the production of the comparatively beautiful copies we have just had before us the science of cartography had sunk to a low ebb, and with some rare but eminent exceptions the maps drawn as late as the middle of the fifteenth century were mostly of a legendary type and of little geographical value. Of those exceptions I have singled out the most notable in the Museum for representation on the screen. and give them in their chronological order. I will not weary you with the Greek or Latin titles of the various works in which they occur : when this paper is printed they will be included in the notes. This map, showing Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Persia, India, and generally those portions of the world of which mention is made in Holy Writ, accompanies a Latin translation made by St. Jerome in the year 388 a.d. of a Greek work entitled the Onomasticon, written by Eusebius before the year 325 a.d. The volume in which it is found4 is a copy written in the middle of the twelfth century, but the map shows, by internal evidence, that it cannot well have been compiled later than the fourth century, con- temporaneously with the work it illustrates. The absence of any doubt to-day respecting its age and authorship is due to the investigation of Dr. Konrad Miller, of Stuttgart,6 whose painstaking work generally in this branch of cartography has been of immense value to students of mediaeval maps, though I am afraid he has not always received the recog- nition due to him. Dr. Miller also sees in the work of the Venerable Bede undoubted traces of acquaintanceship with and use of this Jerome map. By doubling the date, 388 a.d., ascribed to it we come curiously enough to that of our next famous map. one of the world, accompanying a Com- mentary on the Apocalypse written in the year 776 a.d. by St. Beatus,6 a Benedictine monk of Valcavado, in Spain. No fewer than ten slightly varying copies of the map are in existence, the one in the British Museum having been completed in 1109 in the monastery of Silos, in the diocese of Burgos. As in very many niediseval maps, the Earth is quadrangular in form, drawn with the east at the top and surmounted by the Garden of Eden, with the Serpent tempting Eve. Britain and Scotland are represented as separate islands. It is evident, both from the text of the manuscript it accompanies and from a comparison of some of the ten copies extant, that the map was intended to illustrate the spread of the Christian faith by fixing the locality in which each of the twelve Apostles preached the Gospel. Upon the compilation of the Museum catalogue in 1844 the authorship of the original was still undetermined, but was clearly set forth in 1895 by Dr. Konrad Miller, whose excellent work I had occasion to mention just now.

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In our next map this square representation of the known world and the orientation at the top is repeated ; it will therefore be more convenient, in order to see the countries in our accustomed way, to have this and the remaming mediaeval maps thrown sideways on the screen. This map accom- panies a manuscript, portions at least of which appear to have belonged to Battle Abbey in the reign of Henry II.7 The map, generally known as the " Cotton " or " Anglo-Saxon " map, has, however, no reference to the text of the manuscript and has been variously attributed by scholars to the ninth, tenth, and even the eleventh century. Miller places it in the last years of the tenth century, though suggesting, after minute examination and comparison of its legends, a close ahinity between this map and the geographical work of Paulus Orosius, a Spanish historian and theologian of the fifth century. This suggestion, based on documentary evidence, is strengthened by the fact that the north-western portion of Europe is the best of the otherwise poor cartography. It is interesting to note that Jerusalem is not in the centre, and that the island of Taprobana (the old name for Ceylon) takes the place usually given to the Garden of Eden at the top of the map. We now come in chronological order to the map contained in a Psalter of 1200 a.d. 8?a Museum map which I am anxious to show you on account of its close connection with two famous maps not in the British Museum?the Ebstorf Map, drawn in North Germany late in the thirteenth century, and the well-known map in Hereford Cathedral of the same period. Maps have a family relationship just as human beings, and a close study of its most characteristic features shows this specimen to stand in the relation of an elder brother to the Ebstorf map (both coming directly from a common parent), and in that of a first cousin to the Hereford map, both the Hereford map and this having a distinct parentage which again had its origin in a common stock. The map, two centuries later than the last we saw, is of a more legendary type, Jerusalem being fairly in the centre and the Garden of Eden at the top ; within the Garden are presentments of Adam and Eve, separated by the Tree, and five rivers, instead of the tisual four, flow out of it, the Ganges being the addition. The map is particularly small, measuring only 3| inches in diameter, and it is astonishing to find how much detail the draughtsman has compressed into this. Near the bottom, for instance, in Africa, are represented the various types of human monstrosities one is accustomed to find in mediaeval maps, though generally more distributed than grouped, as in this one. The whole map is surmounted by a figure of Christ, with two angels offering Him incense. Though again originating in a distinctly religious atmosphere?the monastery of St. Alban's?our next map is of a more secular character, and accompanies a History of England written by Matthew Paris, in the aforesaid monastery, presumably between the years 1235 and 1259.9 N 2

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Of all the maps and itineraries found in the various works of the monk of St. Alban's this is by far the most elaborate, and is valuable as a specimen of the geographical knowledge of his own country possessed by one who was probably the best-informed man of his time. Some of the legends are exceedingly quaint, one reminding us of an etymological fact: " Tame and Yse [Isis] make Tamise, as Jor and Dan the river Jordan " ; but the most interesting features of the map are perhaps the two walls in the north and the total separation of Scotia Ultramarina from the rest, with a connecting bridge at Stirling, called Estuelin on the map. Another monastic map, this time of the world as then known, carries us on to the year 1350. The most popular history book in England at that period and for a century after was the Polychronicon of Eanulf Hygden, a monk of Chester, no less than twenty or thirty manuscript copies, all written before 1400, being still in existence. In the Museum copy,10 which belonged to Johannes de Wardeboys, Abbot of Bamsey, until the surrender of the abbey to Henry VIII. in 1509, when it became the king's property, are two maps, the larger of which is here shown.11 The geography is still of the conventional mediseval school, more crude even than in the Psalter map of 1200, and the Biblical legends and popular myths still abound. Paradise, it is true, is left a blank, or has been deleted, but Jerusalem is still the centre of the Earth ; Noah's Ark and its occupants are in the Armenian mountains close at hand, the pillars of Hercules in their usual position just ofi Gib, whilst the Amazons are still in the North of Asia, not having yet emigrated to that part of America where they were found by Raleigh. The legends are not in the best of hands, but well worth deciphering for the entertaining if not always original information they contain. Sometimes it is geographical, as when we learn that the Tigris, the Nile, and the Euphrates do indeed flow out of Paradise, but (presumably after a subterranean course) make a second appearance on our habitable portion of the globe ; sometimes ethnological, when we are told that in Albania, which is placed in Asia, there are men who can see only at night, that in Assyria are men with eyes set in their shoulders, and that the Cyclops in the East have but one eye in their forehead ; that in Media are bushmen with hairy bodies, and that in Ethiopia are people with mouths so small that they feed through reeds. But most up-to-date is the politico-econo- mical matter, for we read (and remember that this was the fourteenth century) that Germany has a greater population than it is able to nourish, and that Ireland is larger and wider than England, that it seeks liberty, but shirks work?libertatem querit et laboremfugit. I now come to the last of the mediseval manuscript maps n which 1 had singled out for inspection, and must let you at once into the secret that the Museum copy is but a copy?a splendid one, it is true, but made as late as the year 1804 from the original, then preserved in the monasteryof S. Michele di Murano, near Venice, but now in the St. Mark's Library in the Doges'

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Palace in that city ; drawn south upwards, I will now have it placed so that we can more easily recognize its features. The map was compiled in 1459 by Era IJauro, a monk of the order of Camaldoli; its geography shows an immense improvement out of all proportion to the short century that separates it from our last map of 1350, Europe being especially good, Airica so in a lesser degree, Asia the least correct of all. Six feet four inches in diameter, the map is, and can afford to be by reason of its size, extraordmarily rich in detail, every town and city having some building drawn in keeping with its relative imporfcance. The legends are in Italian, many of them showing the strides which learning generally had made even in the first half of the fifteenth century. For instanee, not having inserted the old conventional columns of Hercules, Era Mauro observes: " Note that the columns of Hercules mean naught else than the break in the mountains which enclose the Strait of Gibilterra." Again, not having placed Jerusalem in its usual position in the very centre of the map (very plucky of him, too), he smooths away his lapse from convention and at the same time endeavours to appease old prejudices in the following ingenious terms : " Jerusalem is indeed in the centre of the inhabited world latitudinally, though longitudinally it is somewhat to the west, but since the western portion is more thickly populated by reason of Europe, there- fore Jerusalem is also in the centre longitudinally if we regard not empty space but the density of population." Era Mauro's map has brought us down to one of the greatest events in the world's history, and that event could not fail to have an unusual effect upon what was then the poor science of cartography. The printing- press, immediately after its invention, at once took the best of all the long-forgotten but reliable material and placed it before the world in immortal form. Ptolemy, manuscript copies of whose second-century maps we have already followed from 1400 to 1470, had been translated into Latin early in the fifteenth century, and the publication of his work in print was rcgarded in the light of a revelation equal in importance to all the real geographical discoveries that were being madein that important century. It has not yet been proved, to everybody's satisfaction, when and where the first edition of the Oosmographia, with maps, was printed. The one issued at Bologna bears the date of 1462, but this is universally recognized to have been a misprint, as no press is said to have been known in that city until 1471. NordensMold maintains that it was meant for 1472, others would have it 1482. By the year 1490 no fewer than seven editions, some with a few additional maps brought up to date, had been issued. The map shown is necessarily from the Rome edition of 1478,12 since the edition dated 1462 is too darkly coloured for effective reproduction. If the last-named edition really appeared in 1472 it contains the first known printed map of the British Isles, if in 1482, the map before us has that distinction.

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The projection, which is so striking a feature of all the maps in most of the early printed editions of Ptolemy (certainly those of 1478, 1490, 1507, and 1508), was introduced by Dominus Nicolaus Germanus, upon whose work and emendations all the editions just mentioned are based, but the sole edition that gives Ptolemy's maps on their original (so-called Marinus) projection, as in the early manuscripts we have seen on the screen, i.e. with equidistant parallels and meridians, is that issued by Francesco Berlinghieri in Florence in 1478.13 This map?a truly remarkable production for the late fifteenth century ?is important as evidence of the conflict that was going on at this period between the mythical and religious schools of thought on one hand and science on the other. Here we still have a map issuing from the press at Lubeck in the year 1475 14?i.e. three years after the appearance of a printed Ptolemy?having the Garden of Eden at the top, Jerusalem in the centre, and in the north-west quarter quite a jumble of countries for wThich there was no room elsewhere; it is, in fact, still the usual type of legendary mediseval cartography. Incidentally, the map is also of interest as being the first printed map with an unquestionable date. Legend, however, had not held sole sway, even in the Middle Ages, as we have seen by the maps already shown, and now, side by side with those early productions of the press, there was still appearing an important series of manuscript maritime maps chiefly descriptive of the Mediterranean and the Levant, and having much the same value for niariners in those days as our Admiralty charts have to-day. I shall now weave them in with the printed maps, preserving a chronological order, as before. Here, for instance, is north-west Europe taken from a portolano of 35 charts,15 each 21 X 16 inches, executed by various Venetian artists about 1489 ; the work is fine for the period, and the shape of the British Isles reminds one forcibly of the 1450 manuscript copy of Ptolemy. Ptolemy's influenee on most cartographers was indeed still a strong one for many years, and even the modernized maps that showed the newly discovered geography of the fifteenth century bore a striking resemblance to those of the old master. A very remarkable and interesting example of this is a map of Central Europe compiled before 1464 16; its colouring is so dark that it does not reproduce very well, but, only four copies being known, it is worthy of a detailed description. It measures 16 X 22 inches, and is from a copper plate that included all the lettering in the margins. The legend describes it as compiled by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, and as having been engraved at Eystat (or Eichstadt), a small town in Bavaria, in the year 1491. It is, therefore, the first map with modern geography (for we must not forget the Lubeck monstrosity) printed north of the Alps. On the back is a manuscript book-plate showing that in 1529 it was in the possession of Willibald Pirckheimer, who himself issued in 1525 an edition of Ptolemy with fifty maps. Pirckheimer died in 1530, and in that selfsame year Sebastian Miinster, a well-known cartographer,

This content downloaded from 192.122.237.41 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 22:36:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms T. CEXTRAL ElTxOEE. DRAWN BY CARPIXAE NICHOLAS OF CUSA BEFORE 14

This content downloaded from 192.122.237.41 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 22:36:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CARDIXAE NICHOLAS OF CUSA BEFORE 1461; PRINTED AT KICHSTADT IN 1491. See page 174.]

This content downloaded from 192.122.237.41 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 22:36:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms FAMOUS MAPS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM. 175 published a very full description of this map ; thenceforward it was lost to the world until its purchase by the British Museum in 1874. Its author, who was born in and took his name from the small town of Kuesen, on the Moselle, in 1401, was one of the most eminent scholars and prelates of his time, much influenced by the Italian school of learning, and numbering Cesarini and Toscanelli, the astronomer, among his personal friends. He became cardinal in 1448, and died at Todi near Spoleto in 1464. From the fact that the modernized maps of Central Europe, in both the 1507 and 1508 editions of Ptolemy's Cosmographia, have the relatively unimportant town of Kuesen marked, Nordenskiold deduced the fact that they must have been the production of the Cardinal Nicholas, and probably other editions of this map ; Wolkenhauer, too, the best authority on early maps of Germany, places the 1507-08 maps as at least belonging to the Cusa type. Then, again, the interesting suggestion has been made by my friend, the librarian of this Society, that a manuscript by Martellus in the Biblioteca Nazionale at Florence may have served as an intermediary between the map of 1464 and those of 1507-08. I have not seen the Martellus map, and one cannot speak or write with safety about maps one has not actually examined?even photographs are often misleading?but a comparison of the maps in the Ptolemy editions with that before us shows them to be totally dissimilar, and this map, moreover, bearing its compiler's name and published twenty-seven years after his death, does not show Kuesen ; it is therefore highly improbable that another map, unlike his, published forty-three years after his death and not bearing his name, should be his simply because it happens to have his birthplace marked upon it. The evidence, I contend, is inconclusive. In the north-west there is part of Scotland, showing Glasgow, Edinburgh, St. Andrews (far inland !), Dundee, Inverness and Brechin ; another point of interest is the much larger area of water shown inside the delta of the Netherlands than is there to-day; but the most remarkable feature of the map is that it has been enlarged by a great strip at the bottom ex- tending southward beyond the original border. While this was probably done in order to bring in Rome and Constantinople, it is strange that the old marginal line was not deleted or that another was not drawn lower down. That the map was certainly never larger than as we see it now is proved by the half-obliterated date, scarcely visible to the naked eye, engraved in the margin, at foot. This map, which is generally called the ' Germania/ is, curiously enough, immediately followed, chronologically, in the Museum collection by a work entitled the ' Insularium Illustratum '17 of Henricus Martellus Germanus, the only copy of which beautifully illustrated manuscript, dated 1492, was acquired not many years ago. It contains ninety-six fine maps, and probably the most appropriate one to choose as an illustration of our knowledge of the globe in the aforementioned pregnant year of grace is the map of the world, which gives us, too, a general view of the Portuguese

This content downloaded from 192.122.237.41 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 22:36:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 176 FAMOUS MAPS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM. discoveries along the whole west coast of Africa and just beyond the Cape of Good Hope, rounded in 1486 or 1488.* Here too we round, figuratively, an important landmark in the history of geography?the end of the fifteenth century; indeed, I may say a landmark more important even in cartography than in geography. We have just seen fairly accurate cartography, it is true, in this last manuscript shown, that of 1492, and here we have the North Atlantic coast of America shown in an Italian portolano of 150818; it is, however, one thing to have coasts of countries laid down in a single manuscript copy which may be destroyed or sequestrated (as many of those sea-charts were), quite another to have the same information disseminated broadcast in print. Johannes Ruysch was the first of a long line of great Dutch cartographers that included Mercator, Ortelius, Hondius, the two Blaeus, Janszoon, the two Visschers, Erederik de Wit, and others, and this map of his forms an epoch in the development of our science. It was published in the 1508 edition of Ptolemy printed in Rome,19 and an inscription on the map itself referring to the visit of the Portuguese to Taprobana in 1507 shows that it can only just have been completed. In Europe the Mediterranean is more correctly delineated than by Ptolemy, and the eastern projection given to Scotland by the latter is corrected. In the geography of Asia it is the first printed map which discards Ptolemy's information and adopts contemporary reports; the first on which India is given as a peninsula bordered on the north by the Indus and Ganges, and also the first to give the proper size and position (though not the correct name) of Ceylon. The island, by the way, here marked as Taprobana, finally vanishes from cartography in the middle of the sixteenth century. In regard to Africa, it rs the first printed map which represents that continent as a peninsula, gives a nearly correct latitude of its southern point, and a tolerably correct delineation of its northern shores. For a long time Ruysch's production was regarded as the first printed map of the world to show the discoveries of the Portuguese along the coasts and the first to give us a map of the New World, drawn in accordance with the geographical knowledge of that period, but the discovery by Father Fischer in 1901 of the Waldseemiiller map, drawn and printed not later than 1507, destroyed that claim. The Canerio and Cantino maps? the one in the Marine Archives in Paris, the other in the Biblioteca Estense at Modena, and both dating from about 1502?may be in the minds of some of my hearers as showing both the New World and Portuguese dis? covery in Africa, but these were of course manuscript charts, whilst Ruysch's was a print and probably one of a pretty extensive edition.

* The correct date was shown almost conclusively by Dr. Ravenstein to be 1488 (Geographical Journal, December, 1900).

This content downloaded from 192.122.237.41 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 22:36:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms II. THE WORLD. DRAWN ABOUT 1520, AND PUBL1SHED BY JAN SEVERSZOON OF AMSTKRDAM;

See page 177.]

This content downloaded from 192.122.237.41 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 22:36:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms BY JAN SEYERSXOOX OF AMSTKRDAM; THE FIRST WORLD-MAP PRINTED IX THE NETHERLANDS.

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I next produce a map 20 till now totally unknown; it was discovered in the British Museum only last year, concealed in an old Dutch Bible of 1532, where it had lain for nearly four centuries. The map itself bears no date in its various legends later than 1513, and appears to be the work of one C. H., who adds an iron pot to those initials as a sort of epithet; it was published by Jan Severszoon, whose name appears on the map as Johannes Severus, a cripple, and who has adopted the arms of the city of Amsterdam and given them his crutches as supporters. We learn from Dutch bibliography that Severszoon printed in his own name between the years 1534 and 1538 only, and it is probable that he acquired the wood block at some time between 1514 and 1534, and cut in it the space which was to contain the typed imprint set up by himself. That imprint bears the words, " this small map is an excerpt from the maps of Ptolemy," but it is clear from the geography that the compiler did not draw direct upon the great Greek cartographer * it is indeed doubtful whether he had ever had before him a Ptolemaean production except in some amended and augmented form, and from a comparison of this map with all its predecessors it is fairly safe to suggest that the immediate soufce of C. H.'s inspiration was the great world map drawn by Waldseemiiller, who for part of that work?to wit, Northern Europe?utilized and brought up to date the maps he found in the Ptolemy edition printed at Ulm in 1486, and for the New World made use of the Canerio Chart of 1502. The Severszoon map, in short. gives us nothing new, nothing more correct than in the maps produced thirteen or twenty years earlier. We must be content to regard it, then, rather as a cartographical curiosity than as an acquisition to the history of geography, for we have the satisfaction of possessing in it a unique copy of the first world map printed in the Netherlands, the land that became the cradle of the higher cartography that was born fifty years later. My next example is a portion of a manuscript map called the Dauphin Mappemonde, and probably made by Herre Desceliers in or before 1536 for the son of Francis I.;21 the whole of it is too large to reproduce usefully on the screen. That portion has therefore been selected which is of most interest to us as presenting a knotty problem long discusred, acrimoniously debated, and still unsolved. The question is whether the land called " Jave la Grande " is meant to be the continent of Australia, and whether the fact of its reproduction here in 1536 points to discovery by the Portuguese prior to that date. Two of my predecessors in the Map Room of the British Museum?Richard Henry Major and Charles Henry Coote?held diametrically opposed views on the subject. Major, in ' Early Voyages to Terra Australis,' 22 basing himself on this and on the other maps which you will see immediately, says, " Our s jrmises therefore lead us to regard it as highly probable that Australia was dis? covered by the Portuguese between the years 1511 and 1529, and almost to a demonstrable certainty that it was discovered before the year 1542."

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Hesupported his contentionby the evidenceof this Museummanuscript map, drawn by John Rotz or Roze in 1542 and contained in a portolano of twelve double-page maps dedicated to Henry VIII.; 23 among this set of Roze's maps is also this world map, which probably more than any other appears to aid Major's hypothesis or claim. A third map that has by some been considered as an additional jriece justificative is this one of the world dated 1571, and published in Montanus5 monumental Polyglot Bible printed at the Plantin Press.24 Coote, on the other hand, maintains 25 that Desceliers' geographical knowledge of the southern hemisphere really terminated on the south coast of Java; that the rest was speculative fancy. To support this he puts forwardthe fact that in the productions of two great cartographers of the period no mention is made of the great southern continent that is held out as an early found Australia. He adduces first the map drawn by Fernao Vaz Dourado, of exactly the same date?1542?as that by Boze, and contained in an elaborately executed portolano of seventeen charts showing the height of the Portuguese power in the middle of the sixteenth century,26 and presented to the British Museum by the Lords of the Admiralty in 1872. That- map has, it is true, a coast-line extending east? ward from the Moluccas, but this undoubtedly refers to New Guinea. Nor is there, he further maintains, in the Spanish portolano of nine maps exe? cuted in 1558 by Diego Homem, probably for Philip II.,27 any indication on either the map of the world or on that of the East Indies of an Antarctic continent or Australia. Mr. Heawood has again favoured me with a valuable observation on this question. It is that in the copy of the Dauphin Mappemonde made at Arques in 1550, and now in the British Museum 28 together with the earlier copy made in 1536, a portion of which you have just seen, there is in the eastern part of a vast southern continent stretching from our Anti- podes to South America this representation of cannibals; there can be little doubt that the man who drew that had seen this, which is in the Carta Marina29 drawn by Waldseemiiller in 1516 on an island certainly intended to be Java. The similarity of the two illustrations increases the probability of the vast continent in the Desceliers map of 1536 and in the Boze maps of 1542 being of mythical origin, though it is just possible that by the middle of the sixteenth century native reports of what we call Australia had made their way to Portuguese mariners in the East Indian archipelago. You have seen the maps; beyond them we have no evidence that anyone knew of the southern land before it was sighted by the Dutch and Portuguese in 1606 (perhaps by the latter in 1601). If the maps of Desceliers and Roze are not fantastic, then it is an open question whether the evidence upon which they were based will ever be forthcoming. It may have surprised some of you to have seen on the screen, illus- trating this Australian dispute, no less than seven manuscript maps, all

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dating from a period coincident with the second half of the first century of printing, but it was just the half-century which intervened between 1520 (a presumably approximate date for the cutting of the C. H. or Severszoon world-map) and 1570 (the year in which the first edition of Ortelius' Atlas appeared) that was almost absolutely barren in printed cartography in cis-Alpine Europe; we must go to Italy for practically every printed map produced during that time. There the great cartographers of the period were Giacomo Gastaldi and Antonio Lafreri. Of Lafreri's own work we have indeed little, but he was always less a worker than a teacher and a collector. He commenced by founding a school for copper engraving at Rome in 1540, and the first work of any importance bearing his name of which we have any ken was a double heart-shaped map of the world80 issued in Rome,it is thought,31 about 1560, copied directly from a world-map published in 1538 by Mercator, (who had himself borrowed the peculiar projection from this map by Orontius Finseus in 1531 32)?an exeeption to the assertion I just now made that there was almost no printed cartography in cis-Alpine Europe between 1520 and 1570. Already soon after the establishment of his school Lafreri had begun to perform the real work of a pubMsher, throwing his net wide and including in his publications the work of all the best men of his time. The Museum does not possess an atlas made up by him, but has of course the separate works of most, if not of all the men he employed. Among these was George lily, by whom this, the first printed map of the British Isles by an English eartographer,33 was made in Rome in 1546, and later incor- porated in Lafreri's Atlas. It is much superior to the anonymous manuscript map in the British Museum drawn a decade or so earlier,34 and it was quaintly signed by Lily in this fashion?three lilies on one side, an angel's wing on the other; to give the key, however, to the conundrum, he affixed the initials G. L. A., for George lily, Anglus. Giacomo Gastaldi was an actual map-mafef, the first of whose pro- ductions?a map of Spain?appeared in 1544. In 1548 an edition of Ptolemy was issued eontaming both the ancient maps and new ones compiled by him, and in 1550 he published in Venice this ambitious map 36 on an oval-shaped projection (first used by Bordone in 1521),36 in which America, though not yet so' named here, as in the earlier maps of Waldseemiiller and Severszoon, is joined for a great part in the north-west to the continent of Asia. Four years later Gastaldi issued a world-map in which the two continents were on the other hand too far separated. And now we come to the period when we must hie back to Holland for our maps. It was, of course, no mere coincidence that carried cartography right across the continent of Europe?from the canals of Venice to the canals of Amsterdam, from the marshes of the Roman Campagna to the mudbanks at the mouth of the Rhine. The Netherlands, during their struggle against

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Spain, and mainly as a consequence of that struggle, became perforce a great naval and commercial power; the rugged fisher-folk, half of whose lives was spent on the sea and the other half on board their junks in the harbours, found it easier, and more profitable, to capture on the ocean a whole fleet of Spanish galleons laden with silver from Peru than to make a stand against veteran battalions at home. The " Beggars," as they were called, emboldened by their first success in ousting the Spaniard from Brill on April 1,1568, gradually girdled the globe with their innumer- able conquests, and even wbilst at home they were resisting the tyrant by flooding the very fields that gave them bread they were making them? selves masters of Guiana, of Brazil, of New Netherland in the west, of India, of Ceylon, of Java, of Sumatra in the east, of the Cape of Good Hope, and of parts even of Australia in the south. The portolani carried by Dutch mariners came back amplified and corrected, and soon we have a whole school of cartographers busily at work; the best and the busiest the world had ever seen. For these reasons we must again seek the next famous English map in the Museum in an atlas published by Abraham Ortelius at Antwerp in 1573 37; it is by Humphrey Lhuyd, and is the first printed map to show England alone in any detail. So popular was the interest in geography at this period and so prolific was the output that no fewer than fifty varying editions of the Ortelius Atlas (including the Additamenta) were issued between 1570 and 1620, and a copy of each of these is in the Map Room of the British Museum. Great publisher as Ortelius was, the palm in actual ma^-mahing must yet be held to have belonged to his compatriot, contemporary, and rival, Gerard Mercator, who, says Nordenskiold, stands unsurpassed in the history of cartography since the time of Ptolemy. From the study of great problems, such as evolving a projection which is still used to-day, he could yet, apparently (for most of his maps bear no name but his own), turn aside to the actual delineation of hitherto neglected countries; to him we must therefore go for the first fairly accurate map of Ireland, included in the third part of his Atlas first published at Duisburg and Diisseldorf in 1595,38 a year after his death; no other map of Ireland printed or published prior to that date is at all to be compared with it. It is true that we have in the Museum a manuscript map of Ireland made by Laurence Nowel, Dean of Lichfield, who died in 1576, and which is not so very inferior to Mercator's, but that remained a manuscript map, in- accessible to all but a very select few. The year 1595, too, saw the issue, also by a Dutchman, Jodocus Hondius, of a typically British map?that showing for the first time the track of Drake's circumnavigation of the globe from December, 1577, to September, 1580 39 ; the map, of which this is the only copy known, has, in fact, two tracks, the second being that of Thomas Cavendish, whose circumnaviga? tion from July, 1586, to September, 1588, was in the opposite direction to Drake's.

This content downloaded from 192.122.237.41 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 22:36:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms III. THE WORLD, SHOWING THE TRACK OF DRAKE'S CIRCUMNAVIGATION, 1577-30, AND THAT OF CA> AND PRINTED AT THE HAGUE, 1595.

This content downloaded from 192.122.237.41 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 22:36:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 3IRCUMNAVIOATI0N, 1577-90, AND THAT OF CAVKNDISH, 15SG-99 COMPILED BY JODOCUS HONDIUS, AND PRINTED AT THE HAGUE, 1595. See page 180.]

This content downloaded from 192.122.237.41 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 22:36:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms IV. GUIANA. DRAWN BY OR FOR SIR WALTER RALEIGH ABOUT 1595, SHOWING THE SUPP< Secpaqc 181.]

This content downloaded from 192.122.237.41 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 22:36:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms )R FOR SIR WALTER RALEIGH ABOUT 1595, SHOWING THE SUPPOSED SITE OF EL DORADO.

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That the science of cartography was, however, not quite dead in England during the last quarter of the sixteenth century is indeed instanced by the productions of Christopher Saxton and John Speed, but their work was restricted to the narrow fleld of county maps, afterwards made up into atlases of England and Wales. The fact that this celebrated map of Guiana40 drawn by or underthe immediatesupervision of Sir WalterRaleigh, also in or about 1595, was allowed to remain in its present manuscript form, cannot, however, be adduced as fair evidence of the lack of enterprise of English cartographers, for many reasons may have militated against its publication. One might quote as one of these reasons an absolute absence of truth in the chief feature of the map; the great lake in the centre, with thirty-three tributary rivers running into it, and the city of Manao or El Dorado at its eastern extremity (eastern, for the south is at the top of the map) was a myth that was believed in for some centuries and that survived in the maps of many great cartographers. This map is in all probability the one referred to by Baleigh himself in his book, ' The Discoverie of Guiana,' published in 1597, in the follow- ing words: " How all these rivers crosse and encounter, how the countrie lieth and is bordred, the passage of Cemenes, and of Berreo, mine owne discoverie, and the way I entred, with all the rest of the nations and rivers, your lordship [that was Lord Charles Howard, to whom the book was dedicated] shall receive in a large chart or map, which I have not yet finished, and which I shall most humbly pray your lordship to secret, and not to suffer it to passe your own hands; for by a draught thereof all may bee prevented by other nations." The map was acquired by the Museum in 1849, one year after Sir Robert Schomburgk edited Raleigh's book for the Hakluyt Society, wherein he says, " It appears he never executed this map, or if he did so, it has been lost." When the map appeared in the third volume of the Museum catalogue of manuscript maps published in 1861, its date was given as 1660, and that may have tended to keep its true origin hidden for some time longer; comparison of its legends, however, with Raleigh's narrative, leaves no doubt as to its authorship, though it may be a contemporary copy. Again it was Jodocus Hondius, the publisher of the Drake map, who in 1599 gave the world the first printed map of Guiana,41 largely based for details of the interior, not upon Raleigh's map, but upon his narrative, and Raleigh's name appears in many of the notes that are spread over it. The Museum copy of this entertaining map is the only one known. The appearance of the wonderful lake in the maps of so enterprising and industrious a cartographer as Willem Blaeu 42?the prince of map- makers, who flourished from 1612 to 1638?is of course not surprising, considering the inaccessibility of the region in which it lay, and the universal fame it had acquired throughout the Elizabethan period. After Blaeu it was adopted in 1647 by Jan Janssen 43 and subsequently

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by Frederick de Witt, a publisher who was also not above adopting the whole of his predecessor's plates and issuing them as his own, a practice not entirely confined to the seventeenth century or to Holland. In the middle of the eighteenth century the myth of Manao or El Dorado, the Golden City on Lake Parime, had a narrow escape of being exterminated through the explorations of a Dutch official, whose sketch-map of the region caused d'Anville to leave the imaginary lake out of his great map of South America published in 1748.44 There is found only the small Lake Amucu ; but public opinion proved too strong for him, and he was obliged to reinstate Lake Parime in the edition he published in T760.45 El Dorado was finally killed by Sir Everard im Thurn, and given decent burial by the British Guiana Boundary Arbitration, one of the knottiest points to be decided turning on this spot.46 The career of this myth has carried me further than the series of famous maps in the British Museum permits me to go, and I must hark back once more to the period of Hondius, from whose printing office in Amsterdam was issued in the year 1616 the magnificent panorama of London of which about a third only is here reproduced.47 The work was actually executed by Nicholas Visscher, well known to all lovers of engraving, and is a faithful portrayal of all that is most interesting in the metropolis. From Bow Church, well in the centre of the picture, we pass over Old St. Paul's to Hamsted in the north-west or over the Dutch Church, piously inserted by the Dutch engraver, to Billingsgate in the east, whilst on the south side of the Thames the Globe Theatre reminds us of England's immortal bard, the date of the map of the year of his death. In the shadow of the Globe, then, I may perhaps fitly conclude these few words on maps. But before I close I have a duty to perform in thanking the Council of this Society for extending the hospitality of its platform to the subject of ancient cartography. Much has been written, and excellently well written, on that subject by many of those who honour me with their presence to-night, but in these busy times there is more necessity for direct demonstration than ever before, and the fascinating study of the interesting and highly imaginative ancient maps needs to be popularized if it is to hold its own with that of the hideously dull though mathemati- cally correct productions of to-day. Seriously speaking, we ought as a nation to be ashamed of the fact that the history of cartography has been so long neglected by this world-wide empire?even geography has but lately come by her own in the establishment of a few 'Varsity chairs?and though I am afraid that the formation of a Cartographical Society may not yet be within the range of practical politics, I do hope to see the operations of this Society, on the one hand, extended so far as demonstration is concerned, and the publications of the Hakluyt Society made to include the reproduction of maps pure and simple, as well as those which form part of geographical records. As for the actual examination of the maps you have seen reproduced

This content downloaded from 192.122.237.41 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 22:36:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms FAMOTJS MAPS IN THE BRITISH MTTSEUM. 183 to-night, I need scarcely remind you that the portals of the British Museum are wide, and almost always open. There I trust that the sight of the well-thumbed parchment sea-charts that served for our Frobishers and Drakes, for Kaleigh and Cavendish, may yet excite in the bosoms of our younger men the desire and the determination that Britain shall continue to hold the supremacy of that element which she has made so peculiarly her own.

NOTES.

I Burney MS. 111. K\av8iov UroAcfiaiov yeuypcKpiKrjs v

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*? Add. 31,317. The map of the East Indies, on ff. 27 and 28, measures 15x21 inches. Coloured. Vellum. 27 Add. 5415a. The maps measure 22 X 31 inches. Coloured. Vellum. 28 Add. 24,065. 29 Reproduced from Die alteste Karte mit dem Namen Amerika . . . und die Garta Marina by Fischer and von Wieser. 1903. B M. maps 109. d. 21. 30 World. Antonio Lafreri. B. M. 920 (256). 31 Nordenskiold, Facsimile Atlas, p. 90. 32 World-map on double cordiform projection by Orontius Finaeus. 114 X 16J inches. B. M. maps 920 (39). 33 The British Isles. K. 5. 1. 29? X 21J inches. 34 The British Isles. Cotton. Aug. I. 1. 9. 25J X 18 inches. Coloured. On vellum. Attributed to 1534. Cf. Globus, No. 96. 1909. 35 Map of the World. B. M. maps, 116. b. 13. 21| X 32? inches. 86 Nordenskiold, Facsimile Atlas, p. 90. Though no map on this projection was published by Bordone until 1528 (in Tutte VIsole del Mondo), one resembling it in its rectilinear parallels appeared in 1524 in De Orbis Situ Epistola, pub? lished by Franciscus Monachus at Antwerp. 37 B. M. Maps, 46. c. 8. 15J X 21J inches. 38 B. M. Maps, 34. c. 3. 16 X 21 inches. 39 B. M. Maps, 93. c. 5. Size of map, exclusive of surrounding descriptive text, 15 X 2l| inches. 40 Add. MS. 17,940a. 27 X 31? inches. VeUum. 41 B. M. Maps 93. c. 5 (9). 14? X 20| inches. 42 Guiana by Willem Blaeu, 1630. 83,955 (4). 14| X 19f inches. 48 Guiana by Jan Janssen, 1647. Maps 115. d. 16. 14} X 19J inches. 44 South America, by d'Anville, 1748. 83,000 (25). 48J X 30J inches. 45 South America, by d'Anville, 1760. S. 63 (2) fol. 19. 48J X 30J inches. 46 Among the Indians of Guiana, by E. F. im Thurn, pp. 36, 37 ; Journal of the Roy. Soc. of Arts, vol. 9, p. 97; Historical Geography of British Guiana, bv J. A. J. de Villiers (London, 1913), p. 11. 47 K. 21, 34.

The President (before the paper) : To-night we are to have a paper of a rather different character from those we often assemble to listen to in this theatre ; a paper in the main of a historical and partly of a literary type. The reader of the paper, Mr. de Villiers, was appointed on account of his linguistic attainments to a post in the British Museum as f ar back as twenty-six years ago, For the past five years he has been in charge of the maps in that collection, and for the same period he has been the Honorary Secretary of the Hakluyt Society, whose name you know well, and which, I am glad to say, is now in a very flourishing con- dition. Mr. de Villiers has himself edited three volumes brought out by that society, and supervises generally the annual issues for which it is responsible. He worked for eight years under Sir Richard Webster, now Lord Alverstone, with the permission of the Trustees, in preparing evidence for the boundary arbitration between Venezuela and Brazil, and some two or three years ago he lectured to us on the rise of British Guiana. He has taken pains to make himself thoroughly aoquainted with the map treasures of the British Museum, and it is the results of his experience and studies that we are about to hear from him. Sir Frederic Kenyon (after the paper): You have made a little mistake when you say you are certain that I shall wish to say something. There is nothing, at the present moment, that I wish less. There is a misapprehension from which I am still suffering, though for four years I have done my best to disillusion people, and that is, that the official head of the British Museum knows something about

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